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“The Maze of the Enchanter”

I think that we’ve seen Xiccarph before? Maybe the planet with the demon flower? Anyway
most of the planet suffers from the whims of the sorcerer Maal Dweb (dweeb) who demands the most beautiful women of the planet for his harem. Their erstwhile boyfriends try to rescue them… with predictable results versus a being who wields god-like power.

“The Dweller in the Gulf”

This is another planetary story but plays at cosmic horror as Earth-prospectors on Mars get way more than they bargained for when they explore a mysterious cave and its incomprehensibly enormous spiraling pit. The monster has a pretty gruesome means of affecting body horror but I just about lost it at its suction cup legs (the hash-slinging slasher!!!)

“The Dimension of Chance”

This is sort of like one of those planetary adventures except it is a world of more or less complete chaos, where water and boulders can appear to roll uphill as gravity isn’t really gravity at all. The framing story is slightly less futuristic and features Japanese spies as the human villains who the heroic Americans followed into the stultifying insanity.

“The Isle of the Torturers”

Depressing, doomed Zothique. The first part of this story is about a bizarre plague that kills instantly and leaves its victims with silver, gleaming skin, wiping out what appears to be one of the few benevolent holdouts of humanity. The other is the super-gross parade of tortures that the king is subjected to, with Smith’s imagination outdoing itself.

“The Ice-Demon”

More Hyperborea! Actually this one is another cursed loot story that reveals an important detail about the enormous glacier, Polarion. It’s actually the supernatural manifestation of a demon who is slowly smothering the ancient civilization as it entombs the continent in ice. Smith is pretty gruesome here with the deaths of the two jewel merchants.

“The White Sybil”

One of those prose-poems that owes more to Lord Dunsany’s format, I think, this is a fable about a poet who falls in love with a sort of phantasmal oracle of ethereal beauty, with things not ending quite as he was expecting once his libido tries to take over the encounter.

“The Disinterment of Venus”

Hey, it’s the third Averoigne tale of this volume! Gardening monks dig up a statue of Venus that was buried in the monastery. It compels them to touch it and, when they do, they leave the monastery at night and commit debaucheries. It’s a very curious read; I like to think of it as a satire of toxic masculinity that even the well-intentioned monks fall afoul of.

“A Star-Change”

This is another one of those “earth man ends up on an alien world” stories. The horror hook is that the protagonist sees their planet as uniquely terrifying until the aliens alter his senses so that he can perceive it as they do, after which it’s fine. Later, when a calamity condemns their world, they send him back to his. But, uh, they forget to reverse the operation on his senses…

“The Beast of Averoigne”

Another Averoigne! But, uh, this one is different as the usually pagan threats that are leveled at the medieval French province are supplanted by a cosmic demon that rides a comet and hops off in order to suck the marrow out of spines. The story cross-connects with Hyperborea as the means by which the Beast is dispatched relies on an antique demon from the ancient First civilization.

“The Mandrakes”

Averoigne! A married witch couple is tolerated because they make awesome love potions from mandrake roots, but the husband murders the wife over a dispute and then carefully buries her body in the mandrake grove. The end result is a weird sort of body horror where the roots look like the nude body of his dead wife, bleed blood, and turn out to be very not good for love potions.

It’s time for more Clark Ashton Smith!

“The Last Illusion”

A fun paranormal detective story where the eternal soul of a magician hangs in the balance.
The hard boiled detective tone feels kind of parodic next to the magic and infernal devices. I know that Harry D’Amour gets his own book later down the line; I’m here for it. The added flair is pretty much what this story about a relatively traditional demonic bargain needed.

“Twilight at the Towers”

There is some sort of bizarre secret agent game going on here and a mind control aspect. It isn’t until the very end where Barker basically spells out what kind of lunacy is at play. Even then, there’s a bit of mystery at play. Are they lycanthropes? Or some sort of experiment a la Moreau?

“How Spoilers Bleed”

Tackling something of colonialism with three Europeans in South America who are afflicted with a horrifying curse that causes any matter not of their own to abrade their flesh and being. It’s a very bleak story.

“The Life of Death”

Pretty good fakeout, here! I was not expecting the ending. This is a very morbid tale, about death and mortality and a protagonist who gets a little too involved with her ideation as she copes with the loss of her ability to birth life, the price for her evasion of Death By Cancer. It’s darkly funny as a story where the apparently metaphysical angle is, um, not.

“In the Flesh”

A pretty good slow burn of a horror story that has shades of Lovecraft’s obsession with antiquated relations that lay some sort of claim on their descendants to bring about their rebirth. Barker’s treatment offers more to the metaphysics of murder and why it perpetuates in the living world as he offers up a dark fantasy of the afterlife of the damned.

“Babel’s Children”

Not-bloody speculative fiction! I mean, the gruesomeness is in the premise of the secret reality, that all political decisions are made by a small group of political scientists, and in protest to the growing idiocy of the political actors who pose as leaders they have taken to playing games to decide the outcomes. It’s kind of depressing but this feels more like a Vonnegut dark comedy.

“The Madonna”

Cosmic horror where the 30s would not dare tread. Barker’s Virgin Mother has the air of Clark Ashton Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla. It is a supreme femininity in stark contrast to the Rawhead Rex, even capable of transforming the male sex to its counter. It’s sort of gothic horror but the aftermath and nature of the differing reactions adds to the depth of the story.