W. H. Pugmire - Writings

Writings

Strongly influenced by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, many of Pugmire's stories directly reference "Lovecraftian" elements (such as Yog-Sothoth of the Cthulhu Mythos). Pugmire's major original contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos is the Sesqua Valley, a fictional location in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and his equivalent of the Arkham/Dunwich/Innsmouth nexus which features in many of Lovecraft's New England stories. According to his official biography, his "goal as an author is to dwell forevermore within Lovecraft's titan shadow." Writing in his scholarly "The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, S. T. Joshi notes that "Pugmire's volumes... contain some of the richest veins of neo-Lovecraftian horror seen in recent years.

Pugmire's writing style has been described as "richly evocative" with a "distinct homoerotic theme or undercurrent that is neither gratuitous nor inconsistent but rather genuine and often central to characterization and storytelling. Author Laird Barron has described him as "an important figure in the fields of modern horror and the weird". Editor and scholar Scott Connors has written that "Stylistically (Pugmire) owes as much to Oscar Wilde and Henry James as to HPL and Poe, creating a truly unholy fusion that defies academic boundaries between 'mainstream' and 'genre' fiction."

Originally published mainly in magazines and anthologies from small press imprints such as Necropolitan Press, Mythos Books, Delirium Books, and Hippocampus Press, since 1997 Pugmire has produced a steady stream of book collections. The Tangled Muse, a major 456-page retrospective of his work, was published in October 2010 by Centipede Press.