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.