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“The Kingdom of the Worm”

A bit of fan-fiction based on a 15th-century knight’s fantastic account of his travels. The description is excellent; Smith can paint the landscape of a cursed kingdom like no other. The protagonist is unsurprisingly passive, accounting for the author’s fatalism. I wonder whether Smith’s work and Robert E. Howard’s may be at polar opposites in action and character development.

“The Ghoul”

Another Arabian story. A young man has made a horrible bargain to preserve the memory of his deceased beloved and is compelled to fulfill it, one way or another. It’s a nice little story, filtered through Smith’s haze of resignation / depression / fatality.

“The Face By the River”

Another antihero who deludes himself as to his culpability. He intended to kill his adulterous lover when he was strangling her; it doesn’t matter that, when he pushed her away, it was into the Sacramento River. Anyway, this jerk is haunted by Elise to a mania that eventually drives him to his death. The description of his haunting is pretty cool.

“The Kiss of Zoraida”

Another Arabian tale. This one is about an adulterer who is flushed out by the jealous husband. The dude is forced to kiss his dead lover to get his share of lethal poison, but - again - his stoicism makes him a dry character and diminishes the horror of his situation. Smith’s characters may feel things but we rarely see them act with feeling.

“An Offering to the Moon”

Two archaeologists turn out to be reincarnated people of the Atlantean era and their work takes them to the scene of an aborted sacrifice, ages past, but their past lives assert themselves. The emotion that dominates so much of Clark’s work is RESIGNATION; the essay on Fate in this collection’s introduction is incredibly apt.

“The Gorgon”

Badass. A man in London is offered the opportunity to glimpse Medusa’s head through the mirror. His host is a serial killer whose M.O. is to entice people to view the head through a mirror and then force them to look directly at it, if the head’s natural power to draw their gaze doesn’t work alone. The protagonist is, eh, a bit too aloof early on, but the concept is awesome.

This book is freakin’ great

“A Rendezvous in Averoigne”

Another story from France’s Bermuda Triangle, Averoigne. A bard tries to arrange a tryst with his lady friend in a cursed forest and almost pays the ultimate price. There’s foreboding landscapes, phantasmal servants, and a vampiric host. Surprisingly, this story has a happy ending! It’s, like, the polar opposite of “The Satyr”.

“The Willow Landscape”

This is a Chinese-themed story that is basically a retelling of the framed tale found within Edogawa Ranpo’s “Traveler With the Pasted Rag Picture”. It lacks all of Ranpo’s substance, which isn’t necessarily a dig on Smith, but it better defines the difference between the level of craft of both authors.

“Told in the Desert”

A middle-eastern set story, more like a fairy tale told as a parable. A man is saved by, perhaps ghost but probably a female djinn, and eventually gets bored of his paradise. He leaves, disregarding her warning that he will never find her again, and - surprise - when he tries to he never does. It’s a beautiful little tale.

“The Red World of Polaris”

The second space-faring tale of Captain Volmar’s crew. They come across a highly-advanced alien race who has put its brains inside metal bodies. It’s a doomed and dying planet, though, and the description of the climax with the Flying Polyp-style grey goo monsters that crave Tloong brains is pretty intense.

“The Door to Saturn”

Hyperborea! But, uh, it’s just an excuse for an ancient sorcerer to take a trip to Saturn to evade personal destruction. This is another one of Clark’s planetary tours, played up to humorous camp as a minor series of misadventures as the sorcerer and his pursuer move witlessly through the alien societies.

Because I kind of want something more lighthearted before I tackle Flannery O’Connor, whose crushing Catholic judgement of our lacking moral framework is… hefty

Notice that The Sandman is f’n fantastic

So there is a glut of notes that’s at least half as long as the text itself. They’re definitely worth reading but they are more informational on what Europeans thought the antiquated Muslim world was like through the notes that they had available. The editor’s contesting / contextualizing information is just as important if not more so. They are greatly appreciated, however.

Idk what I was expecting. Like, pages upon pages of a description of Muslim torments in Hell, I guess, more like what actually happens in Dante’s Inferno. It’s a very weird book and bounces between romance and earnest Muslim cautionary tale and goofy slapstick and occult horror. It’s clearly that the descriptive language is one of the more profound influences on authors like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

Well that was underwhelming.

WE ARE FINALLY IN MUSLIM HELL!!! Vathek can only begin to imagine how badly he has f’d up. His seduced princess appears to have no idea whatsoever and thinks that Iblis (Satan) is kind of cute.

Gulchenrouz, the 13 year old boy, is spared from predation and damnation and Beckford also walks back the horror of Vathek’s sacrifice of his subjects’ children by revealing that a genius saved them and granted them eternal childhood in a genius-created paradise, to which he also conveyed Gulchenrouz.

So Vathek has Nouronihar. I think I know how her story is supposed to play out - I read a summary of Vathek after seeing it mentioned in Lovecraft’s essay on Gothic horror - but it’s still a ways away from the vision of Hell that apparently influenced so many authors, no doubt related in the story’s conclusion.

Enter Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz, two betrothed 13-year olds who have the misfortune of catching Vathek’s eye. The tone of the piece had changed many times; right now it’s sort of a romantic tragedy.

Thus far this book is mostly about illustrating the wonders of the East and how most people can barely stand how horrible Vathek has come to be in his pursuit of all excesses as he has become the antithesis of a devout Muslim

The annotations make this a highly educational read not necessarily in the realities of the Muslim world but in what Europeans thought they knew about it and why. It’s also clear that anything that seemed extravagant has been magnified tenfold by Beckford for humor.