Harlan Ellison will republish a long out of print collection of pulpy short stories with Kicks Books at the end of the month.

Pulling a Train was originally published in 1959 as Sex Gang, “a brown-paper wrapper collection of his men’s magazine stories” written under the name Paul Merchant. This early “juvenile delinquent fiction” is a quite different than the speculative fiction that built Ellison’s career. Check it out:

For the lively set, prepare to blast into orbit with blade-wielding ferocity as Ellison takes you into a cobblestone wilderness fraught with hate and violence, a street level cosmos where shadowy creatures are hard, and blunt, and malicious, and where hope hangs a shingle that reads, “GET LOST”. In the realm of 1950′s juvenile delinquent fiction, it was Ellison who dragged the unnamed genre from the gentle hands of the social workers into a filthy basement, where he worked it over, with great satisfaction, into an alternate universe of hate and pain. Ellison is the king of JD fiction. Of this, there can be no debate.

Kick Books also publishes Sun Ra and Nick Tosches.