If Nick Pullen’s new book reminds you of Russian Orthodox basso profondo chants, well … chances are good you’re an ethnomusicologist. That, or Pullen nailed what he was going for when he sat down to write The Black Hunger.
“When I’m writing, I’m kind of going off impressions and aesthetic tendencies,” says the Whitehorse writer. “I’m sometimes trying to capture the feeling of a piece of music or a piece of art.”
In the case of The Black Hunger (which he calls a queer, gothic horror novel), Pullen wanted the low, sinister vibe of music like Mongolian throat-singing, or the aforementioned chants, to permeate the story.
His debut novel takes historical facts and twists them to suit a narrative built around a man named John Sackville.
Sackville is unsure why he’s trapped in an asylum in England and starts writing what’s essentially his last testament. That document turns into a nesting doll set of stories including those of a Jewish psychiatrist in 1870s England, and a British cavalry officer who’s been captured by the Russians and held in Ukraine during the Crimean War.
Pullen says he originally wrote the stories separately, arranging them sequentially, but over the course of many edits, landed on the triptych style of the novel, which comes out with Orbit Books in October 2024.
While The Black Hunger was his first crack at something of this length, it’s not his first foray into fiction. Pullen’s story, “Famous Blue” won third place in the Toronto Star’s short fiction contest in 2019. He has since expanded that story into another novel he hopes to start submitting to publishers in September. He’s also had shorter works published with the online journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and the Copperfield Review.
It was also his first major effort at blending his academic and writing careers. Pullen has a masters’ degree in history (he works a day job with Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada), but he says writing The Black Hunger allowed him to indulge his love of history in a new way.
“It turns out writing historical fiction is a lot more fun than writing scholarly work,” says Pullen. “I can play around with history and if what actually happened isn’t very interesting, I can make up something better.”
That wasn’t without its own challenges, he says. It was tough to handle subjects in which Pullen has an interest, but isn’t an expert.
For example, The Black Hunger brings in Tibetan culture, Mongolian history and Buddhist theology. Pullen had to play around with how much detail to include to give the book an air of authenticity without bogging his reader down with arcane theological debates.
Eventually he decided authenticity was more important than accuracy. Pullen was ultimately trying to tell an entertaining story rather than establish a long list of facts and truths.
“At some point you have to make decisions based on what you know and draw a line under it,” he says.
And historical fiction was something he knew — he’d loved the genre as a kid — moreso than horror. At least, that’s what Pullen thought before he realized he’d written a horror novel.
“I didn’t really think of myself as a horror guy. It wasn’t part of my identity or anything, but it just turned out to just be what came naturally,” he says.
After finishing a draft of The Black Hunger, Pullen put the manuscript away and re-read Dracula for the first time in years. He was astonished by the influence it had had on him, in terms of the feel of the story and the mechanism by which his characters communicate to the reader through letters and written documents.
The book comes out Oct. 8, 2024. Pullen has already been doing some readings around town with Yukon Words in advance of the release.
He’s hoping to have a local launch, though details of that have yet to be worked out. He will, however, be launching the book at Oxford College in England, where he got his undergraduate degree, and in Toronto, where he’s from.
“For my parents’ sake,” he says, laughing. “I think they’d like the opportunity to celebrate.”
For more information on pre-orders and events, visit nicholaspullen.com
