The Maze of the Enchanter: Maze of the Enchanter v. 4 (Collected Fantasies) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This 4th volume in the series contains some of my favorite tales by Smith, the Zothique stories! This is the best so far, and I really look forward to the fifth and final book in the series as we will then have a complete collection of Smith's fantasy tales in beautiful hardcover form.

The artwork for the dustcover is excellent, as is the artwork on the previous volumes.

But above all else, Smith's Zothique tales show the heights Smith could reach when his writing fully expressed the bizarre and outlandishly frightening heights that became his trademark. My favorite tale is "The Dark Eidolon," a wonderful piece now restored to its original form for the first time.

As usual, editors Connors and Hilger have done an outstanding job in restoring as many of the tales as possible to their original form as Smith intended them to be. There is also an alternative ending, added material deleted from the original publication, and a great deal of fascinating background material and history for each entry.

All the volumes in this series are vital to a complete collection of the master of both horrific and beautiful fantasy!

CONTENTS:
Introduction by Gahan Wilson
A Note on the Texts
The Mandrakes
The Beast of Averoigne
A Star-Change
The Disinterment of Venus
The White Sybil
The Ice-Demon
The Isle of the Torturers
The Dimension of Chance
The Dweller in the Gulf
The Maze of the Enchanter
The Third Episode of VATHEK: The Story of the Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah
Genius Loci
The Secret of the Cairn
The Charnel God
The Dark Eidolon
The Voyage of King Euvoran
Vulthoom
The Weaver in the Vaults
The Flower-Women
APPENDICES
Story Notes
The White Sybil: Alternate Conclusion
The Muse of Hyperborea
The Dweller in the Martian Depths: Added Material
Bibliography

This 4th volume of The Collected Fantasies has some of Clark Ashton Smith's finest tales. "Genius Loci" remains one of my favorite weird tales ever. The story casts a potent spell of dread that most such fictions usually lack. Whenever I read this tale, I am transported. The scene seems very real, authentic. One is swept away by the intensity of the narrative. Smith was indeed a wizard, who conjured with language. His alien landscapes impress one as strange yet realistic. His language is evocative, as we see in this paragraph from "The Dweller in the Gulf":

"None of the three adventurers was overly imaginative or prone to nervousness. But all were beset by certain odd impressions. Behind the arras of cryptic silence, time and again, they seemed to hear a faint whisper, like the sign of sunken seas far down at some hemispheric depth. The air was tinged with a slight and doubtful dankness, and they felt the stirring of an almost imperceptible draft upon their faces. Oddest of all was the hint of a nameless odor, reminding them both of animal dens and the peculiar smell of Martian dwellings."

One of the wonders of these books from the magnificent Night Shade Books are the remarkable jackets, with amazing illustrations by Jason Van Hollander and design by Claudia Noble. They are among the finest examples of jacket art and design I have ever seen, an utter delight and ecstasy.
Exotic, erotic, enchanting -- the dark phantasy tales of Clark Ashton Smith has it all.

Clark Ashton Smith is undergoing something of a revival these days. As well as an amateur artist who even illustrated some of his stories for Weird Tales, he was also a superb poet of the fantastic. (The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith is an affordable, excellent introduction to that side of his talent.)

And, of course, there are the stories. Smith was not as good a writer as poet, but he could still be very good. This series collects his stories in the order Smith wrote them with the editors working very hard to present Smith's preferred versions and alternate versions as well as Smith's opinion of those stories as well as that of his famous friends, H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. This volume's stories were written in 1932 and 1933 and have Smith working in the many universes he had already established or writing sequels to his popular past stories. In all cases, the stories stand alone even when part of a series.

Smith's greatest and most influential creation, the decadent, magical, grotesque far future of Zothique, Earth's last continent, is the setting for many stories here. Showing the influence of Smith's idol Edgar Poe at several points, "The Isle of the Torturers" has a king and fellow sparse survivors of a plague ending up on said island, a place given to the sadistic pleasure of all kinds of torture. "The Charnel God" has a young nobleman braving the temple of Mordiggian to rescue his dead wife from its priests. (She only seems dead, more shades of Poe.). "The Dark Eidolon" is Smith at the top of his form with a sorcerer determined to avenge an injury he suffered, when still a beggar boy and not Zothique's most feared man, at the hands of a future emperor. And there's a god who has his own ideas of justice. A poetic, dark tale of two unpleasant men marred only by a misstep in final imagery. "The Voyage of King Euvoran", obsessively undertaken to recover a royal symbol and right a slight, ends up in a satisfying, wry conclusion. "The Weaver in the Vaults" has three soldiers sent on a mission to recover a royal mummy so it can be ground up for magical potions. They encounter a strange, vampiric creature underneath a city "where Death has made his capital".

There are further entries in the French medieval world of Averoigne. "The Mandrakes" has wedded sorcerers selling illegal love potions - and being murderously unhappy in their own marriage. "The Beast of Averoigne" is an effective werewolf story. "The Disinternment of Venus" pits erotic pagan magic against Christian chastity at a monastery.

The magical prehistoric Earth of Hyperborea is the setting of two stories. "The White Sibyl" is a prose-poem about the obsession of the poet Tortha for the titular woman who foretells the glaciers about to engulf the city of Cerngoth. The fate of a doomed expedition to stop those glaciers and a plot to loot its remains is the subject of "The Ice-Demon".

"The Maze of the Enchanter" introduces the bored magician Maal Dweb. Here a barbarian tries to rescue his lover from Maad Dweb's clutches. Wry insouciance mixed with decadence. Still oppressed by ennui, Dweb decides to live dangerously and rescue "The Flower-Women" with only the powers of his novice days.

As evidenced by its title, "The Third Episode of Vathek: The Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and the Prince Kalilah" finishes off a fragment from William Beckford's Vathek; An Arabian Tale, the first Arabian fantasy. I didn't remember Beckford being so entertaining. Smith added about 4,000 words to Beckford's 14,000.

Horror and science fiction mix in the last two installments of Smith's Ahai aka Mars series. "The Dweller in the Gulf" has a trio from Earth encountering a nasty leftover from the past in a cavern. Effective horror despite some clumsy dialogue and exposition. "Vulthoom" is the most minor of the Ahai series but still, for Smith, a fairly successful science fiction story. Some earthmen discover a plot to invade and subjugate Earth via an alien drug. (Some have seen an influence on Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch).

Most of Smith's straight science fiction doesn't work too well. Its plots characteristically have self-destructively obsessed protagonists or heroes returning as psychological or physical cripples after their encounter with the alien, alienated from their homes in the end. "A Star-Change" has an excellent idea - a man having his senses so altered by extraterresterials that life in his old home is unbearable - but the execution is boring and jargon filled. Americans pursuing Japanese spies end up in "The Dimension of Chance", a place so chaotic that general categories of minerals and plants are unknown and gravity is mercurial. But, again, the execution is annoying. The dialogue is bad too which is perhaps why Smith thought the story worked as satire more than anything else. "The Secret of the Cairn" works better than "A Star-Change" at exploring the alienating effects of the alien.

"Genius Loci" is a fine story bearing the mark of Algernon Blackwood in its plot of an artist's obsession with an unwholesome landscape.