If you haven’t reserved your copy just click on any of the photos below for ordering information.
The haunted Sesqua Valley lies hidden in the Northwest, surrounded by forested hills. A region of dream and madness, it seduces the lunatic soul with the dangerous and captivating marvels of the Outside. Linked to the woodland of this valley is the shadowed forest of the Dreamlands, from which Nyarlathotep and his night-gaunts seep into the world of wakefulness so as to tempt and corrupt humankind.
With this collection of new original fiction, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire investigates his Lovecraftian locality as never before, with new novelettes that take the reader deep into the mysteries of an eldritch land. Chief among they who haunt Sesqua Valley is its first-born beast, Simon Gregory Williams, who in this book is revealed as a creature of secret feelings and dark alchemy. BOHEMIANS OF SESQUA VALLEY is a showcase of Pugmire’s continual obsession with the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, to whom this book pay homage.
A collection of six novelettes of over 50,000 words
Enoch Coffin is a proud inhabitant of Massachusetts, an artist following in the footsteps of local legend Richard Upton Pickman. Coffin is an artist with a singular quest: to capture in paint, or ink, or clay — however he might — sights that no mortal has ever portrayed in art before…and lived to exhibit. His quest will take him throughout actual New England locations, and that other New England of H. P. Lovecraft, where his models will be doomed souls, ravening ghouls, and entities from beyond the veil.
Individually acclaimed for their weird fiction, in this collection of short stories authors W. H. Pugmire and Jeffrey Thomas collaborate to paint the portrait of a character every bit as fascinating and unique as the subjects of his artistic encounters.
With haunting illustrations on the front and back cover by renowned illustrator Santiago Caruso and interior illustrations accompanying every story by illustrator Clint Leduc, Encounters with Enoch Coffin is anticipated to be one of the best-selling Dark Regions Press titles of 2013.
Table of Contents:
Ye Unkempt Thing
Matter of Truth and Death
Beneath Arkham
Spectral Evidence
They Smell of Thunder
Mystic Articulation
Every Exquisite Thing
Impossible Color
Ecstasy in Aberration
Shadow Puppets
Fearless Symmetry
Unto the Child of Woman
One of only 150 signed and numbered hardcover copies.
You know, you think you know someone and then . . . kablooey! Something comes walking along, right up to you, and then punches you in the nose. It’s like that with Peter Crowther.
After reading Peter’s previous collection for Cemetery Dance, the poignantly dark The Longest Single Note back in 1999, you’d think you have his measure — after all, it echoes the nostalgia and gore served up in Escardy Gap, his epic collaboration with James Lovegrove. But then he sideswipes you with the science fictional tales of Songs of Leaving and you think, ah, okay . . . got him now (particularly as you’ve read the Forever Twilight novellas)! But then comes The Spaces Between The Lines, as bleak a gathering of horror yarns as you’re ever likely to find (and if you don’t believe us, read ‘Bedfordshire’) . . . which neatly ties into his take on witches, By Wizard Oak.
So, at that point, you’re certain you have it. How could you not. It’s easy, right? He’s a soft-centered, spookmeister with an eye for wonder and the far reaches of space. Fine. But whooahhh hold on there! Along comes this baby . . . a bona fide set of crime and mystery stories, no less. And so, dear reader, it kind of looks like you know Jack.
Cats figure strongly in this book (though Peter Crowther has never owned one) and private eyes (well, one anyways) . . . and there are no mean streets in England, though one or two of them can get a little grumpy. Unnatural death also figures strongly here, though Peter hasn’t killed anybody (not as far as we know). He hasn’t smuggled drugs either (as in ‘Boxing Day’), hasn’t shot craps with dice that can foretell the future (the Runyonesque ‘Tomorrow Eyes’), doesn’t play trumpet (though, like Cal Williston in ‘The Musician of Bremen, GA,’ he does love the Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan version of ‘Moonlight in Vermont’), hasn’t tried to poison anyone (‘The Allotment’), and as far as he knows Sherlock Holmes and the good Doctor Watson never did make it to the genteel Yorkshire town of Harrogate (‘The Adventure of the Touch of God’).
Eighteen stories from the fertile and frisky mind of one of England’s most accomplished genre wordsmiths. And now we all know exactly what makes Peter tick. At least until next time.
Hardcover Limited Edition of 750 signed copies bound in full-cloth and Smyth sewn
The first edition of Mister Weed-Eater is Limited to Two Hundred Seventy-Four numbered copies and Twenty-Six lettered copies , specially bound, all of which have been signed by the author and the illustrator. Designed by James Cahill, and printed by Mackintosh Topography. This is number 85 of 274 copies.
Hardcover, with slipcase. No Dust Jacket issued. 38 Pages. Book is in fine condition but the slipcase is only in very good condition, it has rubbing, shelf wear, toning, and soiling.
Mister Weed-Eater recounts the story of Mr. Job Harold, who befriends a blind man hired by the church across the street to cut the church’s lawn. The newly-hired landscaper, utilizing a brand new weed-eater with which to trim the yard, is, of course, unable to evaluate the fruits of his labor. Taking a break from the Texas heat, he turns to Mr. Harold for what appears to be an innocent critique of his work. In actuality, it is a brazen attempt by the groundskeeper to maneuver himself into the man’s house and his life.
At first hesitant even to involve himself in the blind man’s business, Mr. Harold, nonetheless, ends up taking the sightless man by the elbow and tries to convey the slip-shoddiness of his weed-eating, yard-whacking efforts. Mr. Harold quickly becomes irritated with the blind man. From that moment on, the macabre and dark-humored tale evolves into a bizarre journey of chaos and bedlam, with the once-routine life of Job Harold becoming a topsy-turvy disarray of self-survival.
This is a first edition hardcover in near fine condition in near fine dust jacket. Very light shelf wear else fine
Contents:
Acknowledgements
The Siege of 318
The Burlap Bag
Fifty of the Blue
Germinal
A Pair of Spectacles
Every Road I walked Along
The Idiot
Bitter Almonds
The Stainless Steel Savior
The Baby Sitter
A Swipe of the Brush
The Scar
An Even Stranger Fruit
In Oxford and Paris psychic investigators are attempting to probe forbidden areas of the mind. In New York, writer David Blake is studying the methods of miracle healer Jonathon Mathias. Driven by their own desperate motives, these researchers are about to unlock Pandora’s Box.
This is a first UK edition in near fine condition in a like dust jacket.
The fight was ugly, but brief. The amazing Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, Jr. had a stunningly ridiculous attack by obfucating Wikipedia bureaucracy, and was in grave danger of being deleted. This smacks of electronic manslaughter, and while it may bake a great horror-science fiction mashup story, we can’t accept this.
Luckily the battle was over. Credentials were offered, and refused as fannish and inconsequential. S. T. Joshi was invoked, and rejected as a nepotistic friend. Awards were listed, and rejected as being insufficient. Wikipedia minutiae of fame were carted out and displayed in order to eradicate Pugmire.
The Lovecraftian gods were not pleased.
There were awful and cacophanous vibrations from Sesqua valley.
But as of 4 February 2013, Wilum has been saved! His Wikipedia page is safe.
Now, someone start giving him the awards and accolades he so richly deserves, but never seeks due to his humbleness.
For the record, here is a chronicle of sites that tells the background story:
THE GHOST OF FEAR AND OTHERS: H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories edited by S. T. Joshi (Signed Limited Hardcover)
H. P. Lovecraft was a voracious reader of supernatural and fantastic fiction, and he was continually on the hunt for powerful and stimulating works in these genres. Many of the stories he read directly influenced his own writings. This first volume of H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories presents 16 stories that Lovecraft found to be of particular merit. Among them are the beautiful poetic fantasy “Idle Days on the Yann” by Lord Dunsany; Fiona Macleod’s grimly evocative “The Sin-Eater,” which influenced “The Rats in the Walls”; Arthur Machen’s grisly novelette “Novel of the White Powder,” which Lovecraft adapted for “Cool Air”; and M. P. Shiel’s “The House of Sounds,” which Lovecraft ranked among the greatest weird tales ever written. Also included are hard-to-find stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, E. F. Benson, Théophile Gautier, John Buchan, and others, as well as two stories from the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales (Seabury Quinn’s “The Phantom Farmhouse” and Arthur J. Burks’s “Bells of Oceana”). The volume contains an introduction by S. T. Joshi as well as notes on the individual stories, giving background on the authors as well as on Lovecraft’s appreciation of the tales and their possible influence on his work.
Contents:
Introduction by S. T. Joshi
Idle Days on the Yann by Lord Dunsany
Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Man Who Went Too Far by E. F. Benson
The Mark of the Beast by Rudyard Kipling
The Sin-Eater by Fiona Macleod
The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel
The Phantom Farmhouse by Seabury Quinn
One of Cleopatra’s Nights by Théophile Gautier
The Stranger from Kurdistan by E. Hoffmann Price
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe
Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen
The Dead Smile by F. Marion Crawford
The Ghost of Fear by H. G. Wells
Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White
Bells of Oceana by Arthur J. Burks
The Wind in the Portico by John Buchan
This is a signed limited edition hardcover of only 150 signed and number
One of only 100 signed and numbered hardcover copies!
With his first collection from Dark Regions Press, W. H. Pugmire continues his radical and obsessive reinterpretations of H. P. Lovecraft’s brilliant fiction. Among the book’s original pieces is the title story, “Gathered Dust,” a sequel to J. Vernon Shea’s “The Haunter of the Graveyard.” Set in Arkham, this tale of utter strangeness concerns the legacy of Randolph Carter and a monstrous burying ground where the phantoms of the past linger so as to feed upon the living. In “Depths of Dreams and Madness” we journey to Pugmire’s Sesqua Valley, wherein we find Lovecraft’s artist, Richard Upton Pickman and Robert E. Howard’s mad poet, Justin Geoffrey, tainted by the valley’s supernatural lunacy. With “These Deities of Rarest Air,” Pugmire continues his exploration of the prose-poem/vignette sequence, in a work that deliciously evokes the mystic aura of not only Lovecraft but Clark Ashton Smith as we ll. With artful decadence and a pen dipped into the dark fin-de-siècle poetry of Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire, Pugmire celebrates his beloved genre of fantastic fiction with works that only his cracked skull could conceive. Jeffrey Thomas has provided a provocative Introduction.
“Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is the prose-poet of the horror/fantasy field; he may be the best prose-poet we have.”
- S. T. Joshi
“In my opinion, he’s the best living writer of Lovecraftiana.”
- Toren Atkinson, of the band Darkest of the Hillside Thickets
“Sometimes subtle, sometimes as blunt as a rosewood coffin, Pugmire’s stories are always emotional. Drawing from his own rather bizarre life, it’s often difficult to separate the facts from the fiction, even for those who presume to know him.”
- Ken Abner, editor of Terminal Frights
We also have one copy of the signed limited edition of SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT by Wilum Pugmire
One of only 100 signed and numbered hardcover copies. Cover and interior illustrations by Matthew Jaffe.
With SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT, Wilum Pugmire continues his aesthetic exploration of the prose-poem and vignette sequence, many of which may be found in his last collection, THE TANGLED MUSE. With this new title from Arcane Wisdom Press we have a book-length sequence of semi-interconnected pieces, all of which are inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s superb sonnet sequence, FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH. Each numbered segment is an imaginative response to that numbered sonnet in Lovecraft’s sequence, and Pugmire’s Lovecraftian influence is the main force that drives this present work; yet other influences burrow from his fevered brain – Oscar Wilde, Edgar A. Poe, Baudelaire and the Decadents. Like some freakish soul who has lost his place in modern time, Pugmire’s style is like that from another era, and yet it too is tainted by his neoteric experience as a punk rock queen and street transvestite. Like his literary heroes such as H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti and Henry James, Pugmire strives to create what he does not hesitate to call “literary art” – prose pieces that are beautifully poetic and imaginatively deranged. This perverse concoction is best when sipped slowly, occasionally, and this is not a book to rush through in one sitting. Let it plant its poisoned fungi gradually upon your innocent brain, and thus blemish forever your paltry soul.
Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire began to write fiction while serving as a Mormon missionary in Omagh, Northern Ireland, under the inspiration of his friend and correspondent, Robert Bloch. When, upon returning to the States, he discovered Arkham House and the fiction and Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, he became an obsessed Lovecraftian determined to join the ranks of modern Mythos writers, and to that end he has devoted himself as an author. After a brief stint as a male whore, he discovered punk rock, which saved his soul and gave him a new fictive voice. Thus his works are a conjoining of traditional Lovecraftian horror with up-ye-arse Decadence. His books include SESQUA VALLEY & OTHER HAUNTS, THE TANGLED MUSE, and, forthcoming, THE STRANGE DARK ONE—TALES OF NYARLATHOTEP. His next book will be a collection of mostly non-Lovecraftian prose-poems and vignettes, UNCOMMON PLACES, to be published at the death of this year by Hippocampus Press.
Wilum Pugmire showing off his limited edition hardcover of THE LIGHT IS THE DARKNESS by Laird Barron. If you haven’t read Laird Barron you are missing the brightest new star in the genre!
Now that these are in stock they are moving very fast and we expect to be sold out soon. If you haven’t reserved your copy get it soon.
Wilum Pugmire talks about his copy of SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT
One of the bookstores that ordered the hardcover limited edition went out of business so we have a couple copies of this title left for sale again. We don’t expect for these two remaining copies to last long so reserve your copy SOON! Click the cover art below for ordering information
