The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith: The Last Hieroglyph

by Clark Ashton Smith

Overview

The Last Hieroglyph is the fifth of the five volume Collected Fantasies series. Editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger have compared original manuscripts, various typescripts, published editions, and Smith's notes and letters, in order to prepare a definitive set of texts.

The Last Hieroglyph includes, in chronological order, all of Clark Ashton Smith's stories from "The Dark Age" to "The Dart of Rasasfa."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597803663
Publisher:	Night Shade Books
Publication date:	01/01/2009
Series:	Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith , #5
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
Sales rank:	795,244
File size:	992 KB

About the Author

Clark Ashton Smith was born on January 13, 1893, in Long Valley, California, but lived most of his life in Auburn. Ill health as a child prevented him from attending all but five years of school, but he set upon an extensive campaign of self-education. He began to write at an early age, and sold several short stories to magazines such as Overland Monthly and Black Cat at the age of seventeen. Smith’s first book, The Star-Treader and Other Poems, was a sensation when published in 1912. He was hailed by the San Francisco press as a new Keats and as the boy-poet of the Sierras. Ambrose Bierce read some of Smith’s poems in manuscript and praised them highly. The necessity to care for his aging parents led Smith to take up the writing of imaginative short stories for pulp magazines such as Wonder Stories and Weird Tales in the late 1920s. During the space of five years he turned out approximately one hundred polished and imaginative tales of “inconceivable fear and unimaginable love.” These were later collected together, and have been translated into several languages. The deaths of his parents, combined with a growing disgust at the low standards of pulp editors and readers, led to his resumption of poetry writing. Smith married late in life, to Carol Dorman, and moved to Pacific Grove in 1954. He died in 1961, having seen his fourth collection of short stories, The Abominations of Yondo, achieve print.

Editorial Reviews

The fifth and final volume in this definitive collection (following Red World of Polaris and The Maze of the Enchanter) reveals Smith in the twilight of his career. As the editors note, Smith, "A stranger in a world he never made nor lived in happily or comfortably," excelled at creating vivid, phantasmagorical worlds, from the rugged Hyperboria of "The Seven Geases" to the lush post-apocalyptic setting of "The Dark Age." Ordered chronologically as they were composed, these works also reveal recurring themes, like deadly obsession in "The Treader of the Dust," "The Garden of Adompha," and "Nemesis of the Unfinished." Heroes strive but fail against power-hungry sorcerers in "The Death of Malygris," "The Seven Geases," and "Necromancy in Naat." Alternate worlds claim the unwary in "The Primal City," "Symposium of the Gorgon," and "The Great God Awto," while "The Chain of Aforgomon," "Double Cosmos," and the title story draw readers into recursive realities worthy of Borges. Readers seeking dense, ornate fantasies will enjoy these classic stories knit from flickering shadows, dark secrets, and twisted magic.
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