Aloha Tantalus,
Many thanks for the kind words about my prose poem and short story. Wish I could take credit for having created them intellectually but they just grew inside me, struggling to get out, two among many cathartic devices that helped channel the pent up desire, anger, loathing, frustration and hope of my dissolving marriage into something nondestructive. Upon my release by an amicable divorce six years ago, that darkness and pain evaporated. Without that bottomless well of dark emotion twisting inside, the urge to transform passion into weird CAS-style literature ebbed. The quality of the few original works I've scrawled since aren't fit to be posted on a site like The Eldritch Dark. Much of my on-line writing is devoted to a Stephen R Donaldson tribute site at [
theland.antgear.com] ... in which I give mad props to CAS and a few other old-timey stellar fantasy authors.
Clark Ashton Smith's literary works outshine mine, embarrassingly so. Perhaps the best thing I managed was to write my pieces, then go back and replace half of the arcane words with normal ones to keep from overdoing it. Probably still went overboard, but I'm glad you liked the results.
The argument could be made, and I would regrettably adhere to it, that the world will never again be graced by a fantasy author of Clark Ashton Smith's caliber. There is something antithetical about top-drawer weird writing and today's modern society equipped as it is with instant gratification, word processing machines, and profit-driven demands for bloated trilogies, tetralogies or Dragonlance-style neverending-logies. My two lowly works were written during anguished nights, my teeth grinding in a turmoil of emotions with a pencil shaking to get the burning words out of my body and onto the paper. Every fantasy piece of the past fifteen years reads -- in my opinion -- as if someone sat down during business hours in front of a computer (probably a Windows PC) and said "I'm going to write a highly lucrative series of novels about ... hmm ... well shit, how hard could it be to churn out some Tolkien-style boilerplate?" Characters seem derived from Central Casting and the works are heavily edited with the sole purpose of extending the series as long as possible to milk every last dime. These days we know everything, we see everything instantly, we have access to everything all the time and there are no more dark, secretive places of wonder and mystery. And thus genuinely weird fantasies elude us.
Clark Ashton Smith wrote because he was gripped internally with turbulent, disturbing, evocative visions that poured from his pencil to paper in great ecstasies of fear and dread and delight. If I remember rightly, he grew up in boring rural settings and taught himself to read with the aid of a voluminous dictionary. He had no TV or Internet to occupy his mind thus his subconscious conjured up eldritch fantasies. Robert E Howard flourished under similar circumstances. Smith had contemporaries in the field to inspire him and correspond with to enrich his creative juices, and editors willing to publish small circulations of something they genuinely enjoyed without trying to strong-arm him to alter it for a mass audience. Will another young boy or girl with CAS' mental abilities be born into similar circumstances? I hope so, but after repeated disappointments my faith begins to wane. Barry Hughart was the last author I read who came up with a genuinely fresh fantasy idea and executed it well.
Sorry to end on that note (about a B flat). Best of luck to you in your search for Smith-caliber literary works. Mahalo,
Sandor
p.s. By coincidence your handle happens to also be the name of a twisty-turny mountain road on O'ahu. Several years ago I went trailrunning on it with a bunch of lunatics ... had a wonderful time! ;-)