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This book features eight tales of Nyarlathotep, one of HP Lovecraft’s most popular creations. The title of this collection, “The strange dark one,” is taken from the second line of HPL’s poem Nyarlathotep.According the Robert E Price in the forward to The Nyarlathotep Cycle (Chaosium, 1997), Nyarlathotep has three roles to the Great Old Ones: The messenger, the soul, and the “crawling chaos.” Pugmire is able to capture all three elements in this collectionThe character Nyarlathotep came to Lovec...
Bad Lovecraft/Anne Rice hybrid fanfiction? Starts off intriguingly enough with an interesting location in the Valley but rapidly devolves into a tedious mess of repetition, over-romanticisation, tributes to the author's weird sexual issues, and annoying, oh-so-special characters. Simon is loathsome and killed any entertainment I might have gotten out of most of the stories - I just wanted Nyarlathotep to annihilate him but the Crawling Chaos's main purpose in the world of Pugmire seems to be to
Some of the story ideas are quite good but the prose style is overwrought and somewhat monotonous. Worse, the book itself is an amateur production, not properly proofread or typeset.http://opionator.wordpress.com/2013/0...
W H Pugmire's Sesqua Valley is a fascinating place, I'll be picking up another collection soon. It's hard to put a finger on what makes his writing so special, ultimately though it's weird fiction at it's best.
W.H. Pugmire is one of the finest modern authors of the Lovecraftian tale. He has been described as "prose-poet", and writes all manners of haunting tales, many of which are set in his fiction Sesqua Valley.The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep is a collection of Pugmire's finest tales dealing with the dark god. Eight stories are collected in this slim volume (weighing in at 153 pages) and makes for a nice quick read. Readers of Lovecraft should be quite familiar with Nyarlathotep, as this...
I didn't much care for this collection based on Nyarlathotep. The first problem was not so much with the content per se. The book is a print-on-demand affair (How can a p-o-d claim to be a First Edition?) riddled with typos and grammatical errors.On to the content. These stories all look like the sort of thing that you would get if you asked a senior high school creative writing class to write a story based on Nyarlathotep. My next problem is with Pugmire's prose. It is overwrought and purple in...
Wonderfully atmospheric, building on several of HPL's tales (I recognized "The Man of Stone," "The Music of Erich Zann," "Nyarlathotep" - doubtless there are more) as well as Pugmire's own Sesqua Valley.
W. H. Pugmire takes H. P. Lovecraft’s Crawling Chaos, Nyarlathotep, and makes it his own in this collection of eight stories all about the Mighty Messenger. Fans of the Cthulhu Mythos or Pugmire’s hypnotic and poetic prose should pick this one up immediately. My full review can be found here: http://horrorworld.org/hw/2012/12/the...
Pugmire is a singular writer, decadent and surreal. His creative visions are spellbinding, but in this collection I found too much repetition. I give him props for his obsessively realized approach to Sesqua Valley and its supernatural inhabitants. I prefer his other collections that contain more variety.
There's all kinds of stuff to like in these tales of the forlorn Sesqua Valley and Nyarlathotep and cultists and old books, all written in a style evocative of Lovecraft without being derivative.
Pugmire clearly had a gift for the Lovecraftian short story. He managed to create a distinct space of his own within the Lovecraft idiom, something that, in my reading heretofore, only Brian Lumley convincingly accomplished. That being said, the stories in this collection seem a bit redundant, though the net effect of the redundancy is to firmly establish Sesqua Valley and several of it inhabitants firmly in the reader's imagination. I'll probably read more of Pugmire. I'm also intrigued by his
Pugmire is a miniaturist. His prose poems are usually a delight, but he really is not at his best when forced to sustain a longer narrative. Even so, his short stories and novelettes are often studded with memorable passages.So, why two stars? I don't feel this collection of stories shows Pugmire in top form. Most of the tales are oriented around Simon Gregory Williams, the sinister and sometimes beguiling "beast" of Pugmire's fictitious Sesqua Valley. The trouble is, the character remains stati...
Pugmire is a master at their craft. Incredibly uncomfortable, but it only adds to the horror both psychological and physical. Vivid writing that led me into the Dreamlands after finishing.
This book preaches to the choir. If you're already initiated into the ways of the Faceless God, you might get something out of it. As for me - no thanks!
