dumnbunny

So a small, independent publisher, Night Shade Books, is releasing a series of books collecting the writings of Clark Ashton Smith, the first one named after one of Smith's stories, "The End of the Story." Somehow I managed to miss this author when I got big into fantasy, sci-fi and horror back in my youth. These days, I'm doing much more reading for pleasure than I've managed in the last, oh, decade or so, rebuilding and adding to my collection of speculative fiction. Enough people have raved about Smith that when I saw the Night Shade published collection pop up on Amazon I grabbed it.

With the opening paragraph of the second story in the book, "The Abominations of Yondo", I was hooked:

The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the grey dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orb-like mountains which rise from its pitted and wrinkled plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the watchful gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished, and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.

Fuckin' A!