Jesse > Recent Status Updates

“Nemesis of the Unfinished”

A goofy semi-autobiographical story about a writer who can’t finish his stories and all of the unfinished manuscripts rebel, finishing themselves in a style that is far more akin to Smith’s personal style with regard to word-choice and detailing. His ego can’t take any of this, and so he dies in a battle with the piles of paper. Huh.

“Double Cosmos”

A scientist conjectures that the hallucinations that drug-users experience are actually glimpses into aspects of reality that we cannot ordinarily perceive. So he makes a super-drug and opens up his mind to the fourth dimension. It’s way less gnarly than your average extra-dimensional Smith adventure.

“The Enchantress of Sylaire”

This is a rewrite of his “The End of the Story”, but with more sex. “Indeed, he proved it so lengthily and in such detail that the sun had fallen below the horizon before Séphora could draw a full breath and speak again.” I guess that there is a werewolf ex-boyfriend sorcerer and… idk what was going on with the Mirror of Reality but it reflected poorly on Dorothée!!!!!!!!

“Strange Shadows”

This is recognizably Smith in how he describes the titular shadows, but the tone is… different? Jones the alcoholic feels like one of Smith’s more fully-realized characters, a dude who spuriously gains access to the shadows cast by living things, with the actions of these shadows betraying something of the true nature of the people who cast them.

“The Great God Awto”

This is one of those satires where archaeologists pick over the remains of contemporary culture and come to bizarre conclusions. Smith is mad at automobiles and depicts the perception of present-day America as a death-cult of, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, “suicide machines”. The notes here are indispensable in adding the context of Smith as something of a Luddite.

“The Garden of Adompha”

A tale of bizarre debauchery in Zothique, where a warped king and his sorcerer graft the body parts of courtiers onto plants that feed off of the buried bodies. It’s pretty gross, even if the king gets his comeuppance in the end. If you think that you killed a sorcerer in Zothique, well, don’t stick around wherever he died!!!

“The Mother of Toads”

UMMMMM

OKAY

Dude is drugged into having sex with the toad-witch-woman and then wakes up, completely grossed out. He tries to escape but… a tidal wave of toads sends him back to her hut, and… when he spurns her second advance, calling her a fat toad, she lets him go… only to drown him in the bog, smothering him under her huge titties.

I had no idea something like this was coming

“The Death of Ilalotha”

Gothic horror in Zothique… the Queen’s lady in waiting dies and her ex-boyfriend, who is now a consort of the Queen, arrives after her death, only for her passing to have rekindled his passion, and a belief that she is not really dead. Smith drops some Clarkashtonic lore, here; witches and sorceress who die with unrequited desires can become lamiae or vampires.

“The Black Abbot of Puthuum”

More Zothique sword and sorcery. This is an adventure story with two buddy heroes and a maiden and a curmudgeonly eunuch and they actually slay the monster! And save the maiden! And in prime machismo they draw straws to see who ends up with the girl because they don’t want to take her to the king, and she gets mad because they didn’t ask her her opinion!!!!! BAD. ASS.

“The Treader of the Dust”

Present-day occultist gets hold of a FoRbIdDeN tOmE and accidentally summons the embodiment of death and decay. The implication is that he must have had some subconscious dying-adjacent desire or else the weird-ass mummy child thing wouldn’t have shown up. Like, morbid fascination with death is only human… and especially Smithian.

“Necromancy in Naat”

Sword and sorcery in Zothique. A prince tears across the continent, looking for his kidnapped bride, who is being passed around the slave trade. He finds her… on another island full of necromancers. Smith is pretty consistent on what human beings animated by necromancy are so this story has a weird element that is about as palatable a romance as you could get with necromancy involved.

“The Last Hieroglyph”

Another Zothique tale. This one has an astrologer who is called on a quest by the God of Destiny, who he had been invoking in his horoscopes. It’s a bizarre tour through fantastic places, with a fairy tale sensibility. Three times does Nushain try to ditch his summons and each time he is told that, while he is a terrible astrologer, his own horoscope is absolutely correct.

“Xeethra”

A Zothique tale that borrows more from Vathek and its episodes than, really, any of the others, but uses Smith’s past-life hook as the vehicle for what drives a shepherd to offer his soul in a bargain with Thasaidon, Zothique’s Iblis. One difference, here, is that there is no spatial tipping point for when you are Lost; for Thasaidon, the entirety of Zothique is his playground.

“The Primal City”

A dude and his best bud go hiking in South America in order to find an ancient city that may pre-date humanity. SPOILER: Bad stuff happens to the explorers. Smith doesn’t name it but the book that they found the city in is probably something like his Book of Eibon.

“The Chains of Aforgomon”

This is another one of Smith’s “past lives” stories, except the person involved is unwittingly enacting his punishment set down at an unfathomable antiquity - another planet, even - by the pissed God of Time. The cosmological implications - past lives, ostensibly human beings appearing in another part of the galaxy - would be more interesting in a bigger fantasy story.

“The Seven Geases”

This is a parody of Smith’s picaresque adventures, where explorers plod from danger to danger. Here, a Hyperborean himbo gets passed along through a variety of eldritch beings from Bat-Toad and Spider Gods to serpent people and phantom archetypes and something very similar to Ubbo-Sathla that now goes by the name of Abhoth.

“The Coming of the White Worm”

An enormous, heat-leeching worm tours the oceans of Hyperborea, gathering up and transmuting wizards so that they can survive the harsh, Arctic climate. And also so that it can eat them, a fact which only our protagonist, Evagh, twigs to. The idiocy of the other sorcerers as they vanish, one by one, beggars belief.

“The Witchcraft of Ulua”

More Zothique. This is one of Smith’s most outrageous tales yet. A virtuous lad is protected from the amorous charms of a beautiful sorceress… so she curses him with all sorts of perverted, necrotic phantasms to ruin his living days. Smith goes pretty heavy in what he implies about Amalzain’s nightmares, not to mention the stuff that he just outright says. Very squicky.

“The Tomb-Spawn”

Zothique I think stands out because so much of it borrows from the opulence of Vathek and the Arabian Nights. Anyway, if a story starts out with two guys being told a story about a lost city and an entombed horror, and the story includes a prophecy about HOW TWO GUYS ARE GONNA ACCIDENTALLY FIND IT, then it’s pretty fuckin’ obvious, don’t ya think??

“The Death of Malygris”

Atlantis! Which, uh, isn’t fundamentally different from Zothique or Hyperborea when you are talking about a secret cabal of sorcerers and a King, all of whom chafe under the imposition of a necromancer who they think is dead but are terrified of taking the steps to prove that he is. This goes about as well as can be expected.

“The Dark Age”

Post-apocalyptic sci-fi; it feels more like the premise of a modern fantasy / sci-fi story, one revealed in a twist late in the first book or so. A global war reduced most of the Earth to the Stone Age, with the current generation completely ignorant of the past. A group of scientists created a technological ark to eventually re-develop society, but fails to fulfill their purpose.

It’s time to finish my tour of Smith’s best-known contributions to fantasy and science fiction!! The intro to this one goes REALLY heavy on the praise, like I’m embarrassed to be reading it. It jives with the photoshop job on the cover.

!!!!!

King hits you with everything that the outside world gets to see of Haven’s climax before feeling it back to the climax from Jim’s POV. It’s a little jarring, and the firebug story is a very weird aside, but it does the heavy lifting for the cleanup.

😬😬😬

They are finally inside the alien ship and I am amused by the last person trying to get into Haven, an investigative reporter. I really doubt that this scoop is gonna go well for him but I root for him in a way that I can’t because I know how the Tommyknockers movie ended for Jim, and while it may not be exactly the same the writing is on the wall between his situation and his terminal alcoholism and depression.

It feels like we are in the final act of the novel, the revelation of what is inside the shed, but we’re only 75% through the book o.O

We are finally back in Jim’s part of the story and while I won’t begrudge the chronicling of Haven’s crack-up it is still a relief to have his narrative dovetailed in with the others. Also, King’s Maine has to be absolutely FUCKED. Does this slice of reality have vampires running around, too? Haven is RIGHT NEXT to DERRY.

well the mission to Haven went about as well as could be expected. Now King is rounding out the tales of Haven with the end of this first phase of folks transitioning into aliens.