Sesqua Valley. Pugmire set many of his stories in the Sesqua Valley, a fictional location in the Pacific Northwest of the United States which for him served the same purpose as the fictional Arkham / Dunwich / Innsmouth nexus did for Lovecraft, or the Severn Valley for Ramsey Campbell. Critical response Pugmire's writings have been described as a "love letter to Lovecraft" around which he constructed his own universe. Pugmire's fiction has also been described as embracing the gothic with a modern sensibility, not as a look or a style but as "an idea that cut against the naive American faith that the past was absolutely past." Editor and scholar Scott Connors has written that, stylistically, Pugmire "owes as much to Oscar Wilde and Henry James as to HPL and Poe, creating a truly unholy fusion that defies academic boundaries between 'mainstream' and 'genre' fiction." Writing for Weird Fiction Review, Bobby Derie stated that Pugmire "wrote Lovecraftian fiction without the formulaic trappings of the mythos, wrapped in a sensuous prose and characters with easy, fluid sexuality". Issue 28 of The Lovecraft eZine was devoted to Pugmire—"one of our greatest Lovecraftian writers"—with tributes from S. T. Joshi, Joseph S. Pulver Sr., and others; in it, Lovecraftian author and editor Robert M. Price described Pugmire as "the Oscar Wilde of our time ... the most revered and beloved figure in the Lovecraftian movement today." Author Laird Barron listed him as one of "the best contemporary horror/weird fiction" small-press authors, and a writer who "puts forth a new baroque masterpiece every other year". Nick Mamatas, in a 2009 interview, stated that Pugmire and Thomas Ligotti were "the best Lovecraftians today". Lovecraftian writers Mike Davis and Will Hart both called Pugmire "the world's greatest living Lovecraftian writer." Silvia Moreno-Garcia, in a Washington Post review article, spoke of Pugmire's "decadent, lush prose". S. T. Joshi described Pugmire's writing style as "richly evocative", writing in his scholarly analysis of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, that Pugmire's work contains "some of the richest veins of neo-Lovecraftian horror seen in recent years." However, Joshi has been more critical of Pugmire's nonfiction writing, proclaiming "no one takes him seriously as a critic." Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, in their review of Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts, stated that "Pugmire's devotion to his sources transcends mere pastiche, and his style is neither overwrought nor too