Customer Reviews

Zothique

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It's a crying shame that this volume is so unknown and so difficult to find. If you enjoy fantasy, especially dark fantasy, you should read this.

Zothique is the last known continent of a dying planet, presumably an Earth so distant that all record of our existence has been long lost, and under conditions so changed that gods haunt cities, necromancers rob the dead of their rest, and bizarre plagues fall from the stars.

Zothique is a place where bad things happen.

This collection of short stories explores the continent, and a few outlying islands, through the eyes of a simple shepherd boy, a newlywed groom, necromancers caught between cannibals and demons, and a king who's lost his hat, among myriad others. In all cases, they exist in a world where a simple misstep and bring down demonic retribution, and nobody really knows the rules, not that they'd help.

The volume begins with a single-page verse followed by sixteen short stories. It's worth noting that I rarely enjoy short stories, and I truly enjoyed this book.

And lastly, Zothique is a place where bad things happen, and while true love, genuine faith, and a sincere effort to help the innocent may go unrewarded, it just might also go unpunished, and in Zothique, that's often the best one can really hope for.

(I only paid $20 for my copy. Hunt for something less than $105, 'cos that's just ridiculous.)

I can only echo the previous reviewers in praising this grotesquely beautiful & compellingly dark volume from the legendary Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. All of Clark Ashton Smith's work is memorable for its prose, so rich as to be overripe & tending towards sticky, glistening decay; but in these stories of a far fature Earth, rotting on the last withered vine of Time before the Sun goes out forever, he surpassed himself.

If there's one word that's intoned throughout these pages, ringing as ponderously as a funeral bell, it's "Doom!" Fallen, deformed gods & demons lurk & brood everywhere; the dead are met as often as the living; and the living are frequently more hideous than the dead. It's a world of ceaseless nightmare, filled with shadows but ruthlessly illuminated by its dying Sun, which leaches the life & hope out of everything. It's also strangely erotic, in a corrupt & callous fashion -- but there's little tenderness or innocence to be found! All the passion remaining in this world is decidedly twisted.

Fortunately Smith's entire body of work has been reprinted in hardcover recently. But if you can unearth a copy of this paperback, get it & hold onto it. Both the cover art & the enthusiastic introduction by series editor Lin Carter make it worth owning -- most definitely recommended!

Dark, horrific, funny, bleak, richly jeweled and ragged in a rotting shroud.

Prayers would be out of place under Clark Ashton Smith's sinister, dying red sun, but let us cast some spell that may lead to a new edition.

Very memorable anthology of short horror/fantasy stories set in the mythical continent of Zothique. Elaborate, embellished
prose but they still retain a certain "Twilight Zone" quality.
Well worthwhile if you can find a copy of this scarce volume.

Don't even think about falling into the usual trap of comparing Smith to his contemporaries Howard and Lovecraft. There is no comparison - Smith is at least two orders of magnitude better than either. Clark Ashton Smith is the greatest pulp writer of all time, and overall the best fantasy writer America has produced, largely because he is the only one who writes genuinely literary prose. His closest competition for the title of best pulp writer is, of course, the two more famous friends of his from Weird Tales just mentioned. Certainly Lovecraft's pseudo-occultish yarns can be amusing enough, and the sheer force of R. E. Howard's vision elevates his work to a sort of workingman's Nietzchean greatness; if most pulp writers are soda pop, those guys are beer. But Smith, by contrast, is fine wine. (A different, darker, sweeter wine than the usual at that - blueberry or blackberry, perhaps).

Smith, indeed, is too good to be classed with the pulp writers, because he has the depth and richness that only artistry, not commerce, can aspire to. A more legitimate comparison would be Jack Vance, Smith's only competition as America's greatest fantasist, and as a crafter of prose. Vance was imitating Smith in his first masterwork (The Dying Earth) but afterwards became primarily a novelist. Smith wrote only short stories, and so the comparison ends there.

Of course, all of these men - pulp writers included - are better writers than anyone who has come along in the field in the last sixty years or so, because they were produced by a superior time and place. Common sense perspectives on the world taken for granted then are unpublishable now (check out the letters written by the Weird Tales guys to each other and other writers and you will enter a politically incorrect time warp of men speaking normal truths that were once taken for granted by informed people). Real writing has since been replaced by kindergarten prose. The decline of Western civilization is accelerating towards its terminal point and good fiction is now nearly impossible. (Just look, as an example, to the silly complaints some other authors and reviewers have towards Smith in the intros to some of his books and on the main website devoted to his works - even people that like Smith tend to like what is least in him and despise what is best. No matter- he will certainly outlast them all.)

Writers of that ilk, and other low-level readers, who like ittle-bitty words and sentences in the modernist, Hemingway style, and who like being spoon fed conventional ideas, plots and characters, will find little to entertain them in Smith. As usual, that's why Smith is so overlooked; his work demands more than modern readers can give (though granted his work was too elite for the hoi polloi even in the thirties, in the last gasp of real civilization - hence the relative popularity of Howard and Lovecraft, so decidedly third rate compared to Smith). Unlike the laughable horrors of Lovecraft or the simple historical adventures of Howard, Smith's work is dark phantasmagoria, written in an elevated language and style which demands concentration, imagination and participation from the reader, not the passive acceptance of emotional manipulation that makes for bestsellers.

If you are among those few who still know what a book is for, rejoice - you just discovered a true hidden gem, in one of the last places you might have expected to find it. As I have become reacquainted with his works my appreciation of Smith has only grown greater. It might be true that he was inspired somewhat by Dunsany, just as he himself is the inspiration of Vance, but while my intellect rejects it, my heart knows that Smith, in the ways that count most, surpasses even Dunsany. Smith's consciousness roamed where it would, unbound by mortal considerations, and his work as a result has a remote, objective spirituality and a consistency of invention that even the great Irish baron cannot match. Most importantly, unlike Dunsany the quality of Smith's work never let up. He has seven great stories to every one that Dunsany (or Borges, for that matter) ever wrote. Personally I have come to rank Smith behind only E. R. Eddison, but in his subgenre of weird, short, heroic science fantasy he is unsurpassed. Given the times we live in he will likely remain so forever.

This is surely one of the finest collections of weird fiction ever written. You won't find any happy endings in these stories, unless you are a ghoul who sides with the bad guys. Smith was really a genius. He should be better known.