In The Great North there is thunder. Gemma Files, Simon Strantzas, Ian Rodgers, and RICHARD GAVIN! These titans rest on my shelves close to Thomas Ligotti, perhaps that tells you what I think of them and their ability to take away your breath . . .
Gavin is the acclaimed author of
CHARNEL WINE,
Primeval Wood,
The Darkly Splendid Realm, and
OMENS.
Earlier this year in "Dead Reckonings" (No. 9) the Review of Horror Literature that's edited by S. T. Joshi and Tony Fonseca, Richard Gavin reviewed my 2nd collection,
SIN & ashes. To say I was pleased by the review is a vast understatement. With my new novel,
The Orphan Palace, just out from Chomu Press and my 3rd collection,
Portraits of Ruin, in the pipeline for a 2012 release from Hippocampus Press I wanted to post Richard's review for those who do not get to see or read the acclaimed "DR".
"Down Dark and Lonesome Highways"
Richard Gavin
JOSEPH S. PULVER, SR.
Sin & Ashes. Introduction
by Laird Barron. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010. 325 pp. $20.00 pb.
If mimicry truly is one of the gravest dangers a writer
faces when broaching weird tale country, then few writers are on safer ground
than Joseph S. Pulver Sr. With
Sin & Ashes, his second collection
from Hippocampus Press, Pulver manages to further cement his reputation as one
of the most daring stylists currently working in supernatural fiction. He is
certainly no stranger to the realm of dark fiction, having built up
considerable publishing credits over the years, primarily through the small and
specialty presses. But his time as one of the genre’s best-kept secrets appears
to be drawing to a close, as his books continue to reach an ever-broader
audience and to garner fresh critical attention. With prose that hovers
somewhere between the hard-boiled crime genre, poetry, and the sheer
lawlessness of Dadaism, Pulver’s work is truly
sui generis, so much so that it almost defies classification.
This brazen originality is given a hefty exhibition in
Sin & Ashes.
Whether broaching more poignant fantasy (“Even Night” and “Long-Stemmed Ghost
Words”) or the book’s hard-boiled forays into hexes and vengeance (“First There
is a Mountain . . . Then”), Pulver invariably manages to impress his
fingerprints upon the material.
The collection’s inaugural tale,
“Love Her Madly,” intertwines the postmortem wanderings of Doors lead singer
Jim Morrison and those of a young woman adrift in an anguished, almost elegiac
modern-day California. It is a bizarre carousel of a story, one that suitably
sets the tone for the forty-eight (!!) other tales, vignettes, and prose poems
that comprise this gripping volume. “Love Her Madly” grants the reader a survey
of many of Joseph Pulver’s interests and inspirations: psychedelic rock, the
gritty underbelly of contemporary culture, and an almost unbearable emotional
pitch of isolation and despair. Pulver then smoothly switches gears for the
second story, “She’s Waiting,” a haunting, heart-squeezing gaze into one
woman’s sense of loss. This mournful riff repeats in several other entries,
such as “When the Moon Comes to Call” and “As the Sun Still Burns Away.”
The varied subjects and settings
that comprise this book’s vast canvas, coupled with the sheer number of its
pieces, make giving a tale-by-tale analysis all but impossible, for Pulver’s
work is a gestalt, a tsunami of image and emotion. His words are unfailingly
razor-keen, his tone beautiful and horrific at once. Stylistically, Pulver,
with his penchant for fragmented, stream-of-consciousness narratives, is most
strongly reminiscent of William S. Burroughs. One never sees all in a Joseph
Pulver story; rather these narratives play out like scenes reflected in a
shattered mirror. We are afforded glimpses and oblique representations, but are
offered none of the pat comforts that a more conventional narrative might
provide. For instance, in “Huddled in Rags in a Kingsport Alley . . .,” we see
H. P. Lovecraft’s seaport town through the prism of one its dejected and broken
inhabitants, a woman who has “no room for the devices of Christ-light in her
fear-laced deeps.” For in the end, “the mouth of future closes. . . . No one is
spared. . . . Little but the noise of the moon survives."
This is heady stuff, yet it also
exposes what might be the only artistic debit of
Sin & Ashes: its
stories offer no light of salvation whatsoever. The reader has no breathing
room, no denouement which carries promise of relief or resolution. In fact,
Pulver’s characters seem to relate to hope only as a quaint and hazy memory, an
oasis that is now irretrievably lost. All these characters—and by extension,
we, readers as well—have left to do is wait for that mouth of the future to
clamp its jaws and drag us all down. However, this is not necessarily an
indication of a deficiency in the writing. Rather, it stands as a testament to
its complexity and relentlessness.
Pulver is a demanding writer.
The reader often has to work simply to navigate the murky, unnerving plots the
book presents. The horrors of
Sin & Ashes might often only be
fleetingly illuminated by lightning flashes of words, but these hints are often
brutal and are apt to haunt one well after the book’s covers are closed. Take,
for example, this extract from the remarkable “Just Another Desert Night with
Blood”:
Highway. Ditches full of seasons
(and the cast-out containers of thirst quenchers). Winds traveling. Red
taillights—moon sold souls—bound for somewhere (easy?). Night’s not going
anywhere. Never does. The lies cooling. Not going anywhere . . . moth and
spider goin’ nowhere . . . phone booth with a broken interior light . . . owl .
. . clouds, not built or elaborate, flat on the dark rug of sky . . .
asphalt—solid ground has no point . . . boots notch the dust on a road
goin’nowhere . . . This nowhere land, a flat leviathan wearing blades and
puddles and smudges of black, seamed with memories, holds no scavengers, no
mirages, no vultures.
Here be a demonstration of one
of Pulver’s greatest strengths: an almost uncanny ability to pull the reader
into settings which are bewildering yet queerly familiar. We may not know who
it is who wanders this highway, or indeed which highway it is, yet we do know this
person, having roamed that roadway ourselves, if only in dreams.
Another pervasive characteristic
of Pulver is the manner in which he dovetails the supernatural with the banal.
Resisting the often disastrous technique of describing the otherworldly with
flamboyant language, Pulver details the uncanny with the same edgy,
matter-of-fact tone he uses to shed light on the underbelly of American
culture, or indeed the fractured spirits of his characters. Forbidden
grimoires, ghosts, and dark gods do indeed lurk in these narratives, but they
are presented as elements no more or less startling than neon signs or strip
clubs or a long vacant road at night. In this respect,
Sin & Ashes
might be thought of as an extension to the mythopoeia of William Blake—whose London
streets were populated simultaneously by merchants and criminals, angels and
demons—as it is a current spin on the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft or Robert W.
Chambers (a visible influence here). We need not find the cursed grove or the
haunted farmhouse, Pulver seems to tell us; the powers of darkness are in fact
roaming right alongside prostitutes and gangsters, working-class loners and
wrecked dreamers.
If you are a reader who seeks
lulling escapism, this book offers no such creature comfort. Pulver tales are
not the kind of stories one slips into like a warm bath. They are splashes of
frigid water, which constantly jar and twist rather than flow headlong. This is
what makes
Sin & Ashes such a potent volume. Pulver is a writer who
takes risks with each story he fashions, which in turn makes reading them
exceptionally rewarding.
(C) Richard Gavin 2011
Links:
RICHARD GAVIN
http://www.richardgavin.net/HIPPOCAMPUS PRESS
http://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/dead-reckonings/dead-reckonings-no.-9http://www.hippocampuspress.com/mythos-and-other-authors/fiction/sin-ashes-by-joseph-s.-pulver-sr.
