Your opinion on Clark Ashton Smith?

[The Nomad]

Having never read any of his short stories, I wondered if other SDnetters had, and would like to share their general feeling on his style and short stories (speaking of the fantasy, not his earlier poetry). Are his short stories collections worth buying?

[Eleas]

Having never read any of his short stories, I wondered if other SDnetters had, and would like to share their general feeling on his style and short stories (speaking of the fantasy, not his earlier poetry). Are his short stories collections worth buying?

I just read City of the Singing Flame. I liked it, on the whole; it displayed a reckless love for the weird, like Lovecraft's works but without the tinge of insular xenophobia. However, his works do hammer home the point that Lovecraft's byzantine prose wasn't an oddity or a sidestep, but a literary convention of the times. In other words, the prose isn't just purple, it has passed the ultraviolet spectrum and exists as bursts of barely intelligible gamma rays.

It also tells me why Robert Howard's famed brevity was so impressive for the time. When reading works like Conan or Kane, that's not what will strike contemporary readers as really remarkable.

[DataPacRat]

Hard to say; I own a couple of his books, but only because I once tried to get a complete set of TSR's Mystara-setting books, and one principality of that setting's "Glantri" had immigrants from one of CAS's settings, "Auvergne". From what I recall of what I read, his writing is somewhere between Lovecraft and Robert E Howard.

[Stark]

I like his early Lovecraft stuff. He's one of the 'better than Lovecraft' guys. I haven't ready any of his later work.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Am I getting him confused with August Derleth, or is CAS the one who added Catholic sensibilities to the Cthulhu Mythos?

[Oni Koneko Damien]

August Derleth was the one who tried to shoehorn the Mythos into 'Good vs. Evil' and give elemental properties to the Great Old Ones.

As far as CAS is concerned... I like him arguably more than Lovecraft, and I'm a Lovecraft fanwhore. If you really want to decide for yourself, The Eldritch Dark has a good deal of his work up for free.

[Raskolnikov]

I read his "Isle of the Torturers" recently. I wasn't that impressed, awkward prose, really obvious plot, thin characterization. Plus I got a strongly racist subtext to the story, more stronger even than a lot of Lovecraft. Not too surprising for the time, but not something that draws me to read more of him.

[The Yosemite Bear]

One of the better apprentices of Mr. Providence. (lovecraft's tombstone is "I am Providance". I liked his stuff a hell of a lot better then Derleth.

[LadyTevar]

I had to look him up. The site I googled had many of Mr. Smith's short stories.
It was 4am before I realized what time it was and that I'd been reading various stories for hours. It also gave me very Gothic-styled dreams all night long.

I grew up reading my father's collection of Poe and Kipling, as well as Sherlock Holmes. The florid prose doesn't bother me -- in fact it enhances the horror for me by being so descriptive. I enjoyed Smith's science fiction ideas of gravitronic drives and mankind being out amongst the stars. His horror touches the primal fears, whether set in the past or the future. I see why people consider him one of Lovecraft's apprentices.

[Edi]

I've read some of his stuff and I liked it. AFAIK he was good friends with Lovecraft and they had regular correspondence. Lovecraft actually gave him a Cthulhu mythos nickname, something like Klarkash-Ton, in his letters as an in-joke.

On the racist angle, reading almost anything from that period is going to have racist undertones more or less, because the society a century ago was very different from today.