The Averoigne Chronicles Books
From the vampire-cursed realm of medieval Averoigne to the time-ravaged spires of dying Zothique, the works of Clark Ashton Smith comprise a unique and imperishable legacy. A major pillar of Arkham house since 1942, Smith was a member of the Weird Tales triumvirate, including H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, who created a non-legendary golden age of American dark fantasy during the 1930s. Of these three authors, Clark Ashton Smith was the master literary sorcerer, presiding over a vast verbal apothecarium of piquant savors and precipitates. The author once defined fantastic literature as being “akin to sublime and exalted poetry, in its evocation of tremendous, non-anthropomorphic imageries,” and the stories collected herein seem to defy the capacity of the English language to render sonorous rhythms, subtle shades and nuances of meaning, awesome conjurations of exoticism and mystery. In employing his prismatic prose to erect edifices of wonder, Smith became a seminal figur
This fine collection of Clark Ashton Smith's work reprints eight of his classic fantasies, including two set in legendary Hyperborea. Think of the visions his stories conjure up as sendings, written in strange runes, transported from the sorcerer's lair by indescribable genii or winged spirits. His stories are altogether unlike anyone else's and quite wonderful, among the treasures of fantastic literature. Clark Ashton Smith was a prodigy who wrote Arabian Nights novels in his mid-teens and was heralded as a major voice in American poetry by the time he was nineteen. In one frantic burst in the middle 1930s, he wrote nearly a hundred strange, wondrous, and grotesque stories, most of which were published in Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Wonder Stories, and other pulps, but he was by no means a conventional pulp writer. A direct heir to Edgar Allan Poe and to the late Romantics and Decadents, a translator of Baudelaire, Smith wrote in baroque, jeweled prose of distant times and remote planets, of baleful magics and reanimated corpses, lost lovers, eldritch gods, and inexorable fate. He is also a writer whose works refuse to die, even after nearly a century. Think of him as the sorcerer-poet, alone in his eyrie in the dry California hills, dreaming his strange dreams and creating his unique worlds-of Zothique, the Earth's haunted last continent at the end of time, Hyperborea, a prehistoric land, Poseidonis, the last foundering isle of Atlantis, and Averoigne, an unhistoried province of medieval France, thick with vampires.
The thrice-infamous Nathaire, alchemist, astrologer and necromancer, with his ten devil-given pupils, had departed very suddenly and under circumstances of strict secrecy from the town of Vyones. It was widely thought, among the people of that vicinage, that his departure had been prompted by a salutary fear of ecclesiastical thumbscrews and faggots. Other wizards, less notorious than he, had already gone to the stake during a year of unusual inquisitory zeal; and it was well-known that Nathaire had incurred the reprobation of the Church. Few, therefore, considered the reason of his going a mystery; but the means of transit which he had employed, as well as the destination of the sorcerer and his pupils, were regarded as more than problematic. A thousand dark and superstitious rumours were abroad; and passers made the sign of the Cross when they neared the tall, gloomy house which Nathaire had built in blasphemous proximity to the great cathedral and had filled with a furniture of Satanic luxury and strangeness. Two daring thieves, who had entered the mansion when the fact of its desertion became well established, reported that much of this furniture, as well as the books and other paraphernalia of Nathaire, had seemingly departed with its owner, doubtless to the same fiery bourn. This served to augment the unholy mystery: for it was patently impossible that Nathaire and his ten apprentices, with several cart-loads of household belongings, could have passed the ever-guarded city gates in any legitimate manner without the knowledge of the custodians...