Customer Reviews

The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith

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Clark Ashton Smith, along with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, was considered one of the three great authors who wrote for Weird Tales in the 1930's. This collection reprints 18 of Smith's best stories for that magazine and other publications of the period. While Howard and Lovecraft have been reprinted innumerable times, Smith has been mostly forgotten or published in expensive hardcover collections aimed at the hard-core collector. This edition from Prime Books contains a great sampling of Smith's work and an introduction by noted SF/fantasy author, Gene Wolfe. It's edited by life-long Smith fan and weird fiction expert, Robert Weinberg (me). And it's priced right, available from Amazon.com for little more than $10.00.

It's hard to single out any one story as being the star of this collection as all of the stories in the book are top notch. Still, "The City of the Singing Flame" is hard to match as a science-fantasy classic. This novelet is one of Smith's masterpieces and is one of the finest and most imaginative stories ever written. I read "City" fifty years ago, when I was thirteen years old, and I still remember every detail of the story today. Having read thousands of fantasy and science fiction stories, and having edited over a hundred books in the field, I consider "The City of the Singing Flame" one of the four or five best science-fantasy stories I ever had the pleasure of reading.

Nearly entertaining, but evoking an entirely different mood, is "The Isle of the Torturers." The last line of this finely written story is worth the price of the book alone. Smith was a writer with a diabolical sense of humor and a taste for the ironic and this story delivers.

This book is a treasure. If you never have read Clark Ashton Smith, this collection will serve as a good introduction to a great fantasy author. Buy it. Read it. You won't be disappointed.

Oh, boy, kiddies. This is a good one. Any "best of" collection of Clark Ashton Smith's writing that's deserving of the title (and this one is, very much so) is going to be a veritable embarassment of riches for those who are predisposed to enjoy his work, so it's difficult to know where to start. Perhaps it's best to give the potential reader a small sample of Smith's prose, if for no other reason to than to make it clear (to name another great literary Californian) that we're not hanging out with John Steinbeck in Salinas here. To that end, here's a brief excerpt from "The Dark Eidolon" (one of my favorite stories in the collection), in which the wizard Namirrha casts a spell of apocalyptic doom on the country of Xylac:

"Instantly, it seemed that great ebon clouds of thunder beetled against the sun. Lining the horizon, the clouds took the form of colossal monsters with heads and members somewhat resembling those of stallions. Rearing terribly, they trod down the sun like an extinguished ember; and racing as if in some hippodrome of Titans, they rose higher and vaster, coming towards Ummaos. Deep, calamitous rumblings preceded them, and the earth shook visibly, till Zotulla saw that these were not immaterial clouds, but actual living forms that had come forth to tread the world in macrocosmic vastness. Throwing their shadows for many leagues before them, the coursers charged as if devil-ridden into Xylac, and their feet descended like falling mountain crags upon far oases and towns of the outer wastes."

You probably had one of two reactions upon reading the above passage. If your favorite reading matter is the short stories published in The New Yorker, I'm guessing your reaction was something along the lines of, "Ugh! I'll have to mark HIM down as a must to avoid!" However, if you're like me and are open to styles that are, shall we say, a bit more gothic and/or baroque than those preferred by your average John Updike fan (I mean no disrespect, by the way - I like his work, too), you might very well say, as I did, "Wow! This is it. This is the guy I've been looking for my whole life."

(Incidentally, I think that's how it often is with a writer like Smith. He's certainly not a writer who appeals to all tastes - unsuprisingly, as this was hardly his intention.)

Anyway, if you fall into the latter group and you get your hands on this volume, you are, as they say, in for a real treat. This is a really great collection that will give you hours of delight. (It'll also give you a chance to give your favorite dictionary a run for its money - Smith had an enormous vocabulary of esoteric words that he was unafraid to employ at will.) I sincerely hope you find the kind of joy in Smith's weird literary wizardry that I have.

Purple-grassed dimensions of wonder... burnt-out post-apocalyptic worlds of sorcery... dismal fog infested towns of misery... nightmarish kingdoms of necromancy... France... these are some of the surreal and mind-bendingly weird realms that you will journey to in this book, with Clark Ashton Smith as your guide. Smith was indeed a wordsmith like no other, as the other reviews on this page will attest. In a typical CAS story, plot and characterization are almost secondary to beauty of language and sheer, raw emotion and imagination. This makes him very different from most modern writers and a refreshing change of pace for the reader (like me) who has become bored with bland prose and authors with only a rudimentary grasp of the English Language. It is a shame that he is virtually unknown to the average horror or fantasy reader. Hopefully this collection can help change that.

"Return of the Sorcerer" is presented as a definitive collection of Smith's best short stories, but I have some qualms about this. Some of the weird tales herein are, I believe, amongst the best Smith ever wrote ("The Dark Eidolon" is my personal favorite). Some however - such as "The Disinterment of Venus" - are slight in comparison and puzzle me as to the reason for their inclusion. In the end, I think that "Return of the Sorcerer" works better as a general introduction than a true "best of" collection. The stories here are good reading for the first time Smith reader and will give them a good idea of what the author is all about.

Another quibble I have with this book is that a few typos made it past the editors before printing - "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" containing the most examples. First, the header for every page in the story says "The *Vaunts* of Yoh-Vombis." Oops. Much more egregious though is the error made on page 85 with "We heard a measured and recurrent clangor as we neared the place" presented as "Weheardameasuredandrecurrentclangoraswenearedtheplace." I had no idea that Clark Ashton Smith preferred to write sentences in the ancient Roman style. I half expected to find u's written as v's.

Minor grumbling aside, this is a good introduction to Clark Ashton Smith. Even though it is missing some of my favorite stories (where's "The Abominations of Yondo?") and there are typos, most of the tales are winners and Smith's language shines through well enough. If you enjoy horror, dark fantasy or science fiction you should pick this up. If the thought of being transported to fantastic worlds both delightful and horrifying appeals to you, definitely pick this up - no one could invent worlds like Clark Ashton Smith.

For years I've heard the name Clark Ashton Smith and never even knew anything about the author. When I finally found this collection I snatched it up. It's been on my bedside table for the past two weeks and I'm MAKING a point to get to bed early so I can read it. The stories are amazing, creepy, and just what I needed for this Halloween season (you can only read so much Lovecraft and Poe). So glad I bought this and I highly recommend it for early 20th century sci-fi and horror fans. Can't wait for the end of the book and the Averoigne stories (inspiration for the D&D module Castle Amber (Chateau d' Amberville Dungeons & Dragons Module X2))!