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Originally Posted by GOLLUM Yes, who is this mysterious Pugmire and how does he compare to the great Ligotti?? |
A thank you to both Ravenus and GOLLUM.... Pugmire is someone who has been published mostly by small presses, and is somewhat elusive. However, here's a tiny snippet on the man:
http://cyberpsychos.netonecom.net/bios/WHPugmire.html
He also has a collection coming up from Hippocampus Press, The Fungal Stain, due out this month, I believe. Other than that, the three I've been able to track down are:
Tales of Sesqua Valley: Weird Tales of Lovecraftian Nightmare and Dark Fantasy (1997)
Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror (1999)
Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts (2003)
He also has a short story, "The Serenade of Starlight" in
The Children of Cthulhu anthology, and a few other things scattered in various Chaosium anthologies.
Comparing Pugmire and Ligotti is -- to use a trite simile -- like comparing apples and oranges. Pugmire's prose is not nearly so dense, nor his textures so layered. Yet his often very brief tales -- almost vignettes -- are close to poetry in their ambiguity and surreal approach to the world, and he does have the same ability to make a reader feel that they've stepped into the Pit ... and that that's where they've been living all along, unknowing. However, Pugmire has a bit more of the strain of the Romantic writers of the early 19th century to him, as well, with a large dash of Gothic imagination. Not to everyone's taste, but decidedly worth checking out if you can find them... Unfortunately, most of his stuff is now out of print and commands unbelievably high prices; when I bought
Sesqua Valley, I paid (with s&h) $51.00 US for it ... it now goes for something around $150-175 US. (Much like Ligotti's earlier work, such as
The Agonising Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (1999) which tends to go for a minimum of about $240 US...
However, Pugmire does tend to heavily revise his work at times (sometimes so that the connection between the two versions is almost unrecognizable), and the new collection, which should be readily available, is going to have a fairly wide representation of the types of work he does, from what I understand, and is much more affordable. He is also, as I think I've noted elsewhere, one of the
very few Lovecraftian writers to garner praise from S. T. Joshi along the way.