Gathered Dust and Others

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

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