1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
Hi guys! I’m Nicholas Pullen, and I’m the author of The Black Hunger, a queer gothic epistolary historical horror novel about a secret Edwardian gay couple dragooned into a secret mission to save the world from a demonic ancient cult of Buddhist heretics bent on wiping out all life. By day I work as a public servant, negotiating self-government with Indigenous peoples, and by night I noodle around with guitars, mandolins, and turntables and PC gaming while I’m procrastinating from writing my books. I have two history degrees from Oxford and McGill, and in the summer used to enjoy scuba diving on shipwrecks before my husband and I moved to the Yukon last year with our Jack Russell Terrorist, Rudolf.

2.- How did you start writing for publication?
I’ve been writing since I was a little kid, but after a long detour caused by severe mental illness and addiction, I got serious about craft between 2014 and 2017. My first halting efforts are best forgotten, but I started to hit my stride with short stories after 2017, and began to place some shorts in small journals here and there. In 2019, a short story of mine, Famous Blue, came third in the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, and was published in that paper, one of the biggest in Canada. That was a fillip of confidence that perhaps I could make something of this, and even write longer work, and I started writing what would become the Black Hunger in the summer of 2019. The pandemic left me no excuse for delay, desperate for escape, and I finished writing it in September 2020. Once I had a finished novel in the drawer, I began to feel comfortable describing myself, and being described, as a writer, at long last. I had done the thing. Publication on top of that was pure gravy.

3.- What inspired you to write The Black Hunger? How did the idea developed from its inception?
The book’s earliest inception was from a throwaway line in a group chat with friends, as we riffed off a news story. It doesn’t matter what the conversation was about, but the line stuck, and conjured an image that lodged in my mind, and required explanation. I have a theory that most books flow from an initial image, a vision, that comes freely and inexplicably, but which the author must then attempt to explain. I’ve heard a few writers talk about this. For George RR Martin, it was an image of a family finding direwolves in the snow. For Susanna Clarke, it was an image of a magician on a bridge in Venice, for whom things were not going well. For me, it was an image of Russian noblemen hunting peasants on horseback through a winter’s night. The image was there, and I needed to explain where it had come from.The initial idea led to a somewhat clunky first draft of something that was far too long to be a short story, and far too short to be a novel. A friend told me he would read it when he was finished. I pondered things for a few days, and eventually had the thought that I could tie it together with two other nebulous ideas that had been floating around in my mind, and assemble from them a coherent novel.
While this process was underway, during the worst of the pandemic, I also had an important conversation with a mentor in which I confessed my terror at the state of the world, and the imminent breakdown of all of our systems of civilization. His response startled me, and made me look at things differently:“Good! The system is rotten to the core; exploitative, extractive, unjust, planet killing. It isn’t worth saving, and you have no control over its fate. Just let it burn, and do your best to be happy.”
This thought was the grit that lodged in the oyster of my brain, and ultimately shaped the book The Black Hunger ended up being.
I’ll also confess that initially, all three ideas were intended to be Call of Cthulhu campaigns I had been telling friends I would GM at some point. But finding the time for any kind of RPG is always difficult, and I increasingly didn’t believe that I had the willingness or the ability to surrender control over my stories to other players, as RPGs require. In the end, it was just easiest to write them down! At some point I will GM a campaign though. I can strongly recommend RPGs to aspiring writers as playgrounds in which to hone your imagination, getting it nimble and able to generate and remember good ideas.

4.- Could you tell us about how you landed an agent?
Pitching an agent is an incredibly dispiriting process that requires precision, endurance, and a willingness to accept near-total rejection. I don’t remember precisely how many I pitched, but I do remember that I got personalized rejections with some degree of personal feedback (encouraging and helpful) twice. There are so many factors at play in how an agent will react to a work, including taste, marketing, personal vibes, that have almost nothing to do with a work’s intrinsic quality. One mistake I think I made was that I didn’t do nearly enough editing or polishing of the initial manuscript before I started submitting. I think waiting even six months and doing even one more hard edit would have helped immensely.
In the end, what helped was that I had some short stories out that did more to testify to my potential as a writer than a big, clunky, rough-hewn first draft manuscript could ever do. They can act as calling cards; short little introductions to what we’re capable of. One of these (Famous Blue) ended up in front of an old friend who was working in publishing in England, who was impressed enough to forward it to Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory in Toronto, who was impressed enough in turn to reach out to ask if I had anything lying around in the drawer that his agency could have a look at. I told him I did, sent him The Black Hunger, and he got one of his assistants, Natasha Mihell, to read it. When Natasha loved it, and wrote a glowing editorial report, Sam informed her that she was now my agent, and the two of us, total neophytes, jumped head-first into the world of publishing together. In the end, Sam was right. Natasha and I figured it out, and are now deeply trauma-bonded by the experience!

5.- Getting a manuscript acquired tends to be one of the most challenging parts of the publishing process. How did your agent and you pitched The Black Hunger?
We were both figuring it out as we went, with the best advice of our friends and superiors at The Rights Factory. Natasha was deeply collaborative and involved me in all stages of the process. We put together a pitch email, curated a list of editors we thought would be receptive, and were even lucky enough to get a favourable blurb from Michael Rowe, an established and brilliant Canadian horror writer who gave the manuscript a read in its earliest stages. We developed a concise pitch of the story, assembled my limited accolades to date, and put it out in the world to between thirty and forty publishers. Some rejected it right away, usually for technical reasons that had nothing to do with the book itself, or our not having accurately judged their lists or tastes. The more encouraging possibilities took longer to make their decisions, but many of these ended up passing all the same. 
Many of them said very complimentary things about the book itself, it just wasn’t for them for one reason or another. But a complimentary, kind, enthusiastic rejection is still a rejection, so the disappointment began to mount over a period of between six to nine months. In the end we had accumulated 26 rejections, until Natasha developed a relationship with Nadia Saward at Orbit Books, and she took a chance on me. The beauty of the experience of submission is that you can accumulate an infinite number of nos, but in the end you really only need one yes. 

6.- The Black Hunger is a gothic story. Why would you say gothic continues to be such a popular subgenre in fiction?
It’s a fascinating question. I would say it’s a bit of a niche taste, for a certain kind of nerd; the kind of nerds I like because I’m one myself. I think the genre at its best has a gloomy, eerie, glamorous, elegant aesthetic that has an intrinsic appeal, and an idiosyncratic, fusty, eccentric character that some people crave, in the same way that an antique piece of furniture, say, appeals to a certain kind of person over a mass produced box from Ikea. It may not be as functional or utilitarian, but it has character and charm and personality. 
I suspect that the historical character of gothic fiction also provides a remove from the terror of the story that makes it feel more like a play you’re watching, with a degree of remove, rather than a movie or a TV show. It dulls the visceral emotions a little, to free you up to appreciate how the eerie and the eldritch and the horrifying can also be beautiful.
But I don’t necessarily know what I’m talking about. These are just my notions.

7.- How would you say your own studies in history have influenced your writing?
I’ve had a deep fascination with the past since childhood, and am not entirely sure why I’m oriented so decisively in that direction. Most of my childhood books were either history books or works of historical fiction. The alien quality of the past, its strangeness and its foreignness, thrilled me. It’s really an aesthetic taste, rooted in a constitutional suspicion of change and the new, and a sense that it’s impossible to understand where our society is heading if we don’t know where it’s coming from. Both my BA and my MA were in history, because as it turned out I had some small academic talent, but it was a relief to discover that to be a writer and a scholar were two different things, and that was ok. I like doing just enough research to provide a flavour of authenticity to my fiction, but not so much that it bogs down, or I have to start citing sources. And the greatest benefit is that if what actually happened isn’t very interesting, I get to make up something better! And to insert the supernatural and the fantastic into history where it belongs.

8.- The Black Hunger features an important queer element, playing a key role in the history. Why would you say it is important to continue showcasing LGTBQ+ themes in fiction?
I think it’s particularly important to showcase queer themes in fiction right now because we have a window here where it’s possible to be honest and open about the queer experience without being censored or persecuted. For once, we have the law on our side, and we’re free to tell the truth about who we are. But that window might not stay open forever. The old attitudes still linger, and this window might not remain open forever. We can already see attitudes shifting in Eastern Europe, Italy, and the United States. It may very well become dangerous to be queer again in the future. I think the queer community is sometimes very cavalier about the fact that we will always be a small minority, and our acceptance is unfortunately contingent upon the acceptance and tolerance of the majority, which can’t always be relied on. We can’t take our freedoms for granted, or be reckless with them. The best place to be queer in the world in 1929 was Berlin. And then suddenly it wasn’t any more. Those were the books the Nazis were burning. The work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld. All of that happened in just a few years.
So now, while we can, we have a responsibility to tell the world who we are, and how we feel. So we can be seen, understood, and most importantly, see and be understood by those who come after us.

9.- We are on your debut week. How do you feel about it? 
It’s incredible! So many complex emotions. Excitement, joy, fear, the smallest bit of anticlimax. Life is the same as it was before, but every so often I get a reminder that my book is out there in the world, and strangers are reading and enjoying it, and it’s an incredible thrill to realize it. Some people are very kindly sharing their opinions and it’s a treat to read every one. I’m doing my best to avoid GoodReads though, and not to obsess about sales. It’s too soon to tell, anyway, and my mental health wouldn’t survive it. I suppose the really interesting thing about it has been the gradual realization that this is actually the beginning, not the end. After so much anticipation about actually getting to debut week, it’s strange and pleasant to realize that actually things are just getting started.

10.- Congrats on The Black Hunger getting selected as the special edition for the Broken Binding Halloween Box. How much time was this a secret before you could announce it?
Thank you so much! That was a secret for absolutely months! I think about six? It’s odd when you’re the author, because your publisher is doing so much behind the scenes that you’re not aware of, and sometimes you’re just sitting in ignorance and anticipation and anxiety. But I did know it was coming, and that I couldn’t talk about it until it was announced. I tried to just put it out of my mind. But actually, my copies just arrived today, and they’re so beautiful. Absolutely worth the wait. I’d recommend buying them, they’re gorgeous. And I signed 1500 of them!

11.- What can we expect from Nicholas Pullen in the future?
Hopefully, many more books! As many as I can write. I just handed in my manuscript to Orbit for a second book a few weeks ago: another queer gothic horror, this one set in Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the end of the 18th century. Turns out the Ancient Egyptians were absolutely, terrifyingly right about what happens when you die. After that, we’ll see! I have a few other novels in the can, some of which are horror, and some of which are literary, and they’re all in various stages of submission. I can’t say much beyond that, but I can assure you there’s more coming from me! The next Orbit book should be out, God willing, in October 2025!

If you are interested in what Nichollas Pullen has written, you can order a copy of The Black Hunger using this link.