Bow down: I am the Emperor of Dreams and the Necromancer of Language
I've just finished up a 6 volume collection of CAS stories and I have some thoughts.
It seems that whenever anyone talks about Clark Ashton Smith they first have to offer a disclaimer about his overuse of purple prose. Well, who am I to buck tradition? At his best, Smith's magniloquence and use of archaisms can create prose poems that are simultaneously beautiful and grotesque:
The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orblike mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.
At his worst, you will find yourself stopping to pick up a dictionary three or four times per page to look up the meaning of some abstruse word. Invariably, those listings will be prefaced with words like
Archaic, Formal, Literary, and Obsolete. The issue, for me, isn't that I don't know the meanings of the words (I don't), it's that, imo, he often makes poor word choices.
A few examples:
"Crepuscular" = "Twilight"
"Coadjutation" = "Help"
"Ramifications" = "Branching"
"Inenarrable" = "Indescribable
"Comestible" = "Food"
"Lepidopter" = "Butterfly"
"Cephaloid" = "Head-like"
"Archean gneiss" = "Rocks" .... I think.
Instead of adding to the tone of the story you end up being distracted by the silliness of outlandish synonyms being used for commonplace words. "The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
Volume one is pretty weak. These are Smith's earliest stories, and while some of them have inventive ideas, the stories themselves just aren't very good. I will make note of a couple of interesting things though. One is the fact that Smith featured miscegenation in a few of these stories, which I think is pretty bold for pulp stories written in 1929 and 1930. "The Venus of Azombeii" is one such story which centers around a doomed romance between a white man and an African woman of mixed heritage. Another is "The Monster of the Prophecy" which ends with a human man falling in love with a very alien woman. It ends with this paragraph:
When it became known in Lompior that Alvor was the lover of Ambiala, no surprise or censure was expressed by any one. Doubtless the people, especially the male Alphads who had vainly wooed the empress, thought that her tastes were queer, not to say eccentric. But anyway, no comment was made: it was her own amour after all, and no one else could carry it on for her. It would seem, from this, that the people of Omanorion had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.
A surprising sentiment from someone who was a frequent correspondent of Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
I would also like to note the "scientifiction" story "The Metamorphosis of the World." Smith was a fantasist but he had to make a living so he wrote a few sci-fi stories for the pulps that were basically fantasy stories with a few token science elements tossed in, sometimes satirically. Funnily enough, Smith (who loathed technology) actually wrote some interesting stuff here that includes solar power, a form of television, and most intriguing, the concept of alien invasion via global terraforming. Ironically, his story was rejected for being too scientific!
Tier one (Good):
None
Tier Two (Decent):
The Last Incantation (dark fantasy)
Tier Three (worth reading once):
The Venus of Azombeii (Horror, Romance)
The Tale of Satampra Zeiros (humorous Dunsanian S & S with a dash of Lovecraftian horror)
................................................
Tier one (Good):
None
Tier Two (Decent):
The Return of the Sorcerer (horror)
Tier Three (worth reading once):
The City of the Singing Flame (weird tale)
The Testament of Athammaus (sequel to Satampra Zeiros)
................................................
The story of a Druidic ancestor of Edgar Allan Poe and his attempts to return a book to his next door neighbor, an Easter egg painted like an ancient Greek Squidward.
Tier one (Good):
The Seed From the Sepulcher (horror)
The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (sci-fi, horror)
Tier Two (Decent):
The Empire of Necromancers (dark fantasy)
The Double Shadow (dark fantasy)
The Colossus of Ylourgne (dark fantasy)
Tier Three (worth reading once):
The Maker of Gargoyles (horror)
The Nameless Offspring (horror)
Ubbo-Sathla (Lovecraftian horror)
A Vintage From Atlantis
.......................................
Tier one (Good):
None
Tier Two (Decent):
The Dark Eidolon (Dark fantasy. Very imaginative)
Tier Three (worth reading once):
The Ice-Demon (S & S. Not bad but nothing groundbreaking)
The Isle of the Torturers (Dark Fantasy. Similar but slightly inferior to two other CAS stories)
Genius Loci (horror)
The Dweller in the Gulf (Sci-Fi, horror. Similar but inferior to Yoh-Vombis)
The Beast of Averoigne (Dark fantasy, horror)
The Disinterment of Venus (Horror, touch of humor)
The Charnel God (Dark Fantasy)
...............................
Tier one (Good):
The Chain of Aforgomon (Fantasy, horror)
Tier Two (Decent):
Necromancy in Naat (dark fantasy)
The Garden of Adompha (horror, dark fanasy)
Mother of Toads (horror)
The Death of Malygris (sequel to The Last Incantation)
Schizoid Creator (Light horror. humor. Reminds me of a couple of Robert Sheckley stories)
Tier Three (worth reading once):
The Black Abbot of Puthuum (S & S. Not bad but nothing groundbreaking)
The Last Hieroglyph (fantasy. Interesting idea. Needed more plot/character motivation)
Xeethra (dark fantasy. Needed a stronger ending)
Unless you are a hardcore fan this volume is skippable. This is a collection of stories that Smith wrote as a teenager and some other oddities like a short play and an early draft of his most famous poem The Hashish Eater.
How I'd rank the stories:
01 The Seed From the Sepulcher
02 The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
03 The Chain of Aforgomon
04 The Dark Eidolon
05 The Last Incantation
06 Necromancy in Naat
07 The Colossus of Ylourgne
08 The Empire of Necromancers
09 The Double Shadow
10 The Return of the Sorcerer
11 The Death of Malygris (sequel to The Last Incantation)
12 The Garden of Adompha
13 Mother of Toads
14 The Dweller in the Gulf
15 Schizoid Creator
16 Ubbo-Sathla
17 The City of the Singing Flame
18 The Beast of Averoigne
19 A Vintage From Atlantis
20 The Maker of Gargoyles
21 The Disinterment of Venus
22 The Venus of Azombeii
23 The Charnel God
24 The Black Abbot of Puthuum