SIN & ashes wins 2010 Nightmare Award for Best Short Stories/Poetry Collections
Joseph Pulver's "Another Desert Night With Blood" from SIN & ashes selected for Ellen Datlow's latest "Year's Best Horror" anthology
Unfilmable dot com Interview with Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
She Never Slept rave review of SIN & ashes
Praise from Laird Barron in SF Signal"Joe Pulver's Sin & Ashes is a hardboiled/noir/horror collection that reads like prose poetry; a psychedelic hybrid of James Ellroy, William Burroughs, and H.P. Lovecraft. It'll rattle your brain."
The world of Joe Pulver’s dreams and nightmares is a world of grim violence and death but also of strange beauty and wonder. In stories that read like poems and poems that read like incantations, Pulver weaves a sorcerer’s spell of language—tough, gritty, cheerless, but always evocative, hypnotizing, intoxicating—that lays bare the fragility of human beings on the edge of the abyss, looking down at the depths and looking up at the boundless cosmos. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and other writers of terror and the supernatural are Pulver’s touchstones, but his riffs on their tales are the work of a master craftsman who recognizes the emotive value of every sentence, phrase, and word. A poet in every sense of the word, Pulver sees the world and the cosmos as a cauldron of death and carnage but also a platform for triumph and redemption. In these stories, sketches, prose-poems, and vignettes, Pulver evokes the wild beauty of terror in a manner that few can match.
"Joseph S Pulver, Sr. is a thunderous scribe of dark fiction. His poetry slams into you, cracking through flesh and bone to the real meat beneath. SIN & ashes is his mighty hammer, deftly wielded and smithed on Hephaestus's great anvil. This is no book for the faint of heart. Filled with hard boiled goodness and devastating imagery, Pulver proves his is a talent to be reckoned with, and cements his rightful place as one of the most interesting voices in the genre. I am both awed and humbled by his power." --Simon Strantzas
"Joe Pulver's SINS AND ASHES is a messed up (and I mean Cronenberg messed up) splicing of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Ligotti. Add a whiskey chaser. After reading these vibrant and weird stories with their assorted devils and down-and-outs, I kinda want to party with Joe. But I think I'm too scared to."--Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep and In the Mean Time.
Strange Aeons Magazine review by Jenna Pittman
SIN & Ashes, the new collection of short stories by Joe Pulver Sr., is a heady blend of rock ‘n roll, sex, death, and insanity. Inside its pages Pulver offers us a dance through the ribbons of his mind. And we accept, because there is something about his vision of a world, so dark and yet so vividly colorful, that is impossible to resist. Each word is delivered in that uniquely poetic style of his, giving us a glimpse into the seedy underbelly of urban decay and rural despair; daring us to consider if it is really human nature that has brought us so low or if otherworldly hands from Carcosa or R’lyeh might have played some role in our downfall.
He opens with Love Her Madly, then barrels ahead like a loosed bull through a land of serial murderers and revenge and cold, cold torture. The tension ebbs and flows as the pages turn; sometimes bitter and terse, other times graceful and melodic, but in every vibrant phrase you sense a hint of something dangerous and feral, just waiting to snare you. Like the slightly too-sweet smell of fruit just before it begins to rot, his words, even when they are breathlessly beautiful, teeter on the edge of lunacy and depravity.
It’s an effect that is hard to duplicate but that just makes it all the more impressive.
The overall style of SIN & Ashes brings to mind the prose of Poppy Z. Brite. The imagery in the fantasy tale Crow in Trick Town specifically conjures memories of her work in Wormwood and Drawing Blood. It isn’t everyone who can fabricate metaphors for sounds or textures or tastes and tell us how they look or hear. That’s the realm of poetry, not storytelling, yet Pulver blends the two disciplines with expert finesse. He has a talent of giving a single word a myriad of meanings, which makes it hard to return to our reality of concrete and glass, where everything is as it looks.
Unfortunately it IS only a book and it, like everything else that is physical, can only go on for so long. However, he leaves us on a high note with a delicious closing tapestry of rock n’ roll and Robert Chambers. Fans of both will be left with such an inspiring thrill of excitement that it will ensure the next installment Joe Pulver Sr. will be met with rabid book lust.
Death’s Head Blues, by Laird BarronLove Her MadlyShe’s Waiting . . .First There Is A Mountain . . . ThenIn This Desert Even the Air BurnsEven Night Crow in Trick Town When the Deal Goes Down Devil’s Got the Walkin’ Blues Dead ’Round Here Tonight The Delirium of a Worm-Wizard As the Sun Still Burns Away Caligari, Again Long-Stemmed Ghost Words When the Moon Comes to Call After Reading Michaux’s “In the Land of Magic” The Walking Man Walks Silent No Longer The Maiden of the PinesLast Year in Carcosa Scarlet Obeisance Rendezvous Under Shadow Bridge in front of an empty house in dead city Ain’t No Love on the Street Perfect Grace Kynothrabian Dirge The Exorcism of Iagsat Lonesome Separate WaysJust Another Desert Night with Blood After Death I Often Dream of Words Forever Changes In the White Walls of Silence Mother Stands for Comfort Blow Wind Blow 8’s & Aces A One-Way Fare Don’t Look Back Long is the way and hard . . . huddled in rags in a Kingsport alley . . . Dead Ends and Empties Sharp Fangs + Blood = Murder Saint Nicholas Hall Funeral in a Hate Field An Orange Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick Engravings The Last Few Nights in a Life of Frost Epilogue for Two Voices To Live and Die in Arkham The Last Twenty Miles of Wandering Again Acknowledgments
This product was added to our catalog on Sunday 25 April, 2010.
