No Good About Goodbye
“Brilliant… a rollicking good read. Rich with often realistically crude boy lingo, No Good About Goodbye is an utterly charming teenage LGBTQ falling-in-love adventure while simultaneously rocking an international crime storyline.”—C.S. Holmes, Indiereader
Fifteen-year-old Ian Racalmuto’s life is in ruins after an embassy raid in Algiers. His mother, a vodka-drunk spy, is dead. His brother, a diplomat, has vanished. And, he’s lost a cremation urn containing a smartphone that could destroy the world.
Forced to live with his cantankerous grandfather in Philadelphia, Ian has seven days to find his brother and secure the phone—all while adjusting to life in a troubled urban school and dodging assassins sent to kill him.
Ian finds an ally in William Xiang, an undocumented immigrant grappling with poverty, a strict family, and abusive classmates. They make a formidable team, but when Ian’s feelings toward Will grow, bombs, bullets and crazed bounty hunters don’t hold a candle to his fear of his friend finding out. Will it wreck their relationship, roll up their mission, and derail a heist they’ve planned at the State Department?
Like a dime store pulp adventure of the past, No Good About Goodbye is an incautious, funny, coming-of-age tale for mature teens and adult readers.
Our Story
Rot Gut Pulp is a publisher of quality and value. Established in Philadelphia in 1928, is has since moved its headquarters to a Potemkin village in Ha Long Bay under the command of award-winning wastrel Curt Sembello.
We focus on neo-pulps – fast-edited, quirky, modern pulp stories of 25-50 pages that serve as cotton candy for your brain to read over a beach weekend or long commute.
Because we have neither the budget nor the inclination to write nice, we depend on our audience to know their tastes. Caveat emptor. If you don’t like our stories or find them offensive, put them down and read the slicks and glossies. If you like our stories, buy others. If children or teens come to you with questions about the hurts and microaggressions they feel after reading one of our pulps, explain that we’d throw our grandmother into a jet turbine for a nickel and some cheap thrills. In life and dice, sometimes you throw a ten, but most of the time you seven out. Vegas wasn’t built on winners, sweetheart.
We’d throw our grandmother into a jet turbine for a nickel and some cheap thrills.
Curt Sembello, Editor-in-Chief.
Our Pulps
Who We Are
Editor-in-Chief
Curt Sembello
Associate Editor
Corliss Wilborne
Design & Format Editor
Catharine Curry
Cover Editor & Designer
Malinda Dekker
Email: RotGutPulp@gmail.com
Rot Gut Pulp is a publishing imprint founded in Philadelphia in a shed under a smokestack near the Delaware River. Now in Ha Long Bay, our offices are too dangerous to visit and protected by canine and spring-gun.
In 2019, Rot Gut Pulp was purchased by St. Ire & Sons Publishing.
Copyright 2022, Rot Gut Pulp. All rights reserved. This website or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by international copyright law.
Rot Gut Pulp is currently closed to submissions.
Rot Gut Pulp. It’s not meant to be good. It’s meant to be read. ™