Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961)

Like Lovecraft - who created an entire mythos of mind-rending abominations and cosmic horror - and Tolkien, - who utilizes British folklore, world-building and the sense of adventure - Smith does carve out his own niche in the weird/fantasy genre. His tales are quests for power, revenge and seeking occult knowledge. Problem is, and I think Tolkien said it best, Smith's works are a "tooraloo of nonsense." Tried as I might, and I read all 256 pages of this Penguin classic, I liked only a few show more of his stories. His writing style is too overdramatized and overly embellished for my liking. I understand that many science fiction writers have been inspired by Smith, but his highest highs cannot make up for the lowest lows.

What's wild is that when he's not trying to write like a glam rock power ballad - although The Dark Eidolon was the best in this vein - I enjoyed it! I liked the "Devotee of Evil," which is a tale of Jean Averaud's search for the source of all evil. It has a touch of Poe in this regard. He's not a wizard or interplanetary being, but a human who wishes to access and worship pure evil. "Genius Loci" is about an artist who is lured in by a haunted meadow, becoming obsessed and merging into an "aboreal Death" with his bride. "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" is particularly gruesome. When a group of archaeologists explore an abandoned Martian temple, they encounter a mummy that unleashes hell onto the group. Imagine the scene from 1999's "The Mummy" as Mr. Henderson wanders the tomb without eyes and a tongue, but much worse.

Smith was close friends with Lovecraft, so there's a throwaway line of anti-Semitism and a racist description of a "Creole." 🙄 I'll give Smith this though, he was definitely ahead of his time. His stories of bizarre lands, civilized planets, powerful wizards and damsels in distress are peak 80s wizard aesthetic. The book ends with selections of his prose and poetry. The few romantic ones are terrible, as you can imagine, but I very much enjoyed "The Corpse and the Skeleton and "The Demon, the Angel and the Beauty." After this though, I won't be reading any more Smith! show less

Apparently there's something in the worship of Tsathoggua that makes things . . . fun.

Tsathoggua is Clark Ashton Smith's toad god, the only deity in Cthulhu stories to tell a human to bugger off because he's eaten already. H.P. Lovecraft loved Tsathoggua, so he and Smith would spitball all kind of crazy background details about how Tsathoggua fit into the Mythos, including how the toad god's gay uncle was Cthulhu's cousin.

That's canon. Honest.

You can check out that craziness right here in show more Smith's own reprinted essay. Just remember what people back then meant by "confirmed bachelor." That sets a precedent for the level of fun in this anthology.

The M.C. is the always entertaining Robert M. Price, and his jovial tone comes through even at his most erudite digression.

And the stories? There's some greats in here.

-The Seven Geases, The Testament of Athammaus, and two others of Smith appear. They are fun sardonic fantasies, and well worth a read or reread.

-Most of the others in this collection have a sense of amusement lurking somewhere underneath, as if the author is winking at a fellow creator to say, "Hey, look what I did with this." Shadow of the Sleeping God, The Curse of the Toad, and The Oracle of Sadoqua amused me especially.

-Two or three are average tales in familiar molds. The Crawling Kingdom particularly feels a little rushed.

-We end with the wonderful tale of Tsathoggua in the far future land of Xothique, The Resurrection of Kzadool-Ra. Henry J. Vester III knocks it out of the park, using a clear version of Smith's style to make an original tale that would have made Lovecraft chuckle.

Also important is the sheer variety of stories. Some themed Cthulhu anthologies, like [book:The Ithaqua Cycle|36506], get samey after awhile due to each story having the same entity and basic conflict. Tsathoggua has so many facets that redundancy never sets in.

Go visit Tsathoggua for a while. Just hope he's eaten first. show less

One of the best prose I have ever read. Macabre, dark, and dreamlike, Clark Ashton's stories fester into your soul like a dark, unholy flower whose sanguine petals unfurl slowly before your helpless eyes.

While it's a great book, not all stories (and poems) included are flawless. Still, it's a must read for the stylistic mastery of Smith itself.

OK, so I know that I am reviewing the Italian translation of Ashton Smith's 'The Beast of Averoigne' (published in Weird Tales in 1933) but I can't let this brilliant piece of horror fantasy go unnoticed with its effortless melding of Lovecraftian horror, Averoigne fantasy and Hyperborean sorcery.

This story really is nearly faultless. An eldritch monster falls out of the skies into fourteenth century France (or rather Ashton Smith's fantasy variant of it), terrorises a monastery and its show more environs and is defeated by a master sorcerer who gets (in effect) immunity from prosecution.

Three documents - a deposition, a letter and a second deposition (the last by the sorcerer himself to future history) - tell the tale but what makes the story so good is Ashton Smith's care in trying to reproduce how medieval Christians might interpret such alien eldritch horror.

The effect is to create a rather clever switch from Lovecraft's scientific explanations of such horrors into one based in a world of demons - same phenomenon, different explanatory perspectives. The science is not so much lost as transmuted into sorcery.

Well written as usual, Ashton Smith is introducing a rather interesting idea - the thing we try to understand remains the same thing whether we look on it clinically and objectively or in terms of faith. The monster's destruction requires a use of sorcery that is also forgotten science.

Sorcery and science to Ashton Smith seem to be morally neutral in themselves. Evil and good sorcerers (the latter as in this story) appear in his medieval Averoigne just as we have the evil scientific murderer in the twentieth century of 'Murder in the Fourth Dimension'.

The obvious observation is that Ashton Smith places the good and evil implicit or explicit in horror and fantasy outside mere technique. What he tends to contrast are value systems where pagan magic, Christian virtue and modern reason compete for our attention as explanations.

But if technique has no virtue and explanations are equally valid for the great questions of existence beyond the normal (the supernatural) then, so fantasy and horror imply, inadequate (undiscovered) science continues to leave open possible explanations based on ideas of demons and ancient gods.

Fantasy and horror point out the imaginative possibility of alternatives to reason that can enchant or frighten us in the spaces where science seems to explain everything but where the unexplained can break out to remind us of the possibility that science may not yet have covered every base.

Today, very few actually believe in magic or the existence of alien elder gods (let alone Mu, Lemuria and Atlantis) and probably rightly so but perhaps, beyond our different explanations, something 'eldritch' that requires explanation does lurk out there ... to enchant and frighten us. show less