Lord Samper's Library

Page Count: Four pages and about four lines. I found ‘Sadastor’ in the collection ‘Out of Space & Time: Volume 2’ but if you can’t find a copy, you can always read it over at ‘Eldritch Dark’ ( Link ). It takes barely any time at all to read but is definitely worth the time you put into it. Quick thoughts follow (you’re really not going to get much more than that from a story that’s only a few pages long…) ‘Sadastor’ is ‘the tale that was told to a fair lamia by the demon Charnadis as they sat together on the top of Mophi, above the sources of the Nile, in those years when the sphinx was young’. It’s a lot more than that though, of course it is. We’ve got a beautifully told travelogue through the outer realms of Clark Ashton Smith’s universe and it’s a universe of wonders that you feel privileged to have been shown. The journey may only be a few paragraphs long but Ashton Smith literally fits an entire universe into those few paragraphs, seemingly without any effort at all. And the...

Both tales are taken from the collection ‘The Lure of Atlantis’, edited by Michael Wheatley. But you knew that already, the cover art was probably a bit of a giveaway ;o) Anyway… Before I get onto the short stories, have a little blurb about the collection as a whole, All about us on the stairs was some of the most exquisite statuary I have ever seen... save for a few pieces carved in the form of some hideous beast, the like of which I have never seen on earth...' The sunken continent of Atlantis has dwelt in the collective imagination of writers and artists for centuries; a bejewelled paradox bubbling with themes of irrecoverable loss and quixotic faith in its rediscovery. This new anthology collects stories from the vast, yet seldom recognised, vault of Atlantean fiction from the Golden Age of Weird Tales magazine, presented in four core sections, perfect for diving into: - Atlantis Rediscovered – in which the ruins of ancient Atlantis are found again. - Atlantis Revisited –...

Last week's dose of Covid put rather a large dent in last weeks reading plans and left me not able to concentrate on an awful lot this week. I'm not complaining though, just thankful really that it was only a light dose this time round. Anyway... What is a Graeme to do in situations like these? You know what this Graeme does, he goes out and pinches posts, from earlier blogs of his, to fill in a gap here. And that's ok ;o) Sometimes, you have to do what you need to. I thought I'd found all my old 'Clark Ashton-Smith' posts, and brought them here, but it turns out that 'The Abominations of Yondo' was still hiding away... Not any longer it isn't! ;o) If you're after the original post, you'll find that over Here . I've changed a little bit here and there but nothing major. If you're after reading the story itself (and you really should, trust me) then you'll find it waiting for you over Here . If you're still with me, let me tell...

Page Count: Eight Pages. It feels like a little while since I last visited any of the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith and with the way my reading has been going just recently, I figured that maybe another short trip would do me some good. And it did, but I’ll tell you about that in a minute. In the meantime… In the triumvirate of Lovecraft, Howard and Smith, someone was always going to be left holding up the rear but it always feels a little unfair that Smith was the unlucky recipient of the third place ‘trophy’. Lovecraft may have come up with the concept of Cosmic Horror but Smith is the better storyteller, in this setting (and funnily enough, ‘The Treader of the Dust’ is a Mythos tale), and I feel like he deserves a little more credit for that. Anyway… My attention span is shot at the moment so when I saw that ‘The Treader of the Dust’ was only a few pages long (all of eight pages), I knew it was the read for me. I found ‘The Treader of the Dust’ in the ‘Lost Worlds’ collection but you...

I told you I wanted to have all my Clark Ashton Smith posts in one place ;o) Thanks for bearing with me by the way, last week was a bit of a nightmare and this week looks like promising more of the same so there may well be a few more posts like this. I'll make sure that they're all good ones though, it's the least that I can do ;o) That's enough of that. While I go and have a think about original posts for this week (time permitting, there are a couple of things I'd love to post about), have some thoughts on 'The Holiness of Azedarac' from way back in 2014. The full review is Here  but there's only a quick introductory paragraph that I haven't included here. All the good stuff is below... 'By the Ram with a Thousand Ewes! By the Tail of Dagon and the Horns of Derceto!' said Azédarac, as he fingered the tiny, pot-bellied vial of vermilion liquid on the table before him. 'Something will have to be done with this pestilential Brother Ambros...

My exam revision isn't going well at all but I still have to not only do the exam but pass it as well so... You're going to see a few more posts like this over the next few days; recycled but still hopefully worth the read ;o)  I was looking through another, older and defunct, blog of mine and came across a little cache of Clark Ashton Smith posts; it's been a while since I've read these particular short stories but I wanted all of these posts in one place so I'm taking the opportunity for a bit more 'lazy posting' that gives me time to get my head round ITIL all over again... If you want to read the bits where I just waffle on about trying to find a copy of 'Emperor of Dreams', you can read the full review over Here . If you want to read 'The Charnel God' (and you do, even if you don't realise it just yet), you can do that over Here . In the meantime, here's the post itself... "And all who die within the walls of the city are sa...

I had a lot of fun with ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’, last week , so when I realised that there was another tale featuring the rotund thief (thanks for the heads up @AnthonyPerconti) there was no chance that I’d leave it as long, as I did last time, before picking up my trusty copy of ‘Emperor of Dreams’ and giving it a read. And to cut a long story short, that’s exactly what I did this morning during my trip into work, finishing it off over a bacon roll in the office. ‘The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles’ is a slightly different read to ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’ but is no less fun for it… Let it be said as a foreword to this tale that I have robbed no man who was not in some way a robber of others. In all my long and arduous career, I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, sometimes known as the master thief, have endeavoured to serve merely as an agent in the rightful redistribution of wealth. The adventure I have now to relate was no exception: though, as it happened in the outcome...

Last night, I was looking for a short(ish) story to read and round off a week where I haven't been able to find the time to read as much as I would have liked. Hopefully next week will be better, we'll see. But anyway... I couldn't settle on anything. Seriously, the floor of my flat is a like a graveyard for short stories... And then I realised that it had been bloody ages since I'd read anything by Clark Ashton Smith ( since November last year actually, I went and checked) and the reading took care of itself. This time round, I decided to see what tale it was that Satampra Zeiros had to tell... I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua, which lies neglected by the worship of man in the jungle-taken suburbs of Commoriom, that long-deserted capital of the Hyperborean rulers. I shall write it with the violet juice ...

It feels like an absolute age since I last looked at a Clark Ashton Smith short story (it was ‘Necromancy in Naat’ , back in August, which feels like ages given everything that has happened since then, it’s a funny old life sometimes)  so I thought I’d do something about that today 😊 My trusty copy of ‘The Emperor of Dreams’ still has more than a few stories that I haven’t tried yet so I went through the contents page in a search for anything that caught my eye and ended up settling on ‘The Tomb Spawn’; a story that I read while waiting for the electricity to come back on again… (Which it did, don’t worry!) ‘Evening had come from the desert into Faraad, bringing the last stragglers of caravans. In a wine-shop near the northern gate, many travelling merchants from outer lands, parched and weary, were refreshing themselves with the famed vintages of Yoros. To divert them from their fatigue, a story-teller spoke amid the clinking of the wine-cups…’ With this understated yet atmos...

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday, too much other stuff was happening and I ran out of time, Hopefully, this will make up for it... And so a brief sojourn in Zothique draws to a close, for now anyway. I suspect that if there are more 'Zothique' tales to be found, I'll find them and read them but having read 'Necromancy in Naat', I'm going to take a little break from all that darkness. It's an amazing setting but one that is best supped from sparingly I think. It's all beautifully told but there's a lot of darkness and a lot of hopelessness at the same time which you need to be in a good place to deal with. I would thoroughly recommend you read from it though (there are links, to each story, at the bottom of all these posts). 'Necromancy in Naat' is the last of the three 'Zothique' tales, that I was pointed at, and I read it, this morning, after a heavy last few days (shepherding my kids from A to B...) left me in no fit state to r...

After yesterday's post on 'The Empire of the Necromancers', a little chat on Twitter pointed me in the direction of two other tales, of 'Zothique', that should be read at the same time. Now, my prior reading of Clark Ashton Smith's work (I haven't read a lot but I'm getting there) hinted at an inclination to give the narrator an easier ride than the villain of the piece. Bad things happen but there is some kind of natural justice (Karma? I don't know) that will shield bystanders from the worst of the fall out. Reading 'Empire' was a bit of a shock then in that the best you could hope for, from that 'natural justice', was that you got to die all over again; for good this time but even so... Evil will fall but it will also take much that is good with it. That's pretty dark then and I found myself wanting more of that (it has been one of those days...) so I thought I'd give 'The Isle of the Torturers' a go and see what ...

Trying to read anything this week has been like having teeth pulled, drawn out and really painful. There are reasons why but nothing worth bulking out a paragraph for ;o) It has just been one of those weeks where reading is a painful business, which is annoying at the best of times but even more annoying when I'd promised myself that I'd do more book posts... Yeah, that went well. But anyway... It's times like this where I tend to end up reading more short stories, just to keep myself ticking over as it were. It has also been ages since I read any Clark Ashton Smith so off I went to my copy of 'The Emperor of Dreams' and picked out the story with the most eye-catching title, 'Empire of the Necromancers' it was then... The legend of Mmatmuor and Sodosma shall arise only in the latter cycles of Earth, when the glad legends of the prime have been forgotten. Before the time of its telling, many epochs shall have passed away, and the seas shall have fallen in t...

I know I’m repeating myself but this week has been crazy and there’s still a couple of days left to go… I can’t wait for the weekend! Last night was a familiar tale then of my not having a lot in me for reading but having just enough for watching ‘Doctor Who’ with a little bit left over for reading a short story before bed. ‘Doctor Who’ will be the subject of another post; right now, it’s all about the short story ‘The Coming of the White Worm’... I’ve had a lot of fun reading Clark Ashton Smith’s works, over the last few months, so it wasn’t a hard choice to go back to ‘The Emperor of Dreams’ last night. This time round, choosing the story to read was accomplished by the highly scientific method of ‘I never pick a tale from the end of the book, lets pick a tale from the end of the book…’ ‘The Coming of the White Worm’ it was then. 'Evagh the warlock, dwelling beside the boreal sea, was aware of many strange and untimely portents in mid-summer. Chilly burned the sun above Mhu T...

I'm into a couple of books right now but unfortunately nowhere near finishing them in time for a post today... That's the way it goes, sometimes you just can't get everything done and reading books was the thing that had to make way. I'm not going to beat myself up over it, just try and see if I can read quicker over the next few days ;o) I did want to start the week off with a blog post though so figured it was about time we returned to the weird and beautifully drawn worlds of Clark Ashton Smith. This time round, instead of picking a story at random, I decided to go with whatever title stood out the most while I was glancing over the contents. 'The Weaver in the Vault' it is then... 'The instructions of Famorgh, fifty-ninth king of Tasuun, were minutely circumstantial and explicit, and, moreover, were not to be disobeyed without the incurring of penalties that would make mere death a pleasant thing. Yanur, Grotara, and Thirlain Ludoch, three of the king...

I'm back at work today (after ten days off) and spent most of yesterday worrying about what I'm going to find, in my inbox, when I turn my work laptop back on... I'm hoping that my project managers all took last week off as well, and my inbox is empty, but we'll see.. I did finish off Sven Hassel's 'Legion of the Damned' yesterday but my mind was absolutely not on writing big reviews (or even medium sized reviews to be honest) so I thought I'd dig out 'The Emperor of Dreams' again and see if there was a suitable short story to post about. And there was, of course there was. Remember the other day when I said that I fancied reading something set in Averoigne? Well, last night saw me ditch the 'open the book and see what short story jumps out' approach and instead, just go for whatever story had the word 'Averoigne' in the title, 'The Beast of Averoigne' as it happened. I'd completely forgotten but I had read this stor...

I've had a great week off but there has been precious little time for reading (which now I think of it, means that I've been doing pretty well for posts this week, go me!) It's not the worst thing in the world (I was at the beach today, watching my kids have the best time, I wouldn't swap that for anything) but I was feeling the need to read, when I got home tonight, and after finding that a 'Conan' comic wasn't going to scratch that itch, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the short stories of one Clark Ashton Smith. As per the usual rules of choosing a Clark Ashton Smith story, to read and review, I opened the book up and let the falling pages make the choice for me. I'm not going to lie, I was hoping for something Hyperborean (or even something set in Averoigne) but fate decreed that I'd be reading 'The Return of the Sorcerer' tonight. So that's just what I did... 'It is verily known by few, but is nevertheless an attes...

Now that I've gone and dug my copy of 'The Emperor of Dreams' out of a pile of books, I think you'll be seeing a few more short stories featuring here in the future (and now). And because it worked so well, for me anyway, last week, all future reads will be chosen by opening the book at a random page. This week's 'Random Page Opening' takes us on a nine page trip to Hyperborea and a money lender who is more of a 'money keeper', for all the good that does him... There's a guy who begs on Lewisham High Street and we have an understanding. If I have a decent amount of change on me then he's welcome to it. If I don't then no worries, we'll have a chat for a bit then get on with our business. Avoosl Wuthoqquan (and it's no good, I'm copying and pasting that name for the rest of this post...) would have done well to follow my lead. Instead, not only does Avoosl refuse to give the beggar any money at all (having had his dreams of ma...