“Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.”

It says a lot about this relatively obscure author that his contemporary H.P Lovecraft was so impressed by his work that he said that Clark Ashton Smith was unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living. Poet, autodidact, and bizarre sculpture, Smith above all was an unmatched storyteller. Simply stated, no one writes like him, either before or since.  This book is a collection of his best tales and poems and allows readers to sample Smiths’ brand of sword and sorcery filled with invention, terror, and phantasmagorical wonder.

His work defies expectations, its prose is lofty with large paragraphs of elongated words, but it’s also easy to read. The tale of Stampra Zeiros kicks things off with this collection, where we journey with rogues to an abandoned jungle with the aim of looting a temple and facing off against ancient cosmic horrors. The stories are often recounted in the first person style and the events play second fiddle to the fantastic exotic scenery that the writer conjures with the power of words.

The short Story Dark Eidolon is a tale of childhood injury avenged on the scale of a big tent pole summer movie. Try not to think of the Doom video game series when you read the Vaults of Yoh-Vombis which is an all-out horror fest that will mess with your mind about an expedition on Mars that excavates an ancient settlement. The last incantation is a poetic treatise on grief and memory. The simple story concerns an elderly sorcerer bringing his lover back from the dead.

Let me just say it now. H.P Lovecraft is the writer most fondly remembered from the pulp / weird tales’ era of the 1920s and 1930s, but Smith was a better storyteller. A poet first and foremost,  His stories are a genuine joy to read. He was a member of the Lovecraft circle of writers and was in regular correspondence with both Lovecraft and Conan creator Robert E Howard. In fact, he visited both of them in person and set many of his tales in their mythological realms.

The best way to describe his work is an amalgamation of those two great titans of the genre. He is as comfortable writing Sword and sorcery in the style of Conan and just at ease writing about the existential dread that awaits humanity out there in the great gulfs of space.

Sam Rami’s Evil dead series owes a great debt to one of his tales, and even if you have never read his work. His influence on popular culture, particularly action films and video games, is everywhere. My one big complaint is that this collection does not include his excellent Empire of the Necromancers, but it still serves as a great introduction to his work. My only hope is that he will one day attain the legacy that H. P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard enjoy.