Sesqua Valley & Other Haunts is a collection of horror and dark fantasy tales in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, set in the mysterious Sesqua Valley - a dark and sinister locale imagined by W.H. Pugmire. The reader will find carefully crafted tales of Lovecraftian horror and the Cthulhu Mythos artfully coloured with the lavish touches for which W.H. Pugmire is famous. His stories are not mere pastiche, but finely wrought stories that transport the reader into a foreboding and enticing realm of hororr and dark fantasy.

Like poison leaked from some acidic brain, this book will haunt you with the language and vision of the lost. For more than four decades, W. H. Pugmire has delighted and astonished his many devotees with vignettes of perfumed prose-poetry that rival the work of Baudelaire and Clark Ashton Smith. In this new collection, which contains both new and reprinted pieces, Pugmire once again stakes his claim to be the most accomplished prose stylist in contemporary weird fiction. Here we find the shades of Lovecraft, Poe and Oscar Wilde-that dandified British author whose life and work hover over this collection like a sea-mist. We explore the shadows spawned in Sesqua Valley... Providence, Rhode Island... and Gershom, a city of artistic exiles. The title work is an impressive sequence of prose-poems, each segment inspired by an entry in Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, fusing delicate prose-poetry with the terror that only the landscape of the fantastic imagination can elicit. This new collection includes all of the original works which first appeared in "The Tangled Muse," Wilum Pugmire's highly-limited (and now, out of print) omnibus, together with a number of newly-written and rather disturbing prose-poems that see their first publication here. The title work also appeared in "The Tangled Muse," but the author has added 10,000 additional words to it for this edition-most of the new material being a segmented sequel to J. Vernon Shea's "The Haunter of the Graveyard." "Uncommon Places" features cover artwork and interior illustrations by the fantastic Swiss artist, Gwabryel, specially commissioned for this edition.

FICTION: "The House of Idiot Children" by W.H. Pugmire & M.K. Snyder; "Landscape, With Fish" by Karen Heuler; "Events at Fort Plentitude" by Cat Rambo; "The Stone and Bone Boy" by Calvin Mills; "Renovations" by Matthew Pridham. POETRY: "Brief Glimpses from Another World" by F.J. Bergmann; "Lament for a One-Legged Lady" by Lisa M. Bradley; NONFICTION: "Weirdism: " Amanda Gannon on life as a bipolar werewolf; Elizabeth Genco interviews Melissa Marr, author of Wicked Lovely; Lost in Lovecraft: Kenneth Hite explores the Arabian sands in H.P.L.'s stories; The Cryptic: Darrell Schweitzer on The Last Witchfinder and James Morrow's next novels; The Library: Book reviews; Lost Pages: Ira Marcks presents an alternate-universe vision of insanity.