Had a few spare credits rattling around, so I picked up some Clark Ashton Smith short stories on Audible. The kind of thing you half expect to be narrated by Vincent Price in a velvet smoking jacket.
Classic sword & sorcery from the ’30s, steeped in gothic horror and that peculiar flavour of decadent doom.
Take The Charnel God, for example: we’re off to the cheerily named city of Zul-Bha-Sair, where the dead are the property of the god Mordiggian, and a young man attempts to rescue his wife from being prematurely “collected.” A sort of Hyborian Age Weekend at Bernie’s.
In related omens, an illustrated hardback of the entire Zothique cycle just happens to be on Kickstarter. Either it’s fate, or the simulation knows me too well.
Unless I am ensorcelled by some necromantic doom, cast adrift upon the black seas of Zothique, or undone by a sorcerer’s curse, this project shall likewise reach you as promised. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marmax/zothique
The audio books are very short and hardly worth the money but.. it’s marvellous listening to the spooky other worldly drama — some words you won’t even recognise but the dying earth vibe!
I honestly think his poetry where it’s at. It’s totally unique; it’s best described as cosmic romanticism. His prose poetry especially is completely trippy and amazing. I heard he considered himself a poet first and write in the pulps to pay his parents medical bills and support himself.
I discovered SF back in my early teens (perhaps, like most of us). This was way back in the early 70s, when I happened upon a small anthology of SF called Time To Come. It blew me away, and fifty years later, I’m still a voracious SF reader. I mention this because one of the stories in the anthology was “Phoenix” by Clark Ashton Smith, making him one of the first SF writers I ever encountered. I will have to dig out my copy of the book (I’d lost it, but then years later found a copy in a used book store [who knows, maybe it was my copy]) but I did find the story posted online here.
All the stories in it were new, not reprints, so I imagine Derleth commissioned them. This is the edition I had read:
I just saw the super cool cover for the CAS Kickstarter yesterday and his work peaked my interest. Has anyone read “Zothique”? I’m not going to back the project but I’d check this out from the library if it’s considered some of his good stuff!
Zothique is a strange and sumptuous collection of sword and sorcery short stories originally published in the pulps of the 1930s. There have been a few collected editions over the years – this Kickstarter is a modern, illustrated edition.
Zothique is part of the Dying Earth sub-genre, unfolding at the twilight of human civilisation. Necromancers, ancient gods, and crumbling empires all jostle for a few last gasps of relevance. CAS writes with an old-world cadence that’s poetic, archaic, and frequently unsavoury. An acquired taste, some say. Or best taken in small, necromantic doses!
Or perhaps, like me, you just love that sort of thing
Many of the stories are available online if you want a taste:
PS. It’s also fun to listen to the dramatised audio versions of these stories – short, spooky and atmospheric.
