The Emperor Of Dreams: Best Fantasy Tales (Fantasy Masterworks) Book

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 KaveneyRead More