The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Read Online Free Page A

“the main object [of the weird tale] is the creation of a supernatural, extra-human atmosphere; the real actors are the terrible arcanic forces, the esoteric cosmic malignities.” 16 He differed from Lovecraft in that he rejected realism as the means to this end, writing that “weird, fantastic writing, by its emphasis of the environing cosmic wonder and spirit of things, may actually be truer to the spirit of life than the work which merely concerns itself with literalities, as most modern fiction does.” 17
    Smith’s cultivation of a prose and poetic idiom of richness, depth, and luxuriance—reminiscent of Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, Lord Dunsany, and others—was avowed and deliberate, as he wrote to Lovecraft: “My own
conscious
ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.” 18 Such a style may not have been in favor in the heyday of Hemingway, but a more expansive understanding of the effectiveness of prose for the purposes for which it is designed may help us to appreciate Smith’s idiom as an essential element in the exotic fantasy he was seeking to create. His devotion to “lands forgotten and unfound” 19 was unremitting, and out of his unbridled imagination he created realms of beauty and terror that have permanently enriched the literature of fantasy.
    S. T. JOSHI

Suggestions for Further Reading
    PRIMARY
    Smith’s earliest book publications were volumes of poetry. The volumes of poetry published in his lifetime have been cited in the Introduction. After his death, his literary executor, Roy A. Squires, issued a number of small-press editions beginning with
The Hill of Dionysus
( 1962 ). It was only in the 1980 s that David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi began amassing the entirety of Smith’s poetic output; their work finally achieved fruition in
The Complete Poetry and Translations
(Hippocampus Press, 2007 – 8 ; three vols.), the first two volumes of which contained original poetry (including hundreds of unpublished and uncollected poems), and the third volume of which contained his translations from Baudelaire’s
Fleurs du mal
and other French and Spanish poets.
    Smith had to issue his first collection of stories,
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
( 1933 ), himself, under the imprint of the
Auburn Journal.
Arkham House’s book publications of Smith’s tales have been cited in the Introduction. Various paperback editions, initially in Lin Carter’s adult fantasy series, appeared in the 1970 s and 1980 s, with limited success. Steve Behrends issued several pamphlets (Necronomicon Press, 1987 – 88 ) featuring corrected editions of individual stories, based on consultation of original manuscripts. This work culminated in Scott Connors and Ron Hilger’s edition of Smith’s
Collected Fantasies
(Night Shade, 2006 – 10 ; five vols.); a sixth volume of
Miscellaneous Writings
appeared in 2011 .
    Two novels that Smith wrote as a teenager have been published by Hippocampus Press:
The Black Diamonds
( 2002 ) and
The Sword of Zagan
( 2004 ). Will Murray published a novella called
As It Is Written
(Donald M. Grant, 1982 ; as by De Lysle Ferrée Cass), purporting to be by Smith; but it was later established that Cass was an actual author of the period.
    Some of Smith’s prose poems were included in
Ebony and Crystal,
but were not collected until Donald Sidney-Fryer assembled them in
Poems in Prose
(Arkham House, 1965 ). A more exhaustive edition, based on original manuscripts, was edited by Marc and Susan Michaud, Steve Behrends, and S. T. Joshi:
Nostalgia of the Unknown: The Complete Prose Poetry
(Necronomicon Press, 1988 , 1993 ). A still