Pulver's skills as a post-Beat visionary are in rare form. A House of Hollow Wounds is a thrilling foray into the dark frontier of the weird.

Skullcrack City messes with your mind the way William Burroughs or a bellyful of hallucinogens will do. I'm a longtime fan of Johnson. A master of derangement, he's been bringing it for years. This time, though, it's different. He's burst into the clear and is taking seven-league strides across the literary landscape.

but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art-the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few

Horror is my motor. It gets to me on an animal level and satisfies my impulse toward scenario building.

The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.

Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.

He was trapped in the electrochemical web of cognition, wherein curiosity leads into temptation, temptation leads into fear, and fear is considered an impulse to be mastered.