Re: Homage to CAS
Posted by:
wilum pugmire (IP Logged)
Date: 5 May, 2014 04:04PM
Has anyone here read THE LAST CONTINENT--NEW TALES OF ZOTHIQUE. I never got it, and now rue that I didn't pick up the copy I saw for sale at the University Bookstore. Copies on Amazon are so expensive, and yet the book seems to have a very good reputation. I remember when I was first seeing Jessica Salmonson and she read me "Hode of the High Place," and I was absolutely enchanted. It would be wonderful if I cou'd somehow be convinced that the book is worth the steep price being asked at Amazon (where all of ye reviews are quite positive).
One homage to CAS that I have started to reread is THE BOOK OF EIBON, edited by Robert M. Price for Chaosium. I began to read the book when I first got it, years ago, but for some reason couldn't get into it; and then I heard, from some Smith fen, that the book was rather awful, so I never went back to finish it. It's a thick volume of almoft 400 pages. I think the one thing that really turned me off about the book were the fragments that were to be arcane formula from Livre d'Eibon, and I found all of this stuff pointless and boring. But glancing through its pages nigh, I see that many of these items are in the form of poetry and are written by some of the genre's finest poets--Richard L. Tierney, Michael Fatina, Ann K. Schwader and Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. Perhaps the bad rep of the book came from such a huge portion of it being written by Lin Carter, and yet I enjoy his Mythos work for its atmosphere of fanboy fun and its enthusiasm. Another dubious aspect of the book is what appears to be unfinish'd stories by CAS that have been completed by others, and my inner gut feeling that such completions cannot do justice to original Clark Ashton Smith.
Books of homage to CAS may nigh escalate if such fans are inspir'd by the new collection from Penguin Classics, which will undoubtedly introduce the writings of Smith to hundreds of new potential fans.
"I'm a little girl."
--H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.