I’ve written before on Teleread about Joseph S. Pulver’s extraordinary, dark/psychedelic prose, specifically in the context of his short story collection Blood Will Have Its Season. This is him delivering same at novel length, and it sustains all the momentum and firepower of his prose (mostly) all the way through its 354 pages of narrative.
The Orphan Palace is vaguely classifiable as horror/weird fiction, although it jumps genres with glee. Menaces and monsters from the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, Robert W. Chambers and others do crawl through its pages (as well as a talking rat called D’If), but it taps a very different vein of noir and surrealist disquiet closer to Thomas Ligotti in parts. The protagonist/anti-hero Cardigan is a Doors-style killer on the road, whose brain is very definitely squirming like a toad, thanks partly to Dr. Archer, the Burroughs-style psycho/therapist who tormented his childhood in an orphanage and who is the target of his trek across America. Cardigan leaves a lot of collateral damage along the way, though, including just about every girl he meets, and is a meat grinder with knife and gun.
As that precis suggests, this is a novel that could satisfy many readers, and leave many others gasping. In some ways it’s a very hard style to pin down, because it fuses disparate aesthetics so well. You have Beat-style stream of consciousness raps. You have fin-de-siècle prose poetry. You have sinister and suggestive cosmic horror. You have brutal noir action writing so hardboiled that you could carve body armor out of it. Imagine how Edgar Allan Poe would have written if he had used amphetamines instead of alcohol as his poison of choice. There really is nothing quite like it. Even Laird Barron, the closest point of reference, is relatively traditional in his prose and construction in comparison. Here’s a taster.
Two shots. The first rips into the ghoul’s cheek, the second dissolves its right eye.
“Night, night.”
Cardigan looks down on the corpse.
Thinks of the sea of sand . . . winds crying in their ruining bellies . . . the courtyards of hunting birds and the paths left by scorpions with murderous appetites, and
villages of insects leaking like pain onto the sand, and the stony hills that hold no blue pools . . .
Smiles.
“Breakfast is served.”
Cardigan moves East. Into the rising light …
That said, if you don’t like this in smaller doses, you won’t like it full length. The story is not exactly plotless – in fact, there’s a very arcane plot afoot, revolving around a series of books in Cardigan’s preferred motel chain which all appear to be rewrites of the same meta-story – and his journey gives the narrative irresistible momentum, but as one reviewer observed, it could be 100 pages shorter or longer without the reader feeling they had missed or OD’d on more than a few episodes. True Detective comes to mind, as does Twin Peaks. All in all, though, it’s a white-knuckle ride, and shows Pulver pulling together his various influences and techniques more assuredly than ever, and driving them on down the road with a nitro boost. Addictive and utterly unique.
