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The book has a bunch of fantasy, sci fi, and horror stories by Clark Ashton Smith. It's very good. The end of the book includes letters to and from HP Lovecraft, CAS's other contemporaries, notes regarding publishers, CAS's thoughts on his own stories, and other stuff. HP Lovecraft was very supportive of CAS.
CAS was extraordinarily productive. I don't remember how many stories he wrote in his career but it was quite a lot. More than a hundred.
CAS must have had a thesaurus close at hand at all times when he was writing. He used more fancy words than any other author I've read. CAS really liked describing colors in his stories for some reason. I can honestly call CAS a wordsmith.
A few highlights, from what I can remember.
1. The Abominations of Yondo
It's a very good story, except it seems to have no real ending.
2. The Metamorphosis of the World
Described in another post of mine.
3. Marooned in Andromeda
A sci fi story about marooned mutineers. They are forced to explore their new planet by a succession of events.
4. The Immeasurable Horror
This is my favorite story in this collection. It's a sci fi horror story. Humans are making an aerial exploration of an alien planet and they encounter a colossal slug-like creature.
5. The Monster of the Prophecy
The human protagonist is the monster in this story. He's taken to another planet to fulfill a prophecy. This story contains a ridiculous plot device to save the human's life. Spoiler
A meteor hits a temple where the human is being tortured, and he uses the confusion to flee.
It's a very good story regardless.
6. The Tale of Satampra Zeiros
Reading this story was very fun. Two guys scoff at tales of a haunted town that people are afraid of. They explore the town and discover why people are afraid of it.
Recommendation: If you like HP Lovecraft or WH Hodgson, you'll like this collection.
I made a list of some of the fancy shmancy words that Clark Ashton Smith put into his stories. Here's a partial list of words that I had to look up. Some of these words should be pretty obvious as to what they mean; for example, funereal.
This is an absolutely excellent sci fi story of a sleeping guy being awakened in the far future. The movie Idiocracy has a lot in it that resembles The Marching Morons, so much so, that it seems like Idiocracy was based on the story.
You can read it for free here, which is what I did.
Notes:
1. His story "Pigeons From Hell" is probably his best story therein. PFH was made into an episode of the podcast Midnight Marinara which you can find here.
2. Some of the stories mention Lovecraft's creatures.
3. REH was pretty good at writing horror adventure stories.
4. He wrote a lot of poetry. I don't like poetry so they didn't interest me very much.
There were a few things I didn't like though.
1. REH used racial language typical of his time, which was the early twentieth century. A lot of it is ugly.
2. REH liked to state people's ethnic backgrounds as a source of pride. I don't like that very much. I've seen movies where a character tells another character: "My ancestors were ruling their country while your ancestors were having sex with goats!" That sort of ethnic pride strongly reminds me of what REH put in his stories.
Recommendation: Read it if you like short horror stories.
William Hope Hodgson is a predecessor to the early 20th century more famous "weird tale" authors. He wasn't a contemporary of Lovecraft and pals. However, a lot of his stories have a similar feel as the stories of the "weird tale" authors (RW Chambers, CA Smith, HP Lovecraft, etc.).
Interestingly, Hodgson reused the same premises and settings for a lot of his stories. For example, there are different short stories that use the premise of a ship being stuck in seaweed and the crew trying to free it. The characters are different, the stories are different, but the settings are the same. There is more than one story where the crew finds a derelict ship. There are many stories where a ship seems haunted, and it turns out that, in the tradition of Scooby-Doo Where Are You, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the supposed hauntings.
And now, this particular volume.
The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and Other Nautical Adventures: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 1
I will never understand why the table of contents isn't available online for every single book. I just searched for it for this book and couldn't find it. So, I had to find my physical copy to make notes about what's in it. This particular volume has the Glen Carrig story, the Sargasso Sea stories, Captain Gault stories, and a few others.
I finished reading this book a year ago, I think. My memory of some things is spotty. Overall, the stories are excellent and fun to read. The stories in this volume are more of the adventure genre than anything else. I'm most interested in horror stories, not adventure stories, so this volume, even though it wasn't my primary interest, was still enjoyable.
The Glen Carrig story is an adventure story of sailors who abandoned their ship.
The Sargasso Sea stories are about ships stuck in seaweed, in the Sargasso Sea.
The Captain Gault stories are about the eponymous captain, who is a smuggler. Kind of like an honorable thief.
The two Captain Jat stories are about the eponymous captain and his abused cabin boy, Pibby Tawles.
The Cargunka stories are about Cargunka, a sort of heroic pub owner, who used to be a pirate or captain or something.
This book is published by Night Shade publishers. I was amazed at how many mistakes were in the book. Like there was one easily noticeable error once every twenty pages. That's quite a lot. It looked a lot like the contents of the book was scanned and then proofread. For example, the errors were like these: "shove" may have been "sh0ve" and "shorn" may have been "shom". I made up those examples just now. However, those made up examples are typical of the type of errors in the book.
Recommendation: If you like early 20th century adventure stories, you'll like this book.
I bought this book years ago and only finished it recently. It's pretty good if you like myth stories and folktales. There are plenty of creation stories, origin stories (such as such-and-such group acquiring fire), talking animals, and a few monsters. Plenty of trickster animals are in the stories. Most of the talking animals seemingly had bodies of humans. Coyote, for example, was described as having human features in a few stories. All of the stories are very short. I think the longest story is 6 pages.
The stories are taken from other collections and put together into this one book. I saw that the word "teepee" had at least 3 different spellings in the book, and the fact that the stories are taken from various collections explains that.
The word Indian was used a lot in the stories which caught my eye. Why not use the word "man", or "boy", or perhaps "Hopi woman" or just "person"? This is from the story Boy Stolen by Thunderbird:
Many, many years ago, a young Winnebago Indian orphan boy lived in a small village with his grandmother.
The story The Celestial Canoe has this sentence:
The father returned to the camp of his Alabama tribe, where he chose another wife, an Indian maiden, whom he felt assured would remain with him on earth.
The story Men Visit the Sky has this:
Down, down, down the Indians dropped for a while, before starting upward again toward the sky.
The stories come from tribes and nations that span the entirety of the land that is currently within the United States. Strangely, a lot of characters that had names that were common English phrases, like "Eagle Feather" or "Other Boy", were omnipresent in the book. That means that groups from wildly different cultures named their characters in the same stylistic manner.
I suspect the reason for the use of the word Indian and the naming style of characters is due to English speakers transcribing oral stories with their own biases and styles. The introduction says that a lot of the stories were collected in the 1800s and early 1900s, so the Native Americans themselves may have used those words due to their influence from English speakers.
I think my only negative for this book is that it has a lot of errors. For example, the glossary has the phrase "scared bundle" when it clearly was supposed to be "sacred bundle".
Recommendation: If you like myth stories, you'd probably like this book.
The Dead Sea Scrolls : A New Translation
Commentary by Wise, Abegg, Cook
The book is a collection of the texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls organized by subject. Examples of the names of the texts of the book: The Damascus Document, The Temple Scroll, Charter for Israel in the Last Days, Wiles of the Wicked Woman, The Book of Jubilees, Rule of Initiation, and The Phases of the Moon. Each section is called a "text" and has a number. Text 11 is The War Scroll, for example. Some texts are made of bits from more than one scroll. For example, text 6, The Book of Secrets, is made of scroll parts found in more than one cave.
Nearly every text (or all of them?) is incomplete. They have bits missing which are denoted by ellipses. There's a bit of symbology in the texts which are explained in one of the several introductions. [], {}, . . . , and <>, for example.
One odd thing in the book is that a lot of the corrected words (denoted by []) have the brackets within the words. For example, text 6, The Book of Secrets, has this: "[hol]iness". The original content of the scrolls was written in a language that's not English. All of texts in the book are translations. So, that means that the original word for "holiness" had at least two characters where part of the word, probably the beginning, was missing. It's weird. Text 13, The Festival Prayer, has "[kn]ow". So, some consonant sound or just the first part of the word for "know" was missing. It's funky.
The commentary by the three guys was pretty good. Tons of introductions to everything is what I'm talking about. What they wrote was well written and informative. The commentaries were the best part of the book.
I read religious text as literature, not to study. In other words, for fun. This book's format, sadly, does not lend itself to reading for fun. So many parts of so many texts are missing that it makes the individual texts hard to grasp. They're hard to latch on to, so to speak. I found my attention wandering far more while reading this book than most other books I've read.
While reading any book, one paragraph flows into another, with no commentary between. While reading six pages later, the content of the book is still related to stuff earlier in the book. Not so with this book. This book has a vast number of interruptions throughout. It's impossible for this book to not be this way. While reading any arbitrary text in this book, it has chunks missing, and just one paragraph later, there's commentary, and then follows another paragraph somewhat unrelated to the previous paragraph. It's like that throughout the entire book. There are mental interruptions all over and it's incredibly hard to latch onto anything continuous. What I'm trying to say is that this book is incredibly hard to pay attention to, at least for me.
This book seems good for scholars, I think. It's not for anyone who likes reading myth stories or religious scripture for fun.
I was expecting some mythical creatures in this book. Things that I had not previously read as part of the Bible. I believe there were none. No griffons, for example. There were a few people who had names that were new to me. Examples: The Watchers (angels kicked out of Heaven), The Teacher of Righteousness, the Man of Mockery, Belial (Satan), the Sons of Light, the Prince of the Host, the Yahad, female and male Wasting-demons, Chest Pain-demon, Fever-demon, Chills-demon, Lilith, howlers, the Sons of Darkness, the Kittim, the angel Sariel, the Boundary-Shifters, the Children of Light, the Shoddy-Wall-Builders, the Prince of Lights, Shemihaza, 450 foot tall giants, Mastemah (Satan), the Prince of Malevolence (Mastemah, aka Satan), the Spreader of Lies, and the Wicked Priest.
I don't remember that the archangel Michael is ever mentioned in the Bible. Perhaps in the book of Revelation. He's definitely mentioned in the DSS.
One of the psalms attributed to David actually mentions that a demon has horns. I think that's the only time I've seen where religious text mentions demons with horns.
Recommendation: If you're a scholar, you might like this. Otherwise, skip it.
Attachments
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MR James was a good author, there is no doubt. Sadly, for me, a lot of his stories kind of bored me. He had some really good ones though. All of his stories followed the same storytelling formula which was:
a. friendly, happy introductory text setting the scene
b. somebody learns something
c. people try to do stuff
d. something scary happens
e. calm ending
Of course, my memory could be failing me, and some of the stories don't follow that kind of formula. I do remember that Casting the Runes doesn't follow that formula.
The more famous stories that I can remember right now are these. I've heard all of the stories below as radio plays or podcast episodes or Librivox recordings, in addition to having read them.
1. 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'
A whistle. Golfing. Ghosts. Probably Mr MR James's best story.
2. Casting the Runes
A guy casts a spell on another guy to kill him.
3. The Mezzotint
A painting changes.
4. A Warning to the Curious
A crown with a ghostly curse.
5. Lost Hearts
A boy is brought to his relative's mansion as a pupil and boy howdy, the relative in question isn't a good person.
Recommendation: Read it if you feel like it.
Here's the table of contents. A reviewer on Amazon was kind enough to type this up and I copied it here for your reading pleasure.
Canon Alberic's Scrapbook
Lost Hearts
The Mezzotint
The Ash Tree
The Number 13
Count Magnus
'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
A School Story
The Rose Garden
The Tractate Middoth
Casting the Runes
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
Martin's Close
Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance
The Residence at Whitminster
The Diary of Mr Poynter
An Episode of Cathedral History
The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
Two Doctors
The Haunted Dolls' House
The Uncommon Prayer-Book
A Neighbour's Landmark
A View from a Hill
A Warning to the Curious
An Evening's Entertainment
There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard
Rats
After Dark in the Playing Fields
Wailing Well
The Experiment
The Malice of Inanimate Objects
A Vignette
Stories I have Tried to Write
AFTERWORD
FURTHER READING
BIOGRAPHY
Attachments
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This is a small collection of short stories by Mr Cousins. Overall, I enjoyed reading it, but it has major flaws. The stories are more in the horror genre than anything else.
The short stories are these, followed by their premises.
Larry: A giant spider monster enters the lives of a couple.
The Walk: A girl has a bad attitude.
Siouxwood: A vacation spot, murders, and a guy who hears voices.
Special Needs: An autistic boy seemingly has super powers.
Citadel1970: Disease and apocalypse.
I liked Larry, Special Needs, and Citadel1970. The Walk was pointless, and Siouxwood was just way too random.
I first started reading Mr Cousins's second book, Larry and the Creeping Horde, and I thought it just outright sucked. I decided to stop reading it and give his first book, Exhibition, a try. The first story is Larry, which is his character that he reused for his second book. I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it. I decided to stick with Exhibition and see if I liked the rest of the stories. I was even more pleasantly surprised to say that I enjoyed them! I couldn't believe it.
Mr Cousins has a writing style that isn't technically great. However, I enjoyed the premises of his stories. Amazingly, I found that his writing is a page turner. I also found that it was easy to pay attention to his stuff without my mind wandering, which is what my mind is wont to do. These are enormous plusses.
And now for the flaws. Mr Cousins has at least two errors per page that I can't not see. Most of his pages have more than two errors on them. Capitalization, punctuation, syntax, dependent clauses with no independent clauses, variable indentation, and spelling. I'm sure there are other technical errors that I'm missing.
Mr Cousins has other flaws in his writing that I can't describe easily. Storytelling flaws perhaps? Like the flow of the story doesn't work correctly in places. The entire premise of the story Citadel1970 didn't get explained until something like halfway through it. I didn't like that. Even with that flaw, I still enjoyed the story. Siouxwood is extremely poorly put together and that bothered me at times.
Overall, his stories are poorly put together. He has a tremendous amount of room for improvement. In my opinion, if he continues with his writing, he'll probably overcome his flaws.
The strangest spelling error is the word "than". Mr Cousins spelled "than" correctly exactly once. All other times, he spelled it like "then". How could this have happened? My best guess is that a certain person proofread the chunk of his text that contains the correct spelling, and that person didn't proofread the rest of his text. Different proofreaders read the rest of the text.
Recommendation: Read it if you feel like it, and you like horror.
I read this book ages ago. It's excellent. I remember very little about the individual stories unfortunately. I do, however, remember that this book is excellent and I loved it. Fredric Brown was extremely clever with his stories.
Here's a little bit of what I can remember.
Arena: A Star Trek episode was based on this episode. Specifically where Kirk fights the Gorn.
Abominable: A guy goes in search of a missing woman and he encounters a yeti.
Knock: The last man on Earth hears a knock at the door. This story was made into radio plays. X-Minus One did a version of this, for example. So did Dimension X and Mindwebs.
I remember these stories, but I can't remember their names.
Alien giants are on Earth and they're emitting some gas.
A guy is sick of his wife and murders her on his birthday.
