Amazon.co.uk Review
The Emperor of Dreams is an intelligently put together collection of the short stories of Clark Ashton Smith, one of the most interesting of the group of fantasy writers who congregated around the magazine Weird Tales in the 1930s. Like his correspondent and friend Lovecraft, Smith was hugely influenced by the fantasies and horror stories of Lord Dunsany, from whom he learned to make dream landscapes seem coherent and to pepper his stories with whimsically polysyllabic names like Thasaidon and Moriggian. Smith's fiction is as ironic as Dunsany's, but distinctly more pessimistic; characters he likes, on the whole, are likely to die only slightly less horribly than the covetous or callous. These are stories whose human characters live on the sufferance of more powerful entities whom they are perpetually offending, almost without meaning to. The mundane world whose jewels and scents and bright flowers Smith portrays, in a prose that frequently heads off in the direction of the purple, is a thin skin over realms of vertiginous emptiness and nightmare. These are stories with a tremendous influence on the fantasy-fiction that followed them--they are an acquired taste which many love passionately. --Roz Kaveney
Product Description
From the vampire-haunted alleyways of mediaeval Averoigne to the shining spires of dying Zothique, Clark Ashton Smith weaves his literary sorcery, transporting us to forgotten realms of necromancies and nightmares, lost worlds and other dimensions. In the enchanted regions of Hyperborea, Atlantis and Xiccarph, encounter malefic magic and demonic deeds beneath the last rays of a fading sun . . . For the first time ever, this volume encompasses Clark Ashton Smith's entire career as a writer. Smith virtually stopped writing stories in 1937, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, but he left behind a unique legacy of fantasy fiction which is as imaginative and decadent today as when it was first published in the pulp magazines more than half a century ago.
About the Author
Clark Ashton Smith was a poet, illustrator and sculptor, and one of the 'big three' authors - Smith, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft - to appear regularly in the legendary pulp magazine WEIRD TALES. For most of his life Smith lived in a small cabin in the woods near Auburn, California. He died at the age of 68.
