Joseph Harms’s newest release Evil is forthcoming from Expat Press. Evil consists of four novels (Ades, Baal, Cant, and Wyrd) written between 2007-2018, and is described as “a brute force proto-transatlantic jihad from one of the most idiosyncratic stylists to ever write. A faith walk down a warpath. A motley mandem contends with a coterie of preacher-subjugated deformed. The most uncouth psychodramaturges populate this climate of psycho-spiritual binge and purge and Boschean decadence.”
Joseph Harms was a finalist for the National Poetry Series Award for Bel (Expat Press), as well as a finalist for the Sexton Prize for Poetry for Goety (The Black Spring Press Group, forthcoming). He is also the author of the poetry collection Nous (IFSF Publishing), and his work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Boulevard, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The North American Review, The International Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, The Opiate, Bayou Magazine, and his poetry appeared in The Gravity of the Thing’s Spring 2016 issue.
Advance praise for Evil:
“Harms well describes the particularity of the waste places of the world, spaces we know intimately when we’re children—the territory where the suburb fades away into woods, a certain rotted tree marking a boundary unvisited by adults, the way it feels to walk through the semi-abandoned empty farmland on the edge of town. His landscapes are beautiful and nostalgic even when menacing, full of the gold of the rye fields and the drift of leaves… Baal is a beautiful, fascinating and thoughtful horror novel—a Midwestern regional novel in a genre that tends to be either placeless or coastal, and a novel which names and foregrounds race and sexuality.”
—Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Baal is a fiercely ambitious novel, imperfect though tinged with frequent moments of genius that demand an audience… the novel bears more resemblance to Cormac McCarthy, particularly Blood Meridian. As the story progresses, propelled by an onslaught of unthinkable violence and sexual deviance, Harms’s rich, elaborate prose is not only a stylistic choice but a necessity. In a lesser writer’s hands, rendered in lay prose, the brutality would come off gratuitous, but through Harms we view the atrocities with philosophical distance—like the difference between a snuff photo and a Bruegel painting.”
—The New Inquiry