I've been an avid fan of CAS since I first discovered his writings in 1970, with the Ballantine Zothique collection. I then read each subsequent collection by Ballantine (as prepared by Carter).

With very few exceptions I liked *all* of what I read.

Then, joining this forum in about 2004, and subsequently participating, on and off, thereafter, but especially within the last 3 or so years, I came to perceive an undercurrent among some sophisticated readers that the open-ended praise that some of the participants here have written for CAS was somewhat misplaced, or even over-done.

So for a while I did not understand *why* they thought this; maybe just being conversationally contrarian--who knows?

But then I was gradually exposed to more of CAS's prose stuff than I'd ever been aware of, mainly thru references in the posts. I'd go to the "Short Stories" section of this forum and read some of these stories. Some were quite rewarding, but the majority of the new ones I read left a sort of underlying negative impression. These stories were unlike those in the Ballantine collections in terms of effective narrative "magic": that extra stuff that makes "The Coming of the White Worm" special was definitely lacking.

Then, recalling that some of the later collections contained stories that were not part of the themed collections, like Zothique, I recalled that I was encountering hints of the same decline in quality that I was seeing in some of the stories here on ED.

So, in a nutshell, the recent story introduced to me here a short time ago, "Treader of the Dust", contain within it elements I liked, a lot, and elements that were mediocre. The parts I liked had that "magic", and the other parts were none too good, in my opinion.

And here's exactly what it was...

The story starts with a short prologue taken from "The Testaments of Carnamagos"--a putative ancient source of knowledge, apparently. This immediately took me away, with that narrative magic. Then the story goes into what I'd call a very standard and cliched supernatural story that many writers do as well as, or better.

Then toward the end there's a section that starts:

"Though Quachil Uttaus cometh-but rarely,..."

which is again from the testaments, apparently, and WHAMO!--this is again magic. It's used as a denouement, but it's far, far more compelling, or at least atmospheric, than the other "normal" sections.

So that's it in a nutshell: CAS is remarkable when he's in full archaic diction mode (think "The Testament of Athammaus") but when not in that mode, he's so-so.

This then makes him a fairly narrow niche writer.

As always, my opinions only. Any comments/thoughts/opinions are welcomed.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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My feelings are comparable. The CAS stories that I love are the extravagantly fantastic ones with outlandish diction -- the ones that have Zothique, Poseidonis, Xiccarph and Hyperborea as their settings. His SF and Averroigne stuff leaves me cold, and some of the modern-day stories (I’m thinking specifically of “The Return of the Sorceror”, “The Devotee of Evil” and “Genius Loci” here) I think are plain boring and bad. The difference is so pronounced to me that I sometimes wonder whether CAS himself perceived any qualitative difference between these groups of stories.

Along similar lines, I worship Jack Vance’s fantasy stuff, love much of his SF and yet am bored to death (no pun intended) by his murder mysteries.

My experiences were slightly different from yours, but ended up in the same general direction, including our feelings toward "The Treader of the Dust."

When I started reading CAS as a teenager (via Arkham House's Lost Worlds, a generous sampling of all his cycle stories, sci-fi, and horror) he could never write a single disappointing thing to me. Everything that was wild and otherworldly was utterly artistic, supremely poetic, almost divine to my young mind. And who could blame me, I hadn't read much literature at that point and wasn't used to poetic prose.

I started feeling less impressed when I started reading more out of Weird Tales magazine, and realized that some of CAS' stories which I thought were unique were quite cliched, even for his time. And I realized these lesser stories were written with less poetry, less dynamic emotions, less of that infernal drama and Edenic beauty that can be found in stories like "The Coming of the White Worm." In some cases (like his alien adventures) he seemed to just wander idly from one scene to the next, or otherwise followed the same formulaic pattern of pseudo-scientific exposition and mandatory action scenes. In other cases (like some of his horror) he was clearly trying to build up to something, but his passages felt stifled because he was limiting his language to the expectations of the genre. Eventually a lot of his alien stories and horror stories were merged in my mind with the disappointing mass that was most of Weird Tales' output.

These days I prefer CAS' cycle stories, such as those of Zothique, Hyperborea, Averoigne, Mars, etc. Them and only a handful of stand-out non-cycle stories like "The Chain of Aforgomon", "Genius Loci", "Sadastor", etc. CAS seemed to be at home writing stories like these (though apparently "Aforgomon" gave him some hell), as they reveled much more in poetry, in dramatic tragedy, in sardonic humor, in human emotions surrounded by an otherworldly atmosphere, etc. Whereas his lesser stories felt like detached observations of events I expect from cliched sci-fi and horror, lacking the dramatic tension of greater authors of those genres like Poe or HPL.

"The Treader of the Dust" was a grand idea, but its most vivid descriptions were surrounded by pretty generic stuff. I feel it could have been more convincing if it had the dramatic tension of "Genius Loci", or if the setting was Zothique and the protagonist was some sorcerer, which seemed to excite CAS' imagination more. The Testaments of Carnamagos were mentioned in one or two Zothique stories, so it would make sense to me.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 1 May 21 | 03:10PM by Hespire.

Hespire Wrote:
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> When I started reading CAS as a teenager (via
> Arkham House's Lost Worlds, a generous sampling of
> all his cycle stories, sci-fi, and horror)

You were a very fortunate teenager. Perhaps that book was easier to come by in those days. When I got it as an adult, I had to save some money first. It is one of the three most expensive books (still somewhat worn) in my collection.

My copy of Lost Worlds previously belonged to director Curtis Harrington, and has his signature on the flyleaf. He made a film called Queen of Blood (1966), that was clearly, in part, inspired by one of the stories, "The Flower-Women", in that collection. If you look closely at one of the scenes in the film, you will notice that Smith's sentence, "Their weirdly slanted eyes, like oblong opals of dew and venom, [...], the bright, baneful scarlet of their lips, that thirsted subtly even as they sang, awoke within him the knowledge of his peril.", was translated directly onto the screen.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 8 May 21 | 05:33AM by Knygatin.

Smith's best writings are found in the early Arkham House collections. His least distinguished stories are collected particularly in Other Dimensions (Arkham House, 1970). Even if one doesn't have the Arkham House editions, the bibliography of their contents, available here on Eldritch Dark, can be used as reference. But, like Dr. Farmer said, Smith's prose is always readable.