Blood and Tacos

The “Blood and Tacos” book series is a playful mockery of and love letter to the classic action-adventure series. Something as big and pulpy as the Mack Bolan-style adventure fiction genre is both easy and hard to make fun of. Easy because it has a lot of obvious “flaws”, hard because it was so prolific that it frequently fell into the “Poe’s Law” pit of being an unintentional self-parody.

For instance, I can give a personal anecdote. I was flipping through Mack Bolan store pages and finding one where he was fighting genetically modified super-soldiers. Given the series started as a somewhat grounded tale of fighting mobsters, I went “a-ha, this must be an ‘Arkansas vs. The Blimps’ moment of craziness.” When I looked back, I found multiple ones where this happened.

The four ebooks in the Blood and Tacos series have a list of short stories and parodies/homages to classic adventure fiction, tales by obscure (made-up) authors that were later “discovered by” the actual ones. There’s also spotlights of either the most ridiculous or the most creepy real adventure novels.

Some of the stories are too forced in their humor, but others manage to hit the spot perfectly. My favorite is “Battleground U.S.S.A., Texasgrad”, for not only managing to spoof adventure novels, but technothrillers and invasion novels as well.