Bloch and Long had Lovecraft as a character in stories and HPL reciprocated with Bloch. Leiber mentions Smith in "Our Lady of Darkness" and has him as someone who did something in the past (along with Hammett). Has Smith appeared as an actual character in a narrative? Sometimes it's hard to tell as the story character is a composite or is only partly suggested by a real person. And I mean a character in someone else's story, not as the narrator of his own tale.

J. B. Post

The only ones which come to mind right off are:

Gahan Wilson's "H.P.L.", which you can find (if you wish) in Cthulhu 2000. It has its points, but on the whole is a sadly jumbled farrago of nonsense. Pity... some worthwhile ideas, but....

and another of the same ilk; the novel Shadow's Bend, by David Barbour and Richard Raleigh, which features all three (HPL, REH, and CAS) as characters. Again, some good points (occasionally very good), some very nice passages of writing here and there... and an awful lot of dreck. The handling of CAS is perhaps the best of the three, but that's not saying much.

The problem is that, unless the individual knew these writers, chances are they are simply going to do a very poor job of capturing their personalities, as each of them were very unique and complex; and the amount of research necessary to actually come to an understanding of them is far more than the majority of writers are willing to put in these days; it's easier going for the shorthand, "urban myth" version and researching important things, such as the details of what brands of coffee were most popular at the time, leaving us with one-dimensional parodies rather than genuine personalities when dealing with writers such as Smith, Lovecraft, Howard, et al.....

anyone interested in writing something as described in this post absolutely must talk to me in person, as there are matters known to me not in print - and this needs to be done before too terribly much longer as I am already twelve years out from a heart transplant -
Clark is mentioned in a poem of mine which took a first in the International Poetry contest of three years ago -
kind of a hokey outfit, but fun to tease, and at least get something in print -

Clark Ashton Smith appears in Marblehead, Richard Lupoff's novel about HPL. Sonia Greene, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Vincent Starrett and many other real people are also depicted.

Ken K. Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Clark Ashton Smith appears in Marblehead, Richard
> Lupoff's novel about HPL. Sonia Greene, Robert E.
> Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Vincent Starrett and
> many other real people are also depicted.

Ah, yes... I was forgetting that one. I've never read the full version, only the abridged, published as Lovecraft's Book, many years ago....

August Derleth mentions Clark Ashton Smith in his 1947 Weird Tales story “Something in Wood”, reprinted in The Mask of Cthulhu. Smith isn’t a character in the story, however- he just merely forms a part of the weird “background”. Jason Wector is a music critic who collects macabre sculptures, such as “the strange religious carvings of the Penitentes, the bas-reliefs of the Mayas, the outré sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith, …” (73) Later, after Wector is given a trans-dimensional Cthulhu carving, Derleth’s narrator wonders how, if it is so ancient, “the modern sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith bore such resemblance to it?” (75)

In another story in the same book, “The Seal of R’lyeh” (1957), Derleth will likewise allude to Robert H. Barlow’s suicide -including Barlow with Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Charles H. Fort as men who knew too much:

“And what happened to Wilmarth in the mountain country of Vermont, when he came too close to the truth in his research into the cults of the Ancient Ones? And to certain writers of what purported to be fiction-Lovecraft, Howard, Barlow-and what purported to be science-like Fort-when they came too close to the truth? Dead, all of them. Dead or missing, like Wilmarth. Dead before their time, most of them, while still comparatively young men…” (163)

I know its not as a "true" character but CAS as a painter, is mentioned by lovecraft in The Horror in the Museum:

Some were the figures of well-known myth—gorgons, chimaeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend—black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt. But the worst were wholly original with Rogers, and represented shapes which no tale of antiquity had ever dared to suggest. Several were hideous parodies on forms of organic life we know, while others seemed taken from feverish dreams of other planets and other galaxies. The wilder paintings of Clark Ashton Smith might suggest a few—but nothing could suggest the effect of poignant, loathsome terror created by their great size and fiendishly cunning workmanship, and by the diabolically clever lighting conditions under which they were exhibited.

-Jeremy