Over at Dose Nation, my favorite freak writer
Erik Davis posts affectionately about Clark Ashton Smith, author of
The Hashish Eater (1922) and a host of other weird tales, many for Weird Tales magazine.
When I was a strange young teen, I wrote ornate and old-fashioned poems haunted by images of demons, wizard scrolls, and implacable fortresses. Matthew Greenfield, a sophisticated chap I knew at college who later became a professor of English, was guilty of a similar sin, which he called “Dungeons and Dragons poetry.” Though I didn’t play much D&D, I did read a lot of weird fantasy stuff from Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and, of course, H.P. Lovecraft. These purple prose monarchs, whose similes and descriptive passages shone with the fetid light of corpse-fed fireflies, lorded over my imaginal life for a few years, and infected the verse I wrote for creative writing classes and for my pleasure. You, dear reader, are happy that I am loathe to disinter them from the sepulchral Office Depot containers moldering in the dank and fetid corners of my necromantic storage space. They are, one might say, o’er-wraught...
But not a smidgen as o’er-wraught as the amazing poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, the California poet and fiction writer who, along with Howard and Lovecraft, wrote his weird stories for Weird Tales, mostly in the 1930s.
The Hashish Eater: the witchery of words (Techgnosis), Buy
Smith collections on Amazon
the latest
latest episodes
And, in fact, I suspect a large part of Smith's fame in the modern day has to do with Dungeons & Dragons. It's where I first met the man, as TSR published an adventure module based on his Averoigne, "Castle Amber".
It stuck with me well enough that I've sought him out since. I just finished reading Chaosium's The Klarkash-Ton Cycle.
CAS is a largely unheralded treasure.
I practically memorized his Zothique stories, "alienating purpleposity" notwithstanding.
I first read his fiction in the L. Sprague deCamp-edited anthology Wizards & Warriors and since then I've been hunting it down.
But right now we're going through a reprint-driven renaissance of pulp fiction and all the grubby paperbacks and battered library discards I've hoarded over the years are being superseded by beautifully designed and printed editions. Oh, well, he sighed.
If you're a dedicated Smith reader the Night Shade Books five-volume hardback edition is the way to go. For most readers I would strongly recommend the Stephen Jones-edited compilation The Emperor of Dreams, part of the wonderful Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series or either Lost Worlds or Out of Space and Time from Bison.
I once had a really, really bad fever and reread all my CAS while sick in bed -- the combination of prose so purple it strobes into the ultraviolet and the sickness produced a genuinely visionary experience -- for days I was incapable of distinguishing between dreams, reality, and the printed page...
There's also the definitive online resource for CAS's writings: The Eldritch Dark. It has an online copy of "The Hashish Eater" and lots of his other writings, with the permission of the Smith estate.
JOHN @4, thanks for that link. Very helpful!
You all should have Erik as a guest blogger, he would bring a ton of great stuff to the table.
VIKING BRIAN @6, He's absolutely on our short list to invite!!!
Awesome.
I've been reading a ton of CAS, Ligotti, Cisco, Hodgson, Chambers, and Lovecraft lately.
In somewhat related news, Barnes & Noble recently published a 1000+ page book containing all of Lovecraft's original fiction. It's only $15. So, for under $20 you can get and read every single piece of original fiction that Lovecraft ever published. That is amazing.
Such a good time to be a fan of literary horror.
This reminds me of Clive Barker's painting style.
http://www.clivebarker.info/intsrevel12.html
Cool.
Noted obscurist archivist Jared Kobek includes a PDF of poetry by Clark Ashton Smith available for download:
http://kobek.com/star-treader.pdf
The kobek.com website also includes interesting miscellanea of H.P. Lovecraft.