The Black Hunger

August 19, 2024
Pullen debuts with a decades-spanning, culture-intertwining work of gripping queer gothic horror. In 1921, John Sackville, the son of an earl, recounts his tale of loss and despair from within the confines of an asylum. His life story moves from turn-of-the-century England to colonial India, where John relocates with his longtime lover/manservant, Garrett, before eventually winding back to recount how, in 1870s Scotland, a woman is presumed mad for her bizarre theories about her husband’s death. Connecting these threads is the Dhaumri Karoti, an ancient and supposedly eradicated Buddhist sect who, according to legend, consume human flesh. The stakes are astronomically high, both because of the death cult and the risk involved in a queer relationship in British society. Frustratingly, the character of Garrett exists more to fulfill the lover archetype than as a fully drawn person. Still, the tension, drama, and depth of historical detail will keep readers glued to the page. With echoes of such classics as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this is an ambitious and largely successful endeavor. Agent: Natasha Mihell, Rights Factory.

September 1, 2024
An epistolary novel about an apocalyptic Buddhist sect's untimely reemergence in 19th-century Tibet. Awaiting his inevitable demise, studious, loquacious Orientalist John Sackville, the Lord Dalwood, summons the energy to narrate in painstaking detail the story that brought him to his proverbial deathbed. In a lengthy diary entry dated Feb. 18, 1921, Sackville describes his romanticized childhood ("I would doze off to Walter Scott novels and old collections of Arthurian folk tales"), his arrival at boarding school, and his blossoming relationship with Garrett Benson, a younger, poorer schoolboy introduced to Sackville through the practice of "fagging," whereby underclassmen performed the roles of servants for older students. Sackville and his manservant-cum-lover journey to Tibet, where the former's research in Urdu, Hindi, and Sanskrit lead him to discover an underground Buddhist order, the Dhaumri Karoti, which seeks the destruction of the world. Intimate depictions of Sackville's relationship with Garrett comprise the most compelling portions of the novel, and Pullen also drops occasional and refreshingly blunt social commentary: "The Empire relies for much of its strength on brutalising children in the system of organised violence and torture that we call the Public School System." But for all its fastidious attention to Tibetan lineages, regional Asian power struggles, and obscure Buddhist dogma, Pullen's novel too often wavers between baroque info dumps and stilted dialogue. The novel eventually finds its form, picking up steam as disturbing reports roll in from across the Himalayas, but a marked fixation on physical appearances borders on fetishization. And while the characters' racist, outdated attitudes may ring true for the era, they can strike an uncomfortable tone. It's one thing to have a privileged English aristocrat remark on an Indian peer's linguistic proficiency ("I admired the idiomatic fluency of his English"). It's another to put those words into the mouths of deferential imperial subjects themselves: "There is much to learn from the British. If we're ever to make something of India...." Readers with a penchant for ornate tours through colonial academia and slavish dedication to verisimilitude will appreciate this title. Impeccably detailed if sometimes didactic, this book reads like the creative indulgence of an erudite scholar.

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September 15, 2024
In 1921, John Sackville, Lord Dalwood, lays dying in an English asylum, grief stricken after the death of his loyal servant and lover, Garrett Benson. Before succumbing to his own mysterious ailments, Sackville vows to recount his skirmishes in South and East Asia with the Dhaumri Karoti, a dissident Buddhist sect whose occult practices could trigger the end of the world. But Sackville isn't the first to have discovered the group's apocalyptic aims--though he may be the last. Spanning centuries and continents, Pullen's ambitious and atmospheric debut incorporates the perspectives of three well-developed characters whose fates become intertwined as they fight to expose the Dhaumri Karoti before it's too late. Ample world building and richly detailed prose catapult the reader to the novel's explosive, blood-soaked finale. Reminiscent of the gothic classics of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, The Black Hunger is sure to have wide appeal for fans of inventive historical fiction like The Historian (2005), by Elizabeth Kostova, and The Last Days of New Paris (2016), by China Mi�ville.

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