(Ashamed to say, an angel from the Fifth Aether didn't deliver up my copy; that arrived courtesy of Dom Zero's Drunken Master Book Pronto-Prompt Delivery Service: Balham to Somerset direct door-to-door service, followed by mucho binge-drinking, smoking and talking crap...thoroughly recommended!)
2 comments:
I knew you'd have Volume 1, I don't think i've ever been surer of anything (though with my increasing flakiness that's not exactly illuminating)...
is any of this stuff any good?... no idea why I went on a mission to buy these books since no one I know has ever recommended them or anything like that (I think I saw The King in Yellow in someone's blog...)
...must be some kind of cultural residue, an ember that I'm missing...
"Is any of this stuff any good?..." Hell, it's all relative...probably not; who knows, but I like it. Or some of it, at least.
He's a 'better' writer than Lovecraft (the prose is more 'poetic', less overwraught), tho' his own personal mythos isn't so tight or thrilling. Mind you, some of it overlaps with HPL's stuff, 'cause they were mates and corresponded w/ each other - both wrote for Weird Tales (along with Robert E Howard they make up The Big Three... )
The best stuff is really enjoyable and chocful of far-out ideas (tho generally not as far-out as HPL)...but Smith's a very 'visual' writer; very good at conjuring up imaginary images and hallucinatory atmospheres...he was also a sculptor who made really strange idols and otherworldly fetish-objects from wood, etc so I guess he had a strong visual/artistic/spacial manipulation edge to his brain's hard-wiring...
"I knew you'd have Volume 1..." Well, I'd been looking for copies of these for ages too (I had them when I was about 14 and wanted to read them again), then Dom just sort of appeared at the door with them (cheers, man!); didn't even have to leave the house! Now, that's magic for ya....
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