PULP ACCORDING TO DAVID GOODIS starts with six characteristics of 1950s pulp noir that fascinated mass-market readers, making them wish they were the protagonist, and yet feel relief that they were not. His thrillers are set in motion by suppressed guilt, sexual frustrations, explosions of violence, and the inaccessible nature of intimacy. Extremely valuable is a gangster-infested urban setting. Uniquely, Goodis saw a still-vibrant community solidarity down there. Another contribution was sympathy for the gang boss, doomed by his very success. He dramatizes all this in the stark language of the Philadelphia's "streets of no return."

The book delineates the noir profundity of the author's work in the context of Franz Kafka's narratives. Goodis' precise sense of place and painful insights about the indomitability of fate parallel Kafka's. Both writers mix realism, the disorienting and the dreamlike; both dwell on obsession and entrapment; both describe the protagonist's degeneration. Tragically, belief in obligations, especially family ones, keep independence out of reach.

Other elements covered in this critical analysis of Goodis' work include his Hollywood script-writing career; his use of Freud, Arthur Miller, Faulkner and Hemingway; his obsession with incest; and his "noble loser's" indomitable perseverance.