The Maker of Gargoyles and Other Stories

Book excerpt: Clark Ashton Smith was a prodigy, who wrote Arabian Nights novels in his mid-teens and was heralded as a major voice in American poetry by the time he was nineteen. In one frantic burst in the middle 1930s, he wrote nearly a hundred strange, wondrous, and grotesque stories, most of which were published in Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Wonder Stories, and other pulps, but he was by no means a conventional pulp writer. Think of the visions his stories conjure up as sendings, written in strange runes, transported from the sorcerer's lair by indescribable genii or winged spirits.