The Abominations Of Yondo, Clark Ashton Smith
The Abominations Of Yondo, Clark Ashton Smith
List: $2.63 | Sale: $1.85
Club: $1.31

The Abominations Of Yondo

Author: Clark Ashton Smith

Narrator: Matthew Schmitz

Unabridged: 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/11/2024


Synopsis

The Abominations Of Yondo - Brought to you by Altrusian Grace Media and narrated by Matthew SchmitzClark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an American writer and artist. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures".Smith was one of "the big three of Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft", though some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. The fantasy writer and critic L. Sprague de Camp said of him that "nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse".[3] Smith was a member of the Lovecraft circle, and his literary friendship with Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937. His work is marked by an extraordinarily rich and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humor.Of his writing style, Smith stated: "My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation."

Reviews

Goodreads review by P.E.

Oneiric Rosary Soundtrack: Air Born - Camel 3,5 rounded up to 4. Some powerful tales tag along decent ones in the collection: while 'A Vintage From Atlantis' evokes other melancholy tales of pirates and marooned sailors, 'The Ice-Demon' sets forth a genuine nightmare which brings to mind an al......more

Goodreads review by Pam

A collection of short stories by a fantasist who was a friend of H. P. Lovecraft but on the whole a better writer. Smith is known for his rather baroque style which occasionally requires recourse to a dictionary, but the stories are on the whole effective. Most of his work is set in invented civilis......more

Goodreads review by Steve

A mixed bag. A couple of underdeveloped stories, and a couple of long failures. But I like this guy, and even his so-so stuff is interesting, because you will always find great mood evoking passages of Smith's very purple and sinister prose (which is a perfect fit given the genre). And there are som......more