Sin & Ashes

by Joseph S. Pulver Sr., Laird Barron (Introduction)

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.

Table of 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”

Genres: Horror, Gothic

326 pages, Paperback

First published December 13, 2010

Reviews

[Pearce Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

SIN & ASHES is a scathing collection. Jarring and unsettling from the git go, Joe refuses to allow the comfort of standard story structure to interfere with his assault on the reader.

This is mean jazz, dissonant Bartok-style classical – music as prose poem. His work evokes the kind of mood you can barely tolerate even in memory, street poetry and strange riffs.

Joe is an acquired taste – and while his strange and idiosyncratic mode of expression may have attained a little affectation in the course of finding his voice and honing his style, the honesty comes right through. One gets the sense that Mr. Pulver didn’t want to write these horrors – he NEEDED to. This is very powerful stuff – even the pieces that didn’t quite gel all the way for me were very affecting.

I have a few personal favorites in this collection:
• Crow in Trick Town – To me this feels sort of like Spillane on crack in hell.
• As the Sun Still Burns Away – Blue Dress Annie and her children are nightmarish in the purest sense of the word.
• Rendezvous Under Shadow Bridge – The Night Watchman’s job is a lonely one; and yet, I felt a sense of the old Warner Bros. cartoon where the sheepdog and the wolf punch in at the beginning of their shift, fight their private war for eight hours and then go home. What DOES the Night Watchman do in his off hours?
• In front of an empty house in dead city – Being former USMC I’m a sucker for Joe’s Marine Recon protagonists – but I’m unsure I even WANT to know what they’re up to in this savage little bloodstained piece
• 8’s & Aces has two very unpleasant ghouls have a shocking conversation with their next meal, and another story is a strange riff based off of A Clockwork Orange.

One common theme that intertwines through Pulver’s work is The King in Yellow and Carcosa. Joe is an unashamed worshiper of the hellish universe first set forth in Robert W. Chambers work a century ago – he even has a photo posted online of himself paying homage at Chambers’ grave.

Another thing I appreciated was that Mr. Pulver is kind enough to share his playlist with us. At the end of most stories in this collection, Joe lists the songs he was blasting while pounding his keyboard to excrete the tale.

I’m in love with this man’s work. This is not for you if you prefer bland, ‘normal’ horror writing – but IMHO he is one of the most important voices in the genre today (if you can even impose the term ‘genre’ on a style so personal and sincere).

Read him.

[Dominique Lamssies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever wonder what it would look like if reality was shattered into a bunch of sharp little shards that floated in a bottomless pool of blood? And then you tried to pick them up?

Yeah, that's reading Sin & Ashes, basically.

This is not a book for everyone, but those who make it through will be glad they did.

Highly recommended.

[Alanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review can be found here:http://sheneverslept.com/newsandrevie...

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's something I'm missing with Pulver's writing. I don't actually dislike his style, but it just kind of slides right off me. Nothing sticks even though I appreciate most of what I read. Low rating for now, but it's definitely something I want to re-read eventually.

[Gaze Santos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pulver is a bit of a writing chameleon, willing and able to experiment with different writing techniques, and fuse them with his dark and visceral imagination. Some of these literary experiments were more successful than others, and on the whole this anthology was not as strong as his previous "Blood Will Have Its Season" which I absolutely loved.

The first half of the book are mainly proem style works, where the story is given in abstract terms and hard to discern. This in itself is not always a problem. But it is not as masterfully executed as Michael Cisco, who is clearly an influence on Pulver. (Some of the stories in this anthology are even dedicated to him.) Perhaps another reason I was not as captivated by this collection is because of it's lack of King in Yellow inspired stories, which are among my favourite Pulver pastiches. There are a couple and they are great, but I wish there had been more. Instead, vampires abound in this collection. And the stories they appear in seem to be rehashes of the gritty life of vampires in modern times trope.

I found the story "Love her Madly," featuring a resurrected Jim Morrison as the supernatural hero, to be especially silly. I think I understand that he is trying to mythologize these recent pop culture icons, but it comes across as a poetically clumsy fanfiction.
He also included some of the material he previously contributed to the "The Book of Eibon"
released by Chaoseum press. These consists of fake "rituals" that have a semblance to ancient grimoire invocations. Interesting idea, but very dry to read.

All this being said, there were some truly beautiful moments in this collection. The majority of my personal favourites were towards the last third of the book. Some of these being: "Saint Nicholas Hall" with some truly ornate and decadent descriptions and atmosphere. "The Last few Nights in a Life of Frost" features a maniac following a trail of diaries to a bloody confrontation. And the requisite but excellent nod to Lovecraft that is "To Live and Die in Arkham." Overall it was an enjoyable, if uneven, read with gems hiding among rough rock.