by Clark Ashton Smith (1880)
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Imagine standing amid the crumbling spires of Zothique, the last continent of a dying Earth, where the sun hangs bloated and red like a festering wound in the sky. A caravan of desperate merchants trudges through shadow-haunted deserts, only to stumble into the lair of Thasaidon, god of evil, whose tentacles writhe from porphyry walls. That’s the pulse of Clark Ashton Smith’s The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies—a collection that drags you into worlds where beauty and decay entwine like lovers in a poisoned garden.
You feel it first in “The Dark Eidolon,” where the sorcerer Narthos, scarred by a childhood glimpse of his father’s murder, unleashes a colossal shadow-demon that devours cities in vengeful ecstasy. The prose crashes over you like opulent waves: jewels gleam with unholy fire, mummies stir with leering grins, and Hyperborea’s ice-bound wastes echo with the howls of Tsathoggua, that squat, toad-like horror slithering from Cyclopean ruins. Reading Smith is to drown in sensory overload—the cloying perfume of necromantic blooms, the chill of Averoigne’s werewolf-haunted forests where Brother Ambrose battles vampiric succubi under Gothic moons. It’s dread laced with rapture, every sentence a baroque jewel that slows your breath and quickens your pulse.
What sets Smith apart in the Weird Tales crowd? While Lovecraft whispers of cosmic insignificance and Howard swings steel through barbaric fury, Smith paints with a decadent brush—his fantasies luxuriate in the grotesque, turning pulp sorcery into poetry that lingers like absinthe on the tongue. No lean narratives here; his dying earths pulse with mythic weight, from the mammoth-riders of Hyperborea clashing against serpent cults to Zothique’s undead emperors scheming in ossuary palaces. This volume, deftly assembled by S.T. Joshi, gathers the best of his cycles into one intoxicating gateway, Penguin Classics finally crowning him beside his peers.
If you devoured Gene Wolfe’s far-future myths or Jack Vance’s Dying Earth extravagance, craving that same blend of swordplay, sorcery, and sublime weirdness, this is your next obsession—Smith outshines them with prose that feels alive, almost malevolent.
Crack it open tonight, and let Zothique’s shadows claim you before dawn.
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