Mary Beth Knechtel's The Goldfish That Exploded (Pulp Press, 1978) was one of the first works of literature from Pulp Press that 'pushed the envelope' in terms of sexually explicit content while retaining its integrity as art on the edge of humour and estrangement. Finely illustrated by Tom Osborne and subtitled A Modern Parable, it starts as a smart, mostly readable and frequently brilliant tale of "an erotic pedant's voyage into absurdity" and detours into laughably lewd and buoyant satire. The title is too difficult to explain, but it has something to do with a lethal goldfish that a beautiful sponge diver is going to use to hijack a remarkable airship dubbed The Sequestered Font in order to fulfill her destiny to become a Hollywood sex goddess. Born in Moose Jaw in 1943, Mary Beth Knechtel was typesetter at the Pulp Press collective when it was still discovering how it could be unique.

[BCBW 2004] "Fiction"