Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. Interview
Hello Ghouls and Boils,
Today we have a special treat – a republished interview with Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. If you stumbled onto this and would like to know why we republished it here, refer to The Not-So-Savvy Reader. Thanks again to Joe for giving us his time. I hope you all find this interview as enjoyable as I did. Enjoy, my fiends!
Abstrusely,
Sarah L. Covert
About the Author: Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., a life-long fan of pulp horror, fantasy, and science fiction, found himself exiled from a happy anonymity as of 1999 when Chaosium, Inc. published his highly acclaimed Cthulhu Mythos novel Nightmare’s Disciple. Though these days he writes mostly Surrealist poetry, his effectively chilling fiction and verse has appeared in collections including The Book of Eibon, Nameless Cults, Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak Occult Detective, Rehearsals for Oblivion, and many others. He has received several honorable mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. Joe also edited Ann K. Schwader’s verse collection The Worms Remember (2001). Hippocampus Press has just released Blood Will Have Its Season, Joe’s 1st collection of short work. It was edited by S.T. Joshi. Joe has new tales upcoming in S.T. Joshi’s Black Wings (PS Publishing) and Bob Price’s The Tindalos Mythos (Hippocampus Press) and in S.T.’s Spawn of the Green Abyss (Mythos Books). He is currently putting together his 2nd collection of short work and working on several new King In Yellow tales.
Sarah L. Covert: Welcome to Savvy Readers – this is obviously a different sort of place for She Never Slept and our readers… but please makes yourself at home and thanks for joining us today.
JSPsr: Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me. I’ll try not to bore the hell out of you and your readers.
Sarah L. Covert: My love for the strange and horrific was born at Drive-In Double Features when I was little. Your writing is very dark. What was it that made you interested in genre writing?
JSPsr: My love of the genre really started in, of all places, the pages of comics. MARVEL, of course J Their early horror stuff and Dr. Strange lead me to Poe and it was the 60’s, so there were lots of paperback collections of horror around. I began scooping them up and reading them at lightspeed. As I was deep into Conan and Fantasy, some of it very dark, and Sci-fi (and some of that was horrific indeed), at the ripe old age of 12 years old, this stuff hit me hard and stuck.
In those pages I found Robert Bloch and Jack the Ripper, and just a bit later, Norman Bates and Juliette (in “A Toy for Juliette” in Harlan Ellison’s seminal Dangerous Visions). I was blown away and deeply hooked by Bloch (and the madness in Poe as well). The madmen I found and the eerie things that haunt and hurt us in those mind-bending pages became my reading passion.
The other major factor was “monster” movies. Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera!! [Shivers.] The Mummy too. And there were others like the “Famous Monsters of Filmland” mag and The Twilight Zone. Those images and themes engraved me. Desire and death, and who (or what is) is the monster? WOW, when you’re 12 those things bite deep and they never leave you.
I never planned on writing, that was just an accident, but when I started (I was nearly 40), I made a beeline line right for my great love, dark fiction. After all, what choice did I have with all that inspiration (and the longstanding fears) swirling around in this cauldron I call a brain J
Sarah L. Covert: A lot of your work is influenced by writers like Lovecraft, Chambers and other weird tale phenoms. There are a small percentage of writers who write on this subject that lean a little toward the erotic side of things. (Cthulhu Sex is a magazine dedicated to just that) To the core, a lot of your stories are actually about love. Do you think there is a place for love and romance in horror writing?
JSPsr: Yes! !! The King In Yellow and weird fiction in general, are a great stage for love and its offspring.
To me, love is a form of madness. It’s a breathtaking inferno of the heady, it takes us over completely and consumes us. Conventions and cages, and control, can and often go right out the window when it’s awakened. It transforms us—for good, or BAD. We will do anything for love, cross any barrier, delve into places and situations outside of our comfort zone (and understanding), and often we fear losing it, or find ourselves moving into darker realms, and it is there, in the fields where our deepest passions and desires burn, things can become utterly dark and dangerous. Those places, be they in our hearts or our minds, where our desires and needs dance and invent, are the voyages that most interest me.
As fear and love are two of the strongest emotions we experience and they play well together, to me, I use them whenever possible. I want to read about characters and what affects them most, so even if I put them in an unnerving setting, on a threatening and grim stage, I want to see their hearts. From Chambers to Poe and HPL and Shakespeare, we have all manner of romantic desire (and even incest) living and haunting the page, I can’t see how you can’t use that power to layer and hue the tales of darkness we create.
Ghouls and other forbidding beasties have hearts, they may be evil, but they too, are filled with desires and I want to know about them. And I don’t think a dead beastie just wants meat. (Sorry, I can’t get in to zombies.) I’d want other things if I were a creature of the dark side, so I go looking at their hearts to see what those desires would contain and where they lead.
Sarah L. Covert: The bulk of your work has been in short story form. What is it about the short story that appeals to you as a writer?
JSPsr: [laughs] I love novels – I want to truly know characters and the complexities of their worlds, never really figured on penning short stuff, but when my novel, Nightmare’s Disciple, came out, some said it was too long. They said I should tighten things up. My short work is a reaction to that less is more. As I love hardboiled fiction so much, I thought I’d explore tight, broken, and poetic language as a stylistic vehicle for dark fiction. And it seemed to fit rather well with my love of poetics, rock lyricism, and madness. Hitting hard and fast seemed/seems, to me, to be better suited to the short form, so I’ve been puttering with the form and it many think it works well for me.
I do like the immediacy. You can throw out borders and conventions in the short form, mix styles and just let it rip. I absolutely adore stepping off the ledge and seeing what makes the ascent into air while I’m in freefall. That said, I am exploring putting my new narrative style in the context of a novel. We’ll see how it works.
Sarah L. Covert: If you had all the money and all the time in the world and you could write on any subject of your fancy – what would it be?
JSPsr: I would one day love to try a straight hardboiled novel. Madness, and/or doom laced with secrets in some form, and necessity hammered into a murderous situation where every door is a dead end, and there would be no supernatural elements.
And I will not rest until I have penned a tale that is good enough to be placed in the King In Yellow canon, alongside, Chambers, Wagner (“The River of Night’s Dreaming”), and Blish. To date I have penned some 30+ tales based on Robert W. Chambers’ KIY and I am not done. Hell, I may just be getting started [laughs demonically] . . .
Sarah L. Covert: Do you have any upcoming projects, news or sarcastic comments to share with our readers?
JSPsr: HA! Yes, I have a few things coming . . . My new collection, SIN & ashes, will be published late this fall by Hippocampus Press. Like my last Hippocampus collection, Blood Will Have Its Season, this one will be edited by S.T. Joshi.
In addition to my new collection SIN & ashes, I have a tale coming in the 1st issue of “STRANGE AEONS” magazine [formerly “Planet Lovecraft”] this spring.
My Lovecraftian tale, “Engravings” will appear in S.T. Joshi’s Black Wings [PS Publishing 2010]
Bob Price’s The Tindalos Cycle will contain a tale and a poem by me [Hippocampus Press 2010]
S.T. has accepted my tale, “The Last Few Nights in a Life of Frost” for his “Weird Tales Annual” #1 [Hippocampus Press 2010]
And my tale, “Hungry . . . Rats . . . “ will appear in S.T.’s The Spawn of the Green Abyss [Mythos Books 2010]
I have just finished the 1st draft my new novel, The Orphan Palace. We’ll see about that as time passes.
I have a project called, Night Begets, that I cannot talk about yet, but I hope it bears fruit. It would involve working with someone I like immensely and respect a great deal . . .
Having been recently reminded it’s the 21st century, I’ve finally started a blog – This Yellow Madness. Ok, everyone can yawn here.
That’s it for now. Thanks for asking me to be part of this. It was fun. I do hope I was not too boring.
