SIN & Ashes

Introduction by Laird Barron.

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

Contents:

• Introduction: Death’s Head Blues by Laird Barron
• Love Her Madly
• She’s Waiting...
• First There Is A Mountain... Then
• In This Desert Even the Air Burns
• Even 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 Pines
• Last 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 Ways
• Just 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