Sean Taylor is an award-winning writer of stories. He grew up telling lies, and he got pretty good at it, so now he writes them into full-blown adventures for comic books, graphic novels, magazines, book anthologies and novels. He makes stuff up for money, and he writes it down for fun. He’s a lucky fellow that way. He’s best known for his work on the best-selling Gene Simmons Dominatrix comic book series from IDW Publishing and Simmons Comics Group. He has also written comics for TV properties such as the top-rated Oxygen Network series The Bad Girls Club. His other forays into fiction include such realms as steampunk, pulp, young adult, fantasy, super heroes, sci-fi, and even samurai frogs on horseback (seriously, don’t laugh). However, his favorite contribution to the world will be as the writer/editor who invented the genre and coined the term "Hookerpunk." For more information (and mug shots) visit www.taylorverse.com and his writer’s blog at seanhtaylor.blogspot.com.
“’The Face of the Yuan Gui’,” says Taylor of his tale in the collection, “covers the period in the early 70s when Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants fled communism to the United States. Some unscrupulous types took advantage of their situation to turn escaping immigrants into slaves. Pour a young Chinese woman trying to live up to her family legacy into the mix, add a pinch of classic Eastern ghost stories, wrap it up in a clash of old ideals versus new American notions, and there you have it. “
“I love,” continues Taylor, “to delve into and learn about other cultures and nothing affords me that opportunity like writing a new story. As a history minor in college, perhaps my favorite classes were History of the Vietnam War and the History of Modern Japan. I've been obsessed with Eastern culture, particularly that of China and Japan, for as long as I can remember. I know it probably started because of Kung Fu Theatre on Sunday afternoons when I was a kid, later evolving into the films of Akira Kurosawa, but it's still fun to build off those legends and folk tales and play with those themes and characters in a real time and place in history, particularly in modern history, without resorting to the exploitation that usual accompanies such tales. Well, that and I really like to write about swords.”As to the significance, if any, that collections like ASIAN PULP might have, Taylor states, “I hope it helps readers and reviewers to reevaluate the role and importance of other cultures in modern pulp fiction in ways that far supersede the traditional "yellow menace" or "pale-skinned beauty" that Eastern characters usually got lumped into. It kind of goes without saying that we as people tend to define things by our own surroundings and culture, and if books like Asian Pulp can cause people to take some steps outside that, then I'll be awfully proud to have been some small part of that.”
