A House of Hollow Wounds

by Joseph S. Pulver Sr.

Over the past decade, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. has attracted a worldwide audience for his stories, vignettes, and prose-poems—works that expand the boundaries of prose expression and evoke scintillating images of wonder, fear, terror, and heartbreak. In this fourth collection of tales, following Blood Will Have Its Season (2009), Sin & Ashes (2010), and Portraits of Ruin (2012), we find imaginative riffs on Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, and others—but more than that, we find the evocative melding of horror and plangency that makes Pulver the most distinctive voice in modern weird fiction.

Table of Contents

“On the Embankment of Tangibility,” by Jeffrey Thomas
“A Thousand Injuries—”
“A (-BIG-) Fishy Menu”
“and the bass keeps thumpin’“
“(he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Honor...”
“Saturday Night… With a Dead Girl in It”
“Doom… & Sigh”
“into the world”
“A Night of Moon & Blood, Then Holstenwall”
“she sings. I sob…”
“The Golem”
“The Ozymandias Display”
“under stars with no desire to flee”
“no one ever talks about there will come a day these days”
“c”-O[lLi(S)I;o!N,S iN tHE word
box or (i)’s
Disintegration”
“On a Faraway Beach…”
“Down… and down we go”
“The Pencil”
“Tender. Sins.”
“Movietime… with popcorn and…”
“Caroline No. Bleue “
“Brick. By… Brick”
“A House of Hollow Wounds”
“Desert Highway Motel”
“One Window, Two Hearts”
“The Sommerset Tales “
“Aubade in a Graveyard”
“I once possessed a fragile blue vase “
“Twilight Sonatas “
“Tears & the stars fall”
“Certain Sunday Evenings in Summer”
“A Traveler Came with Gifts”
“In a Raven’s Eye”
“She Comes in Blood”
“Words Touching”
“Under June”
“I’ll simply call her V”
“Sarah smile”
“In the spaces in between “
“The blood of a damsel’s breast on the green door of the forest”
“I once possessed little other than a fragile blue vase “
“wind. ardent. circular, back on itself as if in dismay.”
“Being Led by Pictures…”
“The Ground She Sleeps upon Is a Clue… and a Mystery”
“8mm… soil”
“a stained translation”
“In a Black Studio No. 76”
“Vase”
“A Cold Yellow Moon”

Cover art by Daniele Serra
Cover Design by Barbara Briggs Silbert

Genres: Horror

314 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[M Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

From somewhere in the outlands, Pulver crafts stylistically unique and emotionally powerful word bombs and heaves them across borders, into the territories of horror, weird fiction, crime/noir and poetry. Readers who value an uncompromising and truly personal approach to wordcraft will find Pulver's work unlike any other. It's poetic, expressive art of the highest order.

[John Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find it hard to read Pulver’s tales. Not for any negative reason, but no other writer triggers the creative juices for me than Pulver. And it’s less about tales and more about paragraphs that sing and soar, screech and howl. Pulver is a poet first, and it’s obvious. His mastery of the way words should play together, the way he lets words frolic freely, with no inhibitions, is a revelation I gleefully embrace. My appreciation of the beauty and horror in this stellar collection is unbounded. I love to dip in, read a tale (a few paragraphs, a sparkling sentence), and step back, my brain reeling, my imagination on fire. Joseph S. Pulver is a marvel!
Highly recommended.

[Mod 41 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work

[SARDON · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first encounter with Pulver was Blood Will Have Its Season, and I was at least somewhat impressed. While I've always regarded the Beats as a self-important, vacuous bunch, Pulver's Ginsberg-meets-Lovecraft prose style is pretty much unprecedented and welcomes very few, if any, imitators. Reading "Pitch Nothing," a brilliant exploration of the void and, IMO, the best story of BWHIS, was enough to initially persuade me of Pulver's worth to the ongoing development of weird fiction.

So, after missing two other collections and various other projects involving Pulver, I decided to pick up A House of Hollow Wounds only to find that he's peddling the same less-than-coherent mix of dystopian, horror, noir and weird elements. Pulver's broadened his preoccupation with the King in Yellow mythology to include other classics of horror and, arguably, weird fiction; the first story extends "The Cask of Amontillado" into a very predictable tale of spectral reprisal, replete with overwrought prose and nebulous political intrigue which amounts to nothing. Having Fortunato's spirit travel into outer space with an entourage of rats does not make this any less boring a tale of revenge. If you're interested to read a far more effectively told sequel to Poe's classic story, check out John Jake's "The Opener of the Crypt."

Another rather pointless story is the titular piece in which one of Pulver's typical mindlessly hyper-violent scumbags--conveniently explained by an obtuse and eyeball-rolling reference to Vietnam--sets out on a quest to capture one hundred ghosts (in other words, kill 100 people) to escape the shithole his life has become. If the generic character weren't bad enough, the woman who gave him these instructions ends up being the disguise of a malignant entity which will be familiar to most readers. The absence of motivation for such a powerful being's deception of such a worthless person underlines how unsatisfying this story is. But, as usual, if you love Pulver's stylistic excesses, you won't be as unsatisfied as I was.

The one reasonably bright spot in this collection is the sequence of vignettes entitled, "The Sommerset Tales." Here Pulver forgoes his beatnik-inspired riffing for prose whose darkly melancholic eloquence bears the obvious sign of his older influences, such as Lovecraft and Poe. The vignettes follow a cryptic, Death-like figure who, somewhat sympathetically, collects mementos from each of his victims. A deeply twilit ambiance pervades these pieces and shows that Pulver, for all of his distinctiveness, can opt for a gentler, quieter shade of darkness when he chooses to do so.

Even though I haven't kept up with everything Pulver has written since BWHIS, his newest collection is sufficient evidence that he's still a top stylistic innovator in contemporary weird fiction. The main issue is that he seems to lean so much on the virtues of his prose that most other aspects of his work have remained stagnant. The fragmentary pieces are still merely fragmentary; not perfectly concise portraits of deviance and despair. Angry, violent characters are still merely angry, violent characters; not characters whose extreme emotional states emerge from any well articulated point of difference. What's missing from Pulver, after releasing four collections of such material, is a lucidly expressed sense of life instead of mere sensationalism. Until then, it seems we'll just have yet another, more or less, redundant collection of weird fiction buoyed only by Pulver's considerable gift for prose styling.