Portraits of Ruin

Introduction by Matt Cardin.

This third collection of stories, vignettes, sketches, and parables highlights those literary qualities that have made Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. a phenomenon in contemporary weird fiction: an impressionistic, prose-poetic style that boldly confronts the reader with vivid metaphors, images of raw horror and exquisite beauty, and a refusal to shy away from the extremes of human experience — love, sex, death, terror, and ecstasy. Pulver continues, as in his earlier work, to draw upon H. P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and other classic writers for his inspiration, but he takes his cues also from rock music, avant-garde prose and poetry, and, most of all, from the spectacular phantasmagoria of life in the twenty-first century. With Portraits of Ruin Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. continue to gain new readers for his unique vision and the even more unique prose with which he expresses it.

"I don't think I've ever read an author who is capable of blending/bending his influences quite like Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. As impacting as a violent train wreck, the resultant explosion of mellifluous ethereality onto the page is something so totally different that it's almost a completely new art form. Sure, you've got your Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, Ramsey Campbell, William Burroughs, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Chandler — even T. S. Eliot — but jam them all together into Pulver's psychotic centrifuge, and the resulting velvet-swathed, running-the-guts spatter pattern ends up as a collection like Portraits of Ruin." – Walt Hicks, author of Exit the Light

Let us posit that Bukowski is the sun. Or Brautigan, Burroughs and the Beats — a solar Coney Island of the Mind where Timothy Leary’s dead and dead Cthulhu waits and sings the live long daydream believer. Then Joe Pulver’s Portraits of Ruin would be the burst of planets, Big Bang-Bang, Marquee Moons hanging on for what they got, scream of consciousness — in Outer Space no one can hear it... except Coffin Joe, Monster Mash Potato that big ol’ Portraits of Ruin — Mars needs it, you need it, so just open the lid and shake your fist — then say: “They kill horses, horses, horses, horses.” Thank you. Come again? — Thomas Ligotti

"Fearless. Daring. Poetic prose for the unhinged. Each tale in Portraits of Ruin packs the sort of mental wallop that leaves the reader reeling. From the scorched deserts to the highest foreign towers, across plains of reality and beneath burning suns, this is no volume for the weak, for the conventional. It is a wake-up call from one of the genre's most visionary masters. A book for those who see differently, for those not afraid to know the truth no matter how terrible the cost. I envy anyone about to experience Pulver's horrors for the first time." — Simon Strantzas, author of Nightingale Songs