E. Hoffman Price

The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith

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It seems to be a time of wrapping up reading projects. With this, I’ve read – if not reviewed – all of Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction except for his juvenile novel The Black Diamonds.

Review: The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith, eds. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, 2011.

Cover by Jason Van Hollander

Obviously, with a title like that, you’re not going to get a lot of top of the line Clark Ashton Smith fiction here. For that, you need to get Night Shade Books’ five volume set of his stories. (I’ve reviewed volumes 1, 2, 4, and 5.) But, if you’re a Smith completist or even just a fan like me, you will want this book. Not only does it have reprints of rare Smith items, but it also prints, for the first time, several of his works.

Editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger’s able “Foreword” has several surprises.  It seems “The Abominations of Yondo” in 1925 was not Smith’s first published fiction or even his first fantastic fiction. It also gives a reason why Smith stopped submitting stories to Weird Tales magazine. It changed ownership in 1938, and, in an interview, the new owner, William J. Delaney, said he didn’t want “nasty” stories that left a “sickish feeling in the reader”, and no more stories where characters spent a lot of time talking in “French, German, Latin, etc”. Now, he may have been thinking of Smith for the “nasty” stories (the interviewer thinks Delaney was thinking of Smith’s “The Coming of the White Worm”), but I’m pretty sure it was Smith he was thinking of in the third banned category: “stories wherein the reader must constantly consult an unabridged dictionary”.

It seems that Smith eventually entered into a partnership with E. Hoffman Price. Smith would provide one of his unpublished manuscripts, and Price would modify it, and they would split the sales proceeds with Price taking two-thirds.

Donald Sidney-Fryer is the closest thing we have to a literary biographer of Smith as well as compiling bibliographies on Smith. He actually met Smith in 1958 and remained Smith’s friend until his death in 1961. His “Introduction: The Sorcerer Departs” was written in 1963 since Sidney-Fryer was worried Smith would be forgotten. This is the third reprinting of it since then.

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Before … 12:01 … and After

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We’re back to the Fedogan & Bremer series.

Raw Feed (2005): Before … 12:01 … and After, Richard A. Lupoff, 1996.before-1201

“Foreword: About Dick Lupoff“, Robert Silverberg — Silverberg talks about how singularly unlucky his friend Lupoff is in his relationships with publishers; several of them collapsed right after or right before publishing work they bought from Lupoff. Silverberg also disputes the notion that Lupoff, known for his many pastiches, is a “hitchhiker on the creativity of other and greater artists”. His pastiches are, he says, complex experiments and his non-pastiche is greatly varied in style and theme.

“Introduction: How I Learned to Read” — Lupoff provides an autobiographical account of his life with accounts of his days writing for radio, in the US Army, working as a technical writer in the computer industry, a fan magazine writer and publisher (with his wife), and an account of his fiction career.

“Mr. Greene and the Monster” — Lupoff’s earliest story that he has record of. It’s a slight tale of a part-time sf writer being transported back into a simpler, pulpier time more in keeping with his style. He sells a story to one “Hugo Burnsback”. The story ends with the story disappearing from the magazine it is to be in. Probably more of an ironic joke than a rumination on temporal censorship. Continue reading →

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1

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Another retro review, from December 9, 2005.

When it appeared on Amazon, weird fiction author Wilum Pugmire rightly chastised me for making a mistake about J. Vernon Shea not being an acquaintance of Lovecraft. He, in fact, corresponded with him. I’ve corrected that mistake here.

Review: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1, August Derleth, 1971.Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

All the authors in this book were personal friends or correspondents of H. P. Lovecraft. Several are distinguished authors in their own right. One, Clark Ashton Smith, could arguably be said to have made some fine contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. But, apart from Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos“, none of this collection’s stories are worth reading on their own merits.

It was Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” which gave the Mythos its name. While not Lovecraft’s personal best, it is certainly one of the central Mythos stories. It has held up well after more than 60 years. That can not be said for many of his imitators. As this collection shows, there’s some alchemy at work in Lovecraft’s prose beyond the characteristic plot structures and adjectives, the props of gods/ETs and forbidden books, a power based in a carefully constructed paranoia with a decided scientific air about it — and not reworked mythology.

The worse offender here is the editor, personal friend, and arguable savior of Lovecraft’s reputation: August Derleth. Continue reading →