This one nearly slipped by us altogether, so we want to make sure it doesn’t slip by you. Hippocampus Press has released Joseph S. Pulver Sr.’s short story collection, Blood Will Have Its Season, in trade paperback for only $15.00.
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. is the acclaimed author of the Lovecraftian novel Nightmare’s Disciple and author of many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He has received several Honorable Mentions in Datlow & Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
Description: The dark, forbidding alleys of our ruined cityscapes; the hopeless lives of brutalized whores, amoral hit-men, and vengeful victims of violence-these are the landscapes and characters that fill the stories, poems, and prose-poems of Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. in his first collection. And yet, there is a strange and intoxicating beauty to Pulver’s creations, for they transport the reader out of the mundane and into the unearthly by the effortless stroke of a dazzling metaphor.
Many of Pulver’s stories are innovative riffs on the enigmatic mythology of The King in Yellow, pregnant with the demonic witchery of the original. With this collection, Pulver has placed himself in the forefront of contemporary fantasy and horror literature.
Table of Contents
- Choosing
- Carl Lee and Cassilda
- Line of Questions
- PITCH nothing
- I, Like the Coyote
- Blood Will Have Its Season
- mr wind sits
- The Prisoner
- An American Tango Ending in Madness
- Orchard Fruit
- The Songs Cassilda Shall Sing, Where Flap the Tatters of the King
- The Night Music of Oakdeene
- Dogs Begin to Bark All Over My Neighborhood
- Chasing Shadows
- But The Day Is A Tomb of Claws
- In This Desert Even The Air Burns
- And She Walks Into The Room . . .
- a certain Mr. Hopfrog, Esq., Nightwalker
- The Black Litany of Nug and Yeb
- Erendira
- An Engagement of Hearts
- An Event Without Knives or Rope
- One Side’s Ice, One’s Fire
- A Spider in the Distance
- PAIN
- A Night of Moon and Blood, Then Holstenwall
- Under The Mask Another Mask
- W a t e r l i l i e s
- Yvrain’s Black Dance
- No Exit Sign
- Lovecraft’s Sentence
- Midnight on a Dead End Street in Noir City
- The Master and Margeritha
- Hello Is A Yellow Kiss
- The Faces Of She
- Good Night And Good Luck
- Patti Smith, Lovecraft & I
- The Collector And The Hand Puppet
- The Only Thing We Have To Fear . . .
- The Corridor
- Stone Cold Fever
“The prose of Joe Pulver can take its place with that of the masters of our genre-Poe, Lovecraft, Campbell, Ligotti-while his imaginative reach is something uniquely his own.” -From S. T. Joshi’s Foreword
To learn more and/or order: Blood Will Have It’s Season
First of all let me say, that I am not that much into short stories. I find it hard to get into the mood of a story or to get a grip on a person when I’m left with no more than 2 and a half pages of story.
Or so I thought until I came across Joseph Pulver’s „Blood will have its Season“.
Mr. Pulver has the rare talent of drawing one into the story in a matter of seconds. His heroes, or rather villains give the reader the feeling of knowing them – knowing what they have endured, understanding what made them into what they are and just why they do … well, what they do.
Inbetween the lines Mr. Pulver touches on other works of fiction by Chalmers, Lovecraft or Bloch just as casually as one might expect from a seasoned writer, yet those slight touches add new ideas and vistas to those other universes. Never does one feel like reading things that have been written before and that have just been re-arranged. There is a new touch and feeling to everything and one usually realizes the connection only after reading the story and wondering why this feels so familiar.
If you’re having a weakness for the bad guys, than Mr. Pulver certainly offers more than a fair share of such characters. The occasional abuse of victims, ladies, gentlemen or the necrophile moments may need a moment to get used to, but there is a reason the W.H. Pugmire refers to Mr. Pulver with the words „Joe Pulver is a dark star in the merciless cosmos of weird fiction. His work is as brutal as it beautiful.“
The, at times very graphic description of a murder (or rape) and other topics leaves the reader stunned. Personally, I have been most willing to be let astray, to be fascinated, bound and gagged along with the helpless victims. I have feasted with the heroes and have delved with them into their darkest desires. Be warned, you will find yourself most willing to come along at another starlit walk – and you will find that Joseph Pulver leaves you standing in the dark – or may push you over the edge into another bloody nightmare.