The Door to Saturn: Volume Two of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith (2007)

The Door to Saturn:  Volume Two of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith (2007); edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger.

For Volume 1: The End of the Story, click here.

Clark Ashton Smith was a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. With those two, he formed what became known as "The Three Musketeers of Weird Tales" in the late 1920's and 1930's. None of them was the most popular writer for Weird Tales -- that was Seabury Quinn. But in time they would become known as the three finest and most influential American fantasists of their era. 

Smith is the least well-known because he didn't create a fictional universe that others would adopt after him, as Lovecraft did with the Cthulhu Mythos and as Howard did with the world of Conan the Barbarian. His style and subject matter, however, have an incalculable influence and worth. His poetic prose (and Smith was a very good, published poet long before his short story years) testifies to horror, lushness, irony, and moments of grace. 

OK, sometimes it seems like he ate a thesaurus. Maybe three of them. But that's a part of the charm, especially as even Smith's diction can be ironic or satiric, especially when he's just making up words.

Truly remarkable too is that the bulk of Smith's stories were written in a five-year period. It's a burst of creativity almost unrivaled in fantasy literature. Most of the stories he wrote after that burst were based on story ideas he recorded at the time in his Commonplace Book.

In this second volume of The Collected Fantasies from Night Shade Press, we see Smith pretty much at the zenith of his powers as a weird fantasist. The stories can be weird and occasionally horrifying, but also droll and comical in some cases. He moves among contemporary horror and distant realms of self-created fantasy with apparent ease. Even a story that waited 55 years to be published -- "A Good Embalmer" -- is an enjoyable bit of dark whimsy that reminds one of the stories of Ambrose Bierce.

There are more attempts at relatively straightforward horror-fantasy here than in any other volume, suggesting that Smith was working to place stories in markets by writing stories to fit the existing markets.  This tendency would wane as his career progressed.


Note on bracketed categories:

• Averoigne: Fictional, demon-haunted French province during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
• Zothique: The "last continent" of Earth, uncounted millions or billions of years in the future.
• Hyperborea: The ancient civilized kingdoms of humanity prior to the last Ice Age.
• Poseidonis: Last city of sinking Atlantis.
• Cthulhu Mythos: A number of Smith's stories could be set within H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, especially those set during the time of Hyperborea and those featuring the dark god Tsathoggua. Well, and those mentioning Eibon or The Book of Eibon. Or Ubbo-Sathla. However, only those stories that are definitely Cthulhu Mythos stories are indicated.

Contains the following stories and essays (All dates are publication, not composition -- the five volumes are arranged in order of publication): 

1. Introduction by Tim Powers
2. A Note on the Texts by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger
3. The Door to Saturn  [Hyperborea]  (1932): Smith's novella about his legendary sorcerer Eibon becomes funnier the longer it goes, and ends with one of Smith's nods to interspecies sex, carefully phrased so as to avoid rejection from the magazines of the 1930's. ESSENTIAL.
4. The Red World of Polaris  [Captain Volmar 2] (2003) : Smith's second tale of Captain Volmar and his intrepid space-faring crew again walks the line between Space Opera and satire, but becomes awesomely apocalyptic over the final third.
5. Told in the Desert (1964) : Minor bit of horror.
6. The Willow Landscape (1931) : [Orientalist fantasy] : Lovely, melancholy Orientalist tale.
7. A Rendezvous in Averoigne  [Averoigne] (1931) : Another Averoigne story lays out some of the province's more dangerous locations. ESSENTIAL.
8. The Gorgon (1932) : Minor horror story.
9. An Offering to the Moon (1953) : Minor tale of a modern-day archaeological expedition gone nightmarishly wrong.
10. The Kiss of Zoraida (1933) : [Conte cruel] : Minor bit of Orientalist nastiness.
11. The Face by the River (2004) : A fairly straightforward contemporary ghost story.
12. The Ghoul (1934) : Weird Orientalist dark fantasy about ghouls. 
13. The Kingdom of the Worm (1933) : Smith pays homage to a little-known confabulist of the past with some pretty eerie and disturbing moments of travel through a disintegrating landscape infected by rot.
14. An Adventure in Futurity  (1931) : One of what is almost a Smith sub-genre -- a guy gets into a machine of either his or alien design (or a future human's, as here), and travels to another world or time. This one visits the future, and aims some pointed satire at conventional time-travelling narratives.
15. The Justice of the Elephant  (1931) : Minor 'revenge' horror story. With elephants!
16. The Return of the Sorcerer  [Cthulhu Mythos]  (1931) : One of Smith's most anthologized stories is a sly, blackly humourous tale that intersects with H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. ESSENTIAL.
17. The City of the Singing Flame  [Singing Flame : 1] (1941) A work of visionary dark fantasy that focuses on the ecstasies of the Sublime. Followed by a sequel. ESSENTIAL.
18. A Good Embalmer  (1989) : Droll contemporary horror story.
19. The Testament of Athammaus  [Hyperborea]  (1932) Great work of dark fantasy is a sort of prequel to Volume 1's "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros." ESSENTIAL.
20. A Captivity in Serpens  [Captain Volmar : 3] (1931) Smith's third tale (second published) of Captain Volmar and his intrepid space-faring crew again walks the line between Space Opera and satire yet again, and features a lengthy, dizzying chase scene through a cyclopean city.
21. The Letter from Mohaun Los  (1932) : One of what is almost a Smith sub-genre -- a guy gets into a machine of either his or alien design, and travels to another world or time. This one visits other planets while attempting to travel in time, discovering that gravity doesn't apply to objects in transit through the time-stream.
22. The Hunters from Beyond  (1932) : Solid, visceral yet cosmic horror story nods in a way to H.P. Lovecraft's great "Pickman's Model." ESSENTIAL.
23. Story Notes by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger
24. Alternate Ending to "The Return of the Sorcerer" 
25. Bibliography by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger