This is titled “The Hardy Boy Poems” but they’re really paragraph-long short stories, i.e. flash fiction stories which “hint at or imply a larger story”.

The basis for these is the Hardy Boys series of books aimed at young boys. These were old even when I was a kid, but I keep seeing these “Hardly Boys” book cover edits on !memes@lemmy.world so people must still be aware of them.

This collection is more risque and suggestive of hidden violence and despair than the mainstream books. In the preface, the author (?) says this is in tribute to the “unwholesome but healthy amounts of anti-authoritarianism and lurid detail” that the original Hardy Boys books had before they were stripped of all such things in the late 50s. The result of these new stories is a world that is far more interesting, far more dangerous, and far more realistic than the world presented in the mainstream books.

Link to the collection: https://www.beardofbees.com/pubs/The_Hardy_Boy_Poems.pdf

  • Coelacanth
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    6 days ago

    I’m so Disco Elysium-pilled my mind goes somewhere completely different when I hear Hardy Boys, even though it’s not even spelled the same way.