Since 2009, PulpFest has featured annual readings by some of today’s best pulp fiction writers. Jim Beard, Christopher Paul Carey, Win Scott Eckert, Dick Eno, Ron Fortier, Will Murray, and many others have read excerpts from their work, showcasing a wide range of exciting new fiction. Afterward, they’ll talk with their audiences, answer questions, field comments, discuss works in progress, and sell their books. Both our writers and their audiences have loved these sessions.
This year, given that PulpFest is celebrating H. P. Lovecraft and WEIRD TALES, we searched for creators who have written fiction inspired by the work of Lovecraft, the Cthulhu Mythos, WEIRD TALES, and such writers as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Seabury Quinn. We think we’ve found some great ones for the PulpFest 2015 New Fictioneers reading series.
PulpFest 2015 is pleased to welcome author and poet Scott H. Urban to its New Fictioneers reading series. Scott will appear Saturday afternoon, August 15, at 3:30 PM in our second-floor programming area at the Hyatt Regency.
Scott Urban first came across Lovecraft in a paperback in his early teens. He immediately fell under the spell of “The Old Gent,” knowing that he had found something special. It was a universe both unfailingly grim and eerily fantastic. He wrote some juvenilia under Lovecraft’s spell, including poems and stories. While his writing has moved away from direct pastiches, Lovecraft remains in the back of his mind. As Scott writes, “. . . probably will be until I die.”
With a love of old pulp and a tongue firmly affixed in cheek, Scott is proud to be reading as a New Fictioneer at this year’s PulpFest. He will read from BLOODY SHOW, a collection of “Dark Tales of Decay and Dissolution,” as well as other pieces, both old and new. It is available for Kindle through Amazon. Scott promises to leave the bubbling chaos at home; however, he cannot guarantee that there will not be writhing tentacles and the ensuing loss of sanity.
Scott’s fiction, poetry, and reviews have appeared in print and online. In 1984, he helped to found the Unnameable Press, a specialty book publisher. During the late 1990s, he edited the small-press horror poetry zine FRISSON: DISCONCERTING VERSE. In 1998, he co-edited THE CONSPIRACY FILES with Martin H. Greenberg. It was published by DAW Books. Some of Scott’s anthology appearances include FEAR ITSELF, SHOCK ROCK II, HOT BLOOD: SEEDS OF FEAR, THE BEAST WITHIN, and TERMINAL FRIGHTS.
Mr. Urban has spent most of his professional career as a public school teacher and administrator on North Carolina’s Cape Fear Coast. In 2011, his family relocated to the mist-shrouded forests of southeastern Ohio, where he teaches at a local college and works with troubled youth. He is currently at work on a novel of erotic horror, slated for publication in 2016. He lives in a renovated Amish farmhouse that isn’t haunted … yet.
