More views of Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories:
"The Death of Ilalotha." OK, by this time it's getting clear that a hallmark of the Zothique stories is necrophilia. We have a man being torn between a living lover and a dead one...and we're told that they even played at necrophilia while she was alive. Of course, her witchcraft draws her to him even after death. There's a great, grotesque ending to this story, when even in the face of death, dissolution, and demonic transformation, his love for her is still intense. And it's not just sex and death being connected, but love and death. Quite a few of Smith's stories have lovers united in death...or semi-death.
"The Weaver in the Vault" has lovely, voluptuous language, but ultimately is a dark sword-and-sorcery tale. It could almost be a Conan story, although it would have a very different ending. The descriptions of the forgotten vaults beneath an abandoned city are terrific, the sort of thing that would make for a great D&D game.
"The Witchcraft of Ulua" has more twisted sexuality. A lustful libertine princess sets her sights on a young courtier, but when he rejects her advances (he appears to have little interest in carnal matters, a born scholar), she sends him nightmares and images of dead and decaying women coming to his bed. He eventually seeks the aid of a relative who's a powerful sorcerer. This is almost...almost...a moral tale. Almost.
"The Charnel God" is another innocent-lovers-in-peril story. A young couple is in a remote city when the wife falls victim to a cataleptic fit. The locals, assuming she's dead, enforce the local law that all corpses be taken to the temple of the death-god Mordiggian. Simultaneously, a beautiful young noblewoman, freshly dead, is also being taken to the temple, where a local necromancer wants to raise her for...well...take a guess. There's an interesting conclusion, a rare happy-ish ending, with a hint that even Zothique's dark gods have a sense of honor.
In between that, I've been reading Peter Abrahams' thriller OBLIVION.
It's actually quite a good novel, the story of private eye Nick Petrov, who has a high-profile serial killer case under his belt, and is hired to track down a missing teenager. He suspects something's wrong, and starts following clues, when he's stricken with severe headaches, mood swings, and erratic behavior. He wakes weeks later in the hospital, having undergone emergency brain surgery to relieve pressure on an artery, and is facing the fact that he's got a severe brain tumor that could very well kill him. Worse yet, he has no memory of the case he was investigating and must piece the clues back together. This ends up meaning he has to revisit the serial killer case that gave him his fame, as aspects of it aren't adding up. The plot's good enough, but the treatment of the hero's health and his confrontation with his mortality is sensitively handled, and his suffering through the problems resulting from the surgery make for a good character arc. His personality changes after his health crisis, and Abrahams clevely indicates this by referring to him as "Petrov" pre-crisis and "Nick" post-crisis. I've never read Abrahams before and he's got good notices, from folks like Joyce Carol Oates, so he's probably worth checking out. Although he's not as gothic and baroque as the usual stuff I read...
And finally...
Cabaret is part of the Dust & Corruption aesthetic, and my latest excursion into the Capital Fringe Festival was a show called "Psycho Cabaret," put together by the DC Cabaret Network. Now, the title would make you think of something really dark and twisted....but it wasn't, really. It was a good show, though. Great songs by some great singers, often very funny.
The highlight for me was Lonny Smith's singing of Kait Kerrigan & Brian Lowdermilk's "Run Away with Me" (from the show "The Unauthorized Biography of Samantha Brown"), which wasn't comedic but a song full of yearning and a note of disappointment at the end that got me a little choked up. Yes, even in my cynical old age I can get choked up by a show tune. Go figure.
So that's all for tonight...there may be more tomorrow or Saturday...
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