It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t come right out and confess at the start of this review that I am a devoted fan of Clark Ashton Smith’s work and have been ever since I first came across it in the richly scented, pulpy pages of Weird Tales and later on expanded and deepened my exposure to it with many repeated readings of his stories in the neat little black-bound books of his stories put out by Arkham House way back when.

There was nobody writing the sort of stuff he wrote in those days and it is interesting to observe that, many decades later, there is still nobody doing it. There have been plenty who have done their best to mimic various other authors who blossomed during Smith’s era, and legions of them have striven mightily to write as much like Robert E. Howard or Howard Phillips Lovecraft as they possibly could; many have actually based their careers on the maneuver, but I am unaware of a single scribe who has dedicated himself to a like effort based on the oeuvre of Clark Ashton Smith.

One grim reason this has been the case could be the work of Smith has never even approached achieving anything at all like the popularity of such as Lovecraft and Howard. I know this to be a bitter truth all too well from a considerable number of personal efforts on my part through the years to encourage a larger reading of this brilliant man’s work. I’ve written introductions for Smith anthologies, done illustrations and covers for his collections, and written any number of essays such as the one you are now reading in an effort to stir up more well-deserved enthusiasm for this brilliant fellow. I don’t regret any of those attempts but I do wish they’d been better done since, so far at least, all these efforts have proven to be totally feckless.

But enough moaning and groaning, Star Changes, the Science Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith (edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger; Darkside Press, Seattle, WA; 234 pages; Trade Hardcover; $45.00) is not only a fine collection of Smith’s stories of science fiction (more about the “science” part of that later) but Connors and Hilger have done us a great service, and through much research and hard work have managed to remove all of the “improvements” inflicted on them by the editors of the pulp magazines which published them this includes a number of alterations made by Smith himself since, being both impoverished and responsible for the survival of his sick and aging parents, his unhappy policy was to accede to publishers’ instructions. They have painstakingly restored their texts so that we are finally reading what Smith originally wrote. This is a huge service and a great treat, and I hope all who are fond of this delightful author’s work gets the chance to read them in Clark Ashton Smith’s own words.

Another excellent feature of this book is an introduction by the editors which not only gives the reader a downright painfully clear view of what poor Smith had to contend with in the extremely eccentric and sometimes highly unkind world of pulp magazine publishing, but details the really amusing problems Smith had in dealing with and trying to observe the niceties of science fiction’s sometimes imaginary differences with fantasy, and his only marginally successful efforts to adapt to many of the field’s basic contentions.

The worst and most persistent stumbling block was that popular science fiction in those days had departed from the sometimes very dark orientation of that genre’s founders such as H. G. Wells (odd how many of these people had tripart initials!) and taken a touchingly positive stance towards mankind’s lunging into the cosmic abyss of space. The heroes and heroines very much tended to be healthy, strapping creatures with thoroughly positive outlooks who took on the challenges presented by technical difficulties and multiple-tentacled monsters with a gusto and enthusiasm which inevitably carried the day and advanced the cause.

Smith, on the other hand, tended to view the conquest of space as a fundamentally dubious notion and his heroes were often apprehensive, if not downright panicky, when confronted by human-devouring aliens. And instead of viewing space exploration as a glorious activity by a species clearly meant to rule the universe, it was painfully obvious he was profoundly convinced the whole effort would be a minuscule event which would be barely noticed if it was observed at all, and do nothing to halt the eventual extinction of our inconsequential life form.

As if this were not enough, the editors of this very good book present a lovely quote from Smith, new to me, which reveals, as if by a flash of lightning, that he regarded science itself (forget the fiction) as rather small potatoes. Here it is: “The mythology of science is not one that intrigues me very deeply.”

I love it!

So, if by some unfortunate circumstance, you have not yet encountered the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, Star Changes will provide you with an excellent introduction to their genuinely haunting awesomeness, their gracious humor, and their considerable profundity.

It would be a pity if you missed it.

ZIPPY/Type Z Personality, by Bill Griffith; Fanatagraphic Books, Seattle, WA; 127 pages; Trade Paperback; $19.95.

Speaking of odd points of view, I have several times in these little essays made a point to now and then call your attention to the latest annual collection of the very hilarious, deeply compassionate, and genuinely therapeutic comic strip Zippy gathered
up and introduced by artist and author,
Bill Griffith.

I am particularly happy to do it this time because, ladies and gentlemen, in this gathering of the year’s past Zippys, the works are presented as part of an educational package which puts in your hands the “E-Z STRIP BY STRIP METHOD,” a radical teaching technique that generously offers you clear and simple at-home tests together with instructional texts and helpful commentary which will gently show you how to recognize the 16 tell-tale signs and discover if you have what experts call a “TYPE Z PERSONALITY”.

Now you can not only chuckle over these comic strips and occasionally even laugh out loud at them— much to your embarrassment, of course, if you’re reading them in public— you can use them as markers to guide your way and find that you need no longer feel “perplexed”.

Consider the following questions printed on the cover of this latest “Zippy the Pinhead” collection:

Do you: (a) Occasionally stop by the roadside to converse with large advertising statuary? (b) Blurt out seemingly random opinions and phraseology? (c) Become excitable in the presence of preserved bakery products? (d) Believe all the celebrities you see on “Entertainment Tonight” are your close, personal friends?

If you have answered “Yes” or even “No” to any or all or even none of these questions I strongly recommend you make every effort to locate and purchase this book. Even if it’s only to read the comic strips. Alabaster, by Caitlin R. Kiernan; Subterranean Press, Burton, MI; 171 pages; Deluxe Hard Cover Edition; $25.00

Very good news for those who have encountered and become taken by Caitlin R. Kiernan’s remarkable character Dancy Flammarion and find themselves wondering whatever became of her; here’s a whole little bookful of brand new stories about her collected and very informatively introduced and afterworded by her author.

Dancy first showed up in the marvelously spooky novel Threshold, and that might have been this strange albino child’s one and only appearance, as the author confesses in her introduction. Kiernan was browsing through the novel in the process of composing an essay on how she’d come to write it and found herself reading a list of spectacular monsters her pale little heroine had slaughtered (with the aid of her Angel, a creature which sometimes gives her orders in the shape of a bat-winged, besworded figure surrounded by swirling winds but is not above speaking to her whilst cleverly-disguised as a stuffed bear or her own reflection in the fly-specked mirror of a gas station rest room) before her adventures in the novel and decided she really had to write the story of at least one of them: a “pretty boy in Savannah who showed Dancy a corked amber bottle that held three thousand ways to suffer, three thousand ways to hurt, before she killed him.”

Happily this brief reference inspired the short novel “Les Fleurs Empoisonees” which heads up the table of contents in Alabaster, a fine collection of beautifully written and genuinely shocking weird tales which should not be missed.

By the way, there is an alternate table of contents on which the above story is listed last instead of first because the stories in this second table are listed as they happened chronologically in Dancy’s life, not in the order of their composition, although the second tale is somewhat cosmic in time, it also mixes in a related tale from way back in legendary days, along with a touching account of Dancy’s mother when she was a child herself and got into all sorts of trouble. I am very glad the author thought to do this as it works extremely well this way, and I strongly suggest this is absolutely how you ought to read them.

I also recommend you decide to leave the introduction and afterword for later (but do get around to them as they’re extremely amusing and very informative) and allow yourself to get to get to know Dancy’s story by story, as one of Kiernan’s greatest talents is her fantastic skill in unfolding these spectacular adventures like a magician pulling silks and metallic linked rings, and live, rabbits from what seem to be empty boxes.

There’s no one quite like her in folding and unfolding characters in a sort of origami fashion so that they surprise you again and again, but always logically no matter how bizarrely; there are very few who can transport you via deft, strange spells from scene to scene as smoothly and gracefully, sliding open secret panels, turning reliable-seeming staircases into carnival slides, and dropping you suddenly through trap doors.

It is all great fun, and if you’ve a heart in your breast you’ll end up loving Dancy dearly.

—Gahan Wilson

In the Eye of Heaven, David Keck, Tor, New York, hardcover, 416 pp. $25.95, ISBN: 0-765-31320-0.

David Keck’s In the Eye of Heaven is the most impressive epic fantasy debut since R. Scott Bakker’s The Darkness That Comes Before. What makes this book even more remarkable is that, unlike Bakker, Keck does not eschew the traditional accoutrements of epic fantasy; on the contrary, he embraces them with a vengeance. Although set in a seemingly familiar quasi-medieval milieu, Eye of Heaven quickly demonstrates that in the hands of a talented writer, even the familiar can be made strange and new.

After long years of training and hardship, Durand, the second son of a middling baron, is about to ascend to knighthood and, so elevated, claim lordship of a small village whose present lord, an elderly knight owing fealty to Durand’s father, lost his only son and heir in battle. When that son shows up very much alive, the iron weft of reciprocal obligations constituting feudal society leaves the baron no option but to restore the rights of the prodigal son in place of his own. An embittered, callow Durand, determined to win for himself what his father could not give him, leaves his family’s lands and embarks on the uncertain career of a hedge knight. First he must get himself knighted, which ceremony the rightful heir prevented, and so he goes in search of a tournament, hoping to impress a lord with his martial prowess, enter into his service, and receive in short order the reward of knighthood.

Prior to departing his father’s castle, Durand has a portentous encounter with an uncanny form identifying itself as the Traveler, the Prince of Heaven, brother to the lord of creation, whose eye, what you and I would call the sun, is referenced in the novel’s title. The Traveler sees something disconcerting in Durand and in his future but says only that he will achieve success and soon meet the woman of his dreams. Later, another encounter leads readers to suspect that Durand may be harboring the soul or spirit of an ancient hero or demigod called Bruna of the Strong Shoulders. Keck is sparing with information about Bruna, the Traveler, and the other Powers, but the little that is told, and the more that can be inferred, suggests a richly developed mythos that seems certain to play a larger role as the series continues.

Durand falls in with thuggish mercenaries serving Lord Radomor, a cruel and ambitious man with designs on the crown; then, fleeing his service after refusing to participate in an atrocity, joins the retinue of a dashing young lord, Lamoric. There he meets the woman of whom the Traveler spoke, who is not what she seems. Meanwhile, events are unfolding that will put the kingdom at risk of invasion by eldritch beings known as the Banished.

Durand matures steadily in the hard and unforgiving school to which he has apprenticed himself, and Keck does a marvelous job of tracing his development from a decent-but-dangerously-impetuous youth to a young man with the beginnings of wisdom, his lofty ideals tempered by intense experience. Overall, this unpretentious, quietly exceptional novel reminded me of Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight. Both books take unusual care to be accurate in the details of the chivalric ethos and the down-and-dirty business of medieval combat and are accordingly imbued with a rare aura of authenticity in matters high and low. Both feature magical systems and divine orders derived from Norse mythology then elaborated with sober intelligence and inspired leaps of imagination into frameworks of belief and mystery that are strong enough, and supple enough, to support the complex worlds and characters of their respective authors’ invention. Both look past Tolkien to the early Arthurian romances for their literary models. They relate their stories with deceptively simple artistry and reward readers capable of discerning from hints and clues in the text the slowly emerging outlines of a grander design. But where Wolfe’s religious faith has increasingly come to the forefront of his work, imparting an allegorical tinge, Keck seems content to place his faith in the inherent logic of his story. I eagerly await the next installment of Durand’s adventures.

The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier, Pantheon, New York, hardcover, 272 pp. $22.95, ISBN: 0-375-42369-9.

The opening chapter of The Brief History of the Dead, “The City,” appeared in The New Yorker—not exactly the first place one expects to find fantasy, or even the fifty-ninth, yet there, incredibly, it was, and it was good. It is a surreal tour of a city whose inhabitants are all dead, not ectoplasmic ghosts but flesh-and-blood men, women, and children with the bodies they had at the time of their deaths, memories of their previous lives, and no idea where they are, how (beyond dying) they got there, and what if anything might be in store for them. These embodied spirits populate a city composed of remembered bits and pieces of earthly metropolises, a kind of way station between life and afterlife. Despite being dead, the inhabitants of the city have jobs, go shopping, eat dinner, have coffee, fall into and out of love, and so on just as they did while alive. This is a droll conceit at first but becomes quite poignant as the novel progresses. Residence in the city can last a long time, but it is not eternal; like souls in limbo, the citizens ultimately vanish, moving on to whatever awaits them. Brockmeier wisely leaves this mystery unresolved, though it is as much a subject of speculation among his fictional dead as it is among we the living.

A number of recurring characters are introduced in the first chapter, most notably Luka Sims, a newspaperman who continues in that function after death, putting out the L. Sims News & Speculation Sheet, and Coleman Kinzler, a blind evangelist. Sims and Kinzler are Brockmeier’s touchstones in the city of the dead, along with a third character, Minny Rings, a woman who becomes romantically involved with Sims.

It seems the influx to the city has accelerated of late, as has the egress of residents emigrating to the great beyond. From the stories of the newly dead we learn that (1) the novel is set in the near future, and (2) a virulent genetically engineered plague, invariably fatal, is responsible. This science-fictional veneer is employed mainly for satirical purposes; Brockmeier’s real interests lie in the fantastic.

In chapter 2, “The Shelter,” we meet the novel’s other main character, who is the central character in more ways than one: a young woman named Laura Byrd. Byrd is part of a three-person mission to Antarctica, a PR stunt by the Coca-Cola company. When a catastrophic equipment failure sends the other two members of her team across the frozen landscape in search of help from a distant research station, she remains behind. When they don’t return, she is forced to go after them, beginning a harrowing journey that will test the limits of her endurance and sanity.

Brockmeier tells his story in alternating chapters. As Byrd struggles to survive in the hostile Antarctic environment, she comes to suspect that she may be the last person alive on Earth. Meanwhile, in the city of the dead, Sims and others are reaching a similar conclusion, formulating the hypothesis that there are gradations of death, and as long as the dead remain in the memories of the living, they are still in some sense alive; only when they have faded from living memory do they become fully dead, vanishing from the city. Brockmeier artfully brings these two narrative lines into convergence: the one a metaphysical meditation on the importance of memory and human connection, as well as the persistence of the past; the other a gripping adventure in which a woman is physically and psychologically stripped down to her essence. The cumulative effect is powerfully moving, a portrait of devastating loss that is also quietly hopeful in a way I found reminiscent of Connie Willis’s novel Passages, which approaches the subject from a very different angle yet ends up in the same icy reaches of unfathomable possibility.

City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer, Bantam, New York, trade paperback, 704 pp. $14.00, ISBN: 0-553-38357-4.

This bravura performance by the almost shamefully talented VanderMeer was originally published in 2002 by Prime Books. Now Bantam, publisher of the author’s excellent sf novel, Veniss Underground, has released a new “definitive” edition. It’s a great opportunity for readers unfamiliar with VanderMeer’s moldering, blood-drenched city of Ambergris, home of deadly mushrooms and ambiguous squids, to become acquainted with its many wonders, horrors, and hilarities before the publication of Shriek: An Afterword, his highly anticipated follow-up. Not precisely a novel, nor exactly a linked collection of short stories, City of Saints and Madmen is a literary Rubik’s Cube that owes as much to Nabokov and Borges as it does to Lovecraft and M. John Harrison. It is marvelous in every sense of the word.

In the Forest of Forgetting, Theodora Goss, Prime Books, New York, hardcover, 284 pp. $24.95, ISBN: 0-809-55691-X.

Readers of this magazine need no introduction to Theodora Goss, whose strong first collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, contains three stories that originally appeared in these pages, including the title story. Whether elegantly deconstructing a fairy tale, as in “The Rose in Twelve Petals,” revisiting childhood fantasies from an adult perspective in the hauntingly evocative “Pip and the Fairies,” or tracing the adventures of four girls who set out to become witches in what was, for me, the collection’s highlight, “Lessons with Miss Gray,” Goss writes with subtle delicacy, close observation, and penetrating insight. She is currently working on a novel; with publication of this collection, she will have readers clamoring for her to finish.
-- Paul Witcover