Blood Splatters Quickly: the Collected Stories, Edward D. Wood, Jr. marks the first authoritative attempt to compile the ephemera of this elusive and transverse man’s career in pulp fiction. Despite his persistent and prolific filmic and literary output, Wood is deservedly best known for being Ed Wood — the subject of the eponymous biopic directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp.

It’s never easy to be an original, either in life or art, but it’s fair to say that Wood pursued his own vision in a post-war society vastly more committed to the conventional than the America of 2014. The odds he faced were vast. Time and again he was met with resounding failure, but he persevered with his tales and stories of “killers in drag,” bloodthirsty housewives, and at times much more. Blood Splatters Quickly provides a peek inside the mind of one of the great American cultural visionaries, someone who has helped shape contemporary culture in ways he never would have dreamed possible.

Few in the Hollywood orbit have had greater influence than this patron saint of the low-brow –– and few have experienced greater failure in a lifetime. This collection features in myriad settings unbounded exploration of gore and sex, and an equally unfettered use of adjectives. Many of the stories (including “Blood Splatters Quickly”), memorable for their sheer outlandishness, appeared in short-lived “girly” magazines published throughout the 1970s. All have been verified as authentic Wood creations by Bob Blackburn, a trusted associate of Kathy Wood, Ed’s widow. And none of these stories has been available to the public in the forty years or more since their initial publication.

Wood not only straddled the line between horror and romance: he seemed to take pure joy in the convergence of the two. He was as quick to dramatically highlight relations of violence and power between genders as he was to pervert them between, and within, his protagonists. He often started at the extreme and offensive height of male fantasy, only to let it unravel into something even more nightmarish.

Wood died in 1978, but the legacy of the director of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda, Jail Bait and so many other beloved screen classics has only grown in importance.

Read a story from the forthcoming collection on Boing Boing