Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire (born William Harry Pugmire (3 May 1951 – 26 March 2019), was an American author and poet based in Seattle, Washington, USA. He specialised in the horror and weird fiction genres.
Pugmire changed his middle name to Hopfrog as a tribute to the titular character in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Hop-Frog", the story of a vengeful dwarf who enacts his wrath on a malicious king [1].
He was heavily influenced by Lovecraftian horror and weird fiction in general, genres to which he devoted much of his output. In 2011, H. P. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi described Pugmire as "the prose-poet of the horror/fantasy field; he may be the best prose-poet we have," and "perhaps the leading Lovecraftian author writing today." Bobby Derie wrote that Pugmire "wrote Lovecraftian fiction without the formulaic trappings of the mythos, wrapped in a sensuous prose and characters with easy, fluid sexuality".
In March 2019, Pugmire died at home from heart problems, a condition which he had been battling for many years [2].
Sesqua Valley[]
Many of Pugmire's Mythos stories take place in the fictional Sesqua Valley, a Pacific Northwest equivalent to Lovecraft's New England which he created for this very purpose. Other authors have also adopted the Sesqua Valley as the setting to their Mythos tales, amongst them author and artist Jeffrey Thomas, who worked on a large number of stories with Pugmire, and provided artwork for several of his publications.
Selected Bibliography[]
Collections[]
- Tales of Sesqua Valley (1997)
- Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror (1999)
- Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts (2003)
- Gathered Dust and Others (2011)
- The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep (2012)
Short Fiction[]
- "The Tree-House" (1995, with Robert M. Price)
- "The Baleful God" (1996)
- "The Woven Offspring" (1998)
- "These Deities of Rarest Air" (2011)
- "To Hold Ye White Husk" (2014)
- "The Secret Painting of Thomas Cartwright" (2017)
External Links[]
- W. H. Pugmire at Wikipedia
- W. H. Pugmire at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- W. H. Pugmire at Goodreads
References[]
- ↑ "Hop-Frog" at Wikipedia
- ↑ W. H. Pugmire at Wikipedia