More Smith, and Other Stuff

So, after completing last night's post, and checking some stuff online, I managed to find a halfway reasonably priced copy of ELEGANT NIGHTMARES on abebooks.com. And it's mine, MINE, I tell you! The next-cheapest is $60 and it's all uphill from there. Check your library system.

Done some more reading of Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories, dark and decadent tales of a dying Earth hundreds of thousands of years in the future, when civilization is falling apart and sorcery has been rediscovered.



"Necromancy in Naat" is the tale of nomad prince Yadar, who seeks his kidnapped lady-love Dalili, taken by slave-traders. This starts off as a fairly normal sword-n-sorcery tale, with a hero on a quest to seek his lost love, and going to the forbidden island of Naat (home of necromancers) in search of her. Of course, this being Smith, it all ends badly; Dalili is on Naat, but as a zombie slave of an unsavory necromancer and his two sons. There's some cool sorcery and violence, and a dark ending that comes across as a very sardonic joke. Sometimes the everlasting love we seek can be almost a curse....

"Empire of the Necromancers" gives us two natives of Naat who go farther afield in search of power. They end up in a kingdom destroyed by plague and corpse by corpse, raise the deceased inhabitants and crown themselves as rulers of an undead empire. Smith gets even more perverse with this one; we're specifically told that the two necromancers are also necrophiles, using some of the better-preserved female corpses for carnal purposes. Their undoing comes at the hands of some zombies who retain a glimmber of their former intelligence. The tale ends with a gruesome punishment that seems almost too much, but with Smith, it all seems part of a dark joke.

"Master of the Crabs," which I finished on the bus heading home from work, is unusual for being a first-person narrative, which Smith rarely does. The third-person viewpoint allows for more arch and sardonic commentary. It's also a lesser tale, pretty much a sword-n-sorcery adventure of competing wizards going after a pirate treasure on a cursed island. It's almost like a decadent version of a Conan story.

There's still more to go in this volume, and I'll continue to take it bit by bit. There are two stories in here that I've read several times, and loved, and if they still hold up I'll put them in the Required Reading list. Yes, they're that good. But I'm not going to tell you which ones now, so stay tuned.