What I've Read Over the Last Month

Just another wholly original 'what I've read' post

Apr 01, 2025

I'm still unsure of my overarching vision for this Substack. Having blogged sporadically since the age of 10, there's been this pervading itch to start posting on Substack. I'm of the opinion that if something's not particularly important, you'll eventually stop thinking about it. I guess here I am.

I thought that I would start things off with a small selection of books that I've read over the last few months. My reading material isn't genre-bound, and I'm always open to suggestions. My methodology for deciding what to read used to be ad-hoc on any particular week, but as of late I've taken to focusing on a particular author for a period of time—generally two weeks or more—and systematically going through their oeuvre. Some might say there's something strangely mechanical about that approach, but I've found relative freedom in that rigidity.

The Dark Eidolon and Other Stories, Clark Ashton Smith

I came across Clark Ashton Smith by way of H.P. Lovecraft1, although I've only read a few of Lovecraft's most famous works. He deals with much of the same themes as the New England master of horror: cosmic disorder; a macabre sense of humour; ancient eldritch beings. The two had a lengthy correspondence with one another, and Lovecraft's influence rears its head in CAS' work. What sets the two apart is CAS' penchant for utilising the English language as a way to paint and build the worlds in which his stories are set.

A common criticism in modern fiction is the idea of purple prose: needlessly ornate writing, to the extent that it detracts from the substance of the work itself. Whilst CAS' work has been described as such, it's also self-aware, and he revels in his consciously flamboyant prose style: he references obscure minerals, rocks, colours, in order to evince particular emotions and feelings in the reader2. It's not uncommon to see people recoil at his verbosity, but CAS' almost surgical precision in his choice of words makes it work.

Take this excerpt from one of his more popular works, The Last Incantation:

Malygris groped backward to the years of his youth, to the misty, remote, incredible years, where, like an alien star, one memory still burned with unfailing luster—the memory of the girl Nylissa whom he had loved in days ere the lust of unpermitted knowledge and necromantic dominion had ever entered his soul. He had well-nigh forgotten her for decades, in the myriad preoccupations of a life so bizarrely diversified, so replete with occult happenings and powers, with supernatural victories and perils; but now, at the mere thought of this slender and innocent child, who had loved him so dearly when he too was young and slim and guileless, and who had died of a sudden mysterious fever on the very eve of their marriage-day, the mummy-like umber of his cheek took on a phantom flush, and deep down in the his orbs was a sparkle like the gleam of mortuary tapers. In his dreams arose the irretrievable suns of youth, and he saw the myrtle-shaded valley of Meros, and the stream Zemander, by whose ever-verdant marge he had walked at eventide with Nylissa, seeing the birth of summer stars in the heavens, the stream, and the eyes of his beloved.

The prose is unashamedly purple, and at times his short stories are hard to distinguish from his prose poetry. It stands in contrast to his peers at the time, and is particularly jarring when compared to modern genre fiction. This ability to use words as textures, his utilization of the sentence as a form to construct vivid, horrifying imagery affords CAS an additional dimension to explore in his fiction. It drew praise from his contemporaries, with Robert E. Howard opining, ‘I'd give my trigger-finger for the ability to make words flame and burn as you do.’

CAS never achieved widescale recognition in the cultural milieu in which he wrote, and even today he remains a largely peripheral figure, brought up in passing with those familiar with the corners of pulpish fiction that gave rise to his larger-than-life peers. Much of this has to do with his circumstances at the time—CAS wrote for money, his parents ailing during the Great Depression shifted his attention to short stories. There are at least 120 short stories that have been attributed to him in a five year span starting from 1929 and ending in 1934. He also directed his attention towards other ventures, becoming a nascent visual artist and sculptor.

This particular collection, edited by S.T. Joshi, features a selection of CAS' short stories throughout his professional career, as well as his prose poems and poetry. The stories vary in terms of literary quality, but as a whole, I can't not recommend an author who has had an enduring—but understated—influence on science fiction and fantasy, from Vance to Wolfe, Ellison to Lieber.

Particular highlights from the collection are The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, The Double Shadow, The Last Incantation, and The Dark Eidolon.

I leave with this quote from Gene Wolfe, taken from his introduction to The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith:

Earlier I wrote that Smith had come—and gone. That he had been ours only briefly, and now was ours no longer. That is so for me and for many others. If you have yet to read him, it is not so for you. For you solely he is about to live again, whispering of the road between the atoms and the path into far stars.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Before you ask, I haven't watched the film—it wasn't until after finishing this novel that I made the connection to the movie adaptation.

Continuing the Lovecraftian theme, the first book in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy is an epistolary novel in the form of a field journal, kept by a female biologist. She, together with three other women (a psychologist, anthropologist, surveyor) delve into Area X, an unmarked area of a country where strange events and circumstances have occurred. The women are members of the 12th expedition into this area, and the story revolves around their various pursuits and encounters.

I don't want to spoil the plot, so I'll hesitate on revealing anything more, but VanderMeer has this haunting ability to evoke a sense of horror in the mundane. The novel's epistolary format allows him to evoke a feeling of heightened tension, in the absence of traditional horror motifs. The novel has this ever-present sense of suspense and uneasiness, that *something* is off, and that unease propelled me through the book; I ended up finishing it in two sittings.

Character work takes a backseat, with VanderMeer taking his time to sketch out the setting in such a manner that compels you to uncover more about this preternatural world that the characters have found themselves in, despite the haunting spectre he constructs. We aren't given any names—the biologist is referred to simply as 'the biologist' throughout, with the characters serving as a lens through which we peer into the landscape of Area X. That isn't to say that there's no character development—the biologist's past serves as a key plot point—but the characters and their interactions feel more like ephemeral vignettes rather than intimate psychological examinations.

I'll definitely be reading the other two novels in the series at a later date.

To round it off, here's a choice excerpt from the book, taken from the first chapter:

This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

Traipsing Margins

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