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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN num: 9781597800280
ISBN number: 1597800287
Label: Night Shade Books
Manufacturer: Night Shade Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: February 07, 2007
Publishing house: Night Shade Books
Sale Popularity Level: 100156
Studio: Night Shade Books
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Published in chronological order, with extensive story and bibliographic notes, this series not only provides acess to stories that have been out of print for years, but gives them a historical and social context. Series editors Scott Conners and Ronald S. Hilger excavated the still-existing manuscripts, letters and various published versions of the stories, creating a definitive 'preferred text' for Smith's entire body of work. This very first volume of the series, brings together 25 of his fantasy stories, written between 1925 and 1930, including such classics as 'The Abominations of Yondo,' 'The Monster of the Prophecy,' 'The Last Incantation' and the title story.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
I've been an avid CAS reader for over 30 years. I happened on the Ballantine Books "Fantasy Series" paperback edition ZOTHIQUE when it was very first released in the 70s, and have long wished for a compendium of his work.
CAS's style is very dense, and reflects very careful construction of prose as well as plot. His style is as evolved as Lord Dunsany, Morris, and Tolkien, and is entertaining in it's own right. Don't let this scare you off - his stories are all eminently accessible to casual readers, and numerous wry turns of phrase indicate a well-honed (but bone dry) sense of humor.
When compared to his better-known contemporaries, H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulu) and Robert E. Howard (Conan) I find CAS to be more a "readers writer." CAS is a master of phrasing surpassing HPL - his stories are less eerie than HPL, and don't slather on the dread as heavily. CAS is (usually) less swash-buckling blood-and-gore than REH, but doesn't shrink from characters hacking each other to bits when the story requires.
The only fault I can find with this series is that stories are ordered by date of publication. (Perhaps this was required by the copyrights issued to the three Ballantine collections assembled by Lin Carter.) My preference, though less academic, would be to collect the tales by story cycle to facilitate READING rather than STUDYING. Nevertheless, these volumes are without question well worth the investment - like a collection of Poe, you will find yourself returning to them many times.
Rated by buyers -
I love the writings of Clark Ashton Smith. He was the quintessenstial poet. BOW DOWN, I AM THE EMPEROR OF DREAMS. I Crown me with the million-colored suns of secret worlds incredible and take their trailing skies
for vestment. His fiction is also clothed in words that are poetry. His only peer is Lord Dunsany.I corresponded a little with Smith and owned one of his strange sculptures. I welcome this renaissance of interest in Smith (if that is what it is).I wrote a short story influenced by his writings which he critiqued and added one sentence. I lost it, if you ever come across it, the title is THE COMING OF THE BLACK NEBULA.
Rated by buyers 
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`The End of the Story' is the very first of five volumes of Clark Ashton Smith's short stories. The stories are arranged chronologically by composition. The stories in this volume were written between 1925 and 1930. The stories are:
The Abomination of Yondo
Sadastor
The Ninth Skeleton
The Last Incantation
The End of the Story
The Phantoms of the Fire
A Night in Malneant
The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake
Thirteen Phantasms
The Venus of Azombeii
The Tale of Satampra Zeiros
The Monster of the Prophecy
The Metamorphosis of the World
The Epiphany of Death
A Murder in the Fourth Dimension
The Devotee of Evil
The Satyr
The Planet of the Dead
The Uncharted Isle
Marooned in Andromeda
The Root of Ampoi
The Necromatic Tale
The Immeasurable Horror
A Voyage to Sfanomoe
Most of the stories are of the `weird tale' sort, but some veer to straight Horror and some can be classified as Science Fiction (although always with a horror angle). Smith was a very flowery writer, and some of the stories can be tough going, but that's the beauty of short stories, they're short.
Rated by buyers -
This very first volume in what promises to be the definitive collection of short fiction by Clark Ashton Smith is nothing short of a literary treasure. For those who have previously had to satisfy their craving for Klarkashtonia by seeking it out in scattered and hard-to-obtain tomes, The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith is a blessing nonpareil. Do yourself a favor and get it while it lasts.
Rated by buyers -
As established here and reinforced by the second volume, all five books in this series are essential to anyone interested in Smith's work and literate fantasy as a whole. Connors and Hilger have followed earlier textual studies by Donald Sidney-Fryer, Steve Behrends, and others with extensive studies of their own to restore as much of the glory to Smith's texts as is currently possible - and what glory! Smith is one of the few fantasists capable not only of creating multiple fantasy cultures, but with investing each of those worlds with its own distinct atmosphere, tone, and use of language. Many earlier versions of these texts toned down the richness, eroticism, and grotesquerie of these stories in order to appeal to what Smith's editors deemed was acceptable to the lowest-common-denominator among its readership. Scores of deletions, simplifications, bowdlerizations, and other alterations which have served to remove the sheen from these works have here been corrected through painstaking attention to all available manuscripts and correpondence. Here, at long last, is Smith in all his mordant, coruscating splendor. If one considers all of this, along with intelligent introductory material; alternate endings; unpedantic notes to each story detailing its composition, publication history, and its place within the larger context of Smith's work; as well as Jason Van Hollander's inspired integration of Smith and his sculptures into the macabre and affectionate cover art; Night Shade and these editors have presented to all lovers of fantasy an edition of the master's prose fiction which will serve as the benchmark for many years to come.
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