Over at Dose Nation, my favorite freak writer Erik Davis posts affectionately about Clark Ashton Smith, author of The Hashish Eater (1922) and a host of other weird tales, many for Weird Tales magazine.
When I was a strange young teen, I wrote ornate and old-fashioned poems haunted by images of demons, wizard scrolls, and implacable fortresses. Matthew Greenfield, a sophisticated chap I knew at college who later became a professor of English, was guilty of a similar sin, which he called “Dungeons and Dragons poetry.” Though I didn’t play much D&D, I did read a lot of weird fantasy stuff from Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and, of course, H.P. Lovecraft. These purple prose monarchs, whose similes and descriptive passages shone with the fetid light of corpse-fed fireflies, lorded over my imaginal life for a few years, and infected the verse I wrote for creative writing classes and for my pleasure. You, dear reader, are happy that I am loathe to disinter them from the sepulchral Office Depot containers moldering in the dank and fetid corners of my necromantic storage space. They are, one might say, o’er-wraught…But not a smidgen as o’er-wraught as the amazing poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, the California poet and fiction writer who, along with Howard and Lovecraft, wrote his weird stories for Weird Tales, mostly in the 1930s.
The Hashish Eater: the witchery of words (Techgnosis), Buy Smith collections on Amazon
