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wpsmith17's review
4.0
I really enjoyed this. It not only wears its influences on its sleeves; it celebrates them. Gothic imagery, southern trappings, and surprising chills. It's a hoot.
ctgt's review
4.0
Her eyes, those colorless orbs, penetrated him with their staring, and her perfect mouth made love to the language she uttered. The artist, his hands itching for his pen, took in her mauve skin, her coils of tawny hair; and he marveled at how luxurious that hair looked in the misty light of the place, how it seemed in his imagination at times to writhe with an almost lecherous sentience.
As I bounced around the internet between several of my favorite weird fiction websites I had come across the name Pugmire on several occasions and decided to give this collection a spin. The book starts with a bang, Gathered Dust is an homage or sequel to J. Vernon Shea's The Haunter of the Graveyard which has always been a favorite of mine. I didn't enjoy the stories in the niddle of the book as much as the first few but the last 3 or 4, especially Host of Haunted Air and A Vestige of Mirth are fantastic.
We had one final fight about my mother-I demanded to be told about her, about why she had vanished when I was a boy. I knew instinctively that she had held the key to my mystery of hatching into this hateful world. She has visited me often, in my queerest dreams, and with each visit she looked a little altered. Often she was accompanied by two silent creatures, winged things with flesh as black as midnight, fiends without faces.
There are references to the Lovecraft world but Pugmire has also created his own little pocket of weird called Sesqua Valley. It's the kind of pocket you don't want to just stick your hand into blindly, too many sharp, pointy, oozy things inside. You could say this is Lovecraft with a darker, sharper edge. Some of these stories are told from the viewpoint of the fiends themselves. There is some sex both gay and straight but that is all secondary, looked down upon as unworthy of what is really important. There is also a recurring theme with eyes......not windows to the soul but windows to the void.
Coming to a stop, he held one hand to the quarter moon and made to it an esoteric sign, his sunken eyes flashing with keen expectancy. A number of people gathered around the cart and took up the queerest looking instruments I had ever seen. Simon chose a mammoth coiled horn-like thing that looked incredibly heavy, an instrument that reminded me of a shofar blown at Jewish holidays, but it didn't come from any ram of earthly existence.
As I bounced around the internet between several of my favorite weird fiction websites I had come across the name Pugmire on several occasions and decided to give this collection a spin. The book starts with a bang, Gathered Dust is an homage or sequel to J. Vernon Shea's The Haunter of the Graveyard which has always been a favorite of mine. I didn't enjoy the stories in the niddle of the book as much as the first few but the last 3 or 4, especially Host of Haunted Air and A Vestige of Mirth are fantastic.
We had one final fight about my mother-I demanded to be told about her, about why she had vanished when I was a boy. I knew instinctively that she had held the key to my mystery of hatching into this hateful world. She has visited me often, in my queerest dreams, and with each visit she looked a little altered. Often she was accompanied by two silent creatures, winged things with flesh as black as midnight, fiends without faces.
There are references to the Lovecraft world but Pugmire has also created his own little pocket of weird called Sesqua Valley. It's the kind of pocket you don't want to just stick your hand into blindly, too many sharp, pointy, oozy things inside. You could say this is Lovecraft with a darker, sharper edge. Some of these stories are told from the viewpoint of the fiends themselves. There is some sex both gay and straight but that is all secondary, looked down upon as unworthy of what is really important. There is also a recurring theme with eyes......not windows to the soul but windows to the void.
Coming to a stop, he held one hand to the quarter moon and made to it an esoteric sign, his sunken eyes flashing with keen expectancy. A number of people gathered around the cart and took up the queerest looking instruments I had ever seen. Simon chose a mammoth coiled horn-like thing that looked incredibly heavy, an instrument that reminded me of a shofar blown at Jewish holidays, but it didn't come from any ram of earthly existence.
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