I'm just going to mention my favorites in this short story collection.

The Return of the Sorcerer - I can appreciate that this came before some of my favorite horror films, Evil Dead, Lord of Illusions, but I'm stunned to see how many themes and tropes have carried over the years to be embedded so firmly in our horrific psyche. This story is rife with oblivious misunderstandings, but who cares... it's supposed to play upon our greatest horrific imaginings, and if it is heavy, it can be excused because it is a short story. It's also from 1931. It feels pretty damn modern, though. Kudos!

The City of the Singing Flame - So pretty. Missing that taste of other worlds and strange creatures in an alternate reality, full of huge moths, pilgrims in an occult dimension, and an awe-some fraternity of inconceivable life and mind? This is such a pretty story of discovery and sight-seeing. Once more into the flame!

There's a lot of tales that feature necromancy and devils and other kinds of dark gifts. Pretty decent, and even rather modern in flavor, so I'm rather surprised that it came out so long ago.

They ARE very hammy, though, and quite amusingly so, but nothing more deep than, say, a D&D game or one of those EVIL B-Movies of yore. EVIL! EVIL! lol

The Dark Eidolon - This one was probably the most turgid prose I've ever read. Yes, Turgid. Like the biggest glowing evil member of fallen humanity and dark gods. It says a lot that the least evil character is the ancient emperor seeking immortality through necromancy is the most innocent among them. :)

Very b-movie stuff. So much necromancy, so much EVIL! Pretty fantastic, all told, but only if you're a fan of the horror. No suspense, really. Just outright, unhidden, horror. :) ( )

Very good material and it makes me want to make a glossary of great adjectives long fallen from the lexicon that are still less turgid than those used by HPL. ( )

Here are a group of stories by an overlooked master of the science fiction, fantasy and horror fields.

First published in the 1930s, the unearthly beings in these stories are not just denizens of Hell; they come from someplace worse than Hell. Some of these stories take place in the present day. Other stories take place in the distant past, in an era of amazing cities. Still others take place on impossible worlds in some other universe.

Those who are not horror fans need not be concerned; the horror in these tales is not overwhelming. For those who are fantasy or horror fans, and have never read Clark Ashton Smith, you are in for a huge treat. This is a wonderful place to start. Few writers can reach the level of poetry in their fiction; Smith does it. ( )

Like C.L. Moore, whose Jirel of Jory stories I read recently, Clark Ashton Smith was a pulp author writing during roughly the first half of the twentieth century; in fact, he was, besides Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, one of the mainstays of Weird Tales. He is markedly lesser known and (supposedly) read than the others today, but not necessarily a worse writer for that; in many aspects I would even consider him the most interesting of the three.

For one thing, he is the most varied in both subject matter and style – while Lovecraft is something of a one-trick pony, and Howard’s stories, while thematically more diverse, are all written in a very similar tone, this Best Of collection presents us with stories that range from elegic prose poems to gruesome horror fiction, from satirical allegories to whimsical fantasy stories, and while Smith’s unique style is present in all of those, they are also markedly different from each other.

As an aside, this collection, like the one by C.L. Moore before, gave me occasion to marvel at how much the concept of pulp seems to have changed over the last century – today, ‘pulp’ tends to evoke (at least it does for me) fast, sleazy action; and while there might be some degree of sleaziness in Moore and Smith it’s rather subdued (although I seem to remember reqading somewhere that Smith’s stories were toned down for publication in Weird Tales and were much more overly sexual in their unedited versions), their stories are anything but fast-moving, they’re mostly very slow, detailed and colourful descriptions of fantastic landscapes, the kind one would imagine a modern-day reader to get bored with before the end of the first serpentine-syntaxed period of purple prose winds to its end. There are only a few stories of pure description in this collection though, and I thought those were rather the weakest ones in the lot – Moore’s descriptions were for a great part carried by sheer passion, both of her writing and her heroine, and with Smith favouring a detached narrative point of view, his long descriptive passages tend to come across as static and somewhat lifeless.

Another major difference is that in Smith’s work, at least in so far as it is represented in this collection, the racism that is a problem in Howard’s and a major stumbling block in Lovecraft’s oeuvre seems to be refreshingly absent – no subhuman blacks or devious Asians populate these stories,. And finally, Smith actually has a sense of humour, something that Howard and Lovecraft are very much lacking in. And not just in the explicitely humorous stories, either: Apparently, Smith saw himself mainy as a poet, and wrote for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines only in order to make some money. The earlier stories in this collection, those written at around 1931-32 are still mostly serious affairs, and clearly influenced by French decadent and symbolist poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Mallarmé; but starting in 1933, Smiths seems to have moved away from his mostly static prose poems towards more dynamic, narrative structures, while at the same time never quite making his peace with the form. As a result, there is a different kind of detachment creeping into the later stories – not the impassibilité of the symbolist poet who stand aloof from the mundane world, but rather the wry amusement of a narrator who can’t quite believe that he is doing something as silly as, you know, telling a story, of all things.

That latter trait is something he shares with one of my favourite SFF authors, namely Jack Vance, and as Smith also has a distinct penchant for thinking up weird names and does appear to be the inventor of the “Dying Earth” sub-genre, I feel inclined to disagree with Gene Wolfe in his foreword to this collection, when he insists on Smith’s uniqueness – while he certainly was not as influential as Howard or Lovecraft, I for one am seeing a strong influence (conscious or not) on Vance’s work.

In lesser hands, this constant distancing of the stories from themselves might have seriously undercut the tone of the stories, but Clark Ashton Smith it serves to heighten the sense of the weird and bizarre, and together with his sometimes outlandish vocabulary (I was glad I read this book on the Kindle and was hence able to look the words easily – except that even the integrated dictionary did not know all of them) bestow on them a kind of out-of-this-world quality, turns them into something akin to the hashish-induced visions Smith so often evokes, something almost hallucinatory and always just eluding the reader’s grasp.

A nice collection of short stories by a master of the weird who is far more obscure than he deserves to be.

One may quibble with some of the inclusions and exclusions here - "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" surely belongs in any best of CAS collection - but it's a good introduction to CAS's prose work, ranging from horror to Dunsanian fancy, and sampling the various setting-based "cycles" (Hyperborea, Averoigne, etc). ( )