{"id":7967,"date":"2009-12-02T23:36:14","date_gmt":"2009-12-03T06:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/?p=7967"},"modified":"2015-09-25T09:17:53","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T16:17:53","slug":"owchar-reviews-the-return-of-the-sorcerer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/owchar-reviews-the-return-of-the-sorcerer\/","title":{"rendered":"Owchar Reviews The Return of the Sorcerer<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cas-rots-nocopy\"Last weekend, Nick Owchar reviewed The Return of the Sorcerer<\/em><\/a> for The LA Times<\/em>. The book itself<\/a> is a new “best of” collection featuring the tales of Clark Ashton Smith<\/a> and is published by Prime Books.<\/p>\n

Owchar starts out well enough, noting that the “Weird Tales<\/em> Circle<\/a>” does not get near the attention it should from mainstream literary critics. I agree.\u00a0Umpteen tomes have been published going on about the “Bloomsbury Group<\/a>,” whilst the inferno of synergistic creativity that blazed\u00a0around the core members of the “Weird Tales<\/em> Circle” goes largely unexamined. As Leo Grin\u00a0stated<\/a> four years ago, “someday a book combining the lives of all three Weird Tales<\/em> geniuses \u2014 Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith \u2014 will have to be written.”<\/p>\n

Mr. Owchar\u00a0proceeds to quote a bit from what sounds like a solid introduction by CAS (and REH and HPL) fan, Gene Wolfe<\/a>. Owchar calls Smith “an overlooked master of a wholly original vein of horror and hallucinatory science fiction,” while also noting CAS’s\u00a0endeavors in the fields of poetry<\/a> as well as\u00a0the graphic and sculptural arts<\/a>.\u00a0Towards the end of his review,\u00a0he expresses a deep admiration for Smith’s work and\u00a0a hope that Klarkash-Ton’s oeuvre<\/em> will soon achieve the recognition it so richly deserves.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Beyond the\u00a0positive points noted above, I think Nick Owchar’s review suffers from some serious problems.<\/p>\n

\"returnofthesorcerer\"The paragraph that\u00a0Owchar devotes to a quick overview of Smith’s life is riddled with errors and half-truths. He alludes to CAS dealing with\u00a0“mental issues” in his youth. While Clark appears to have suffered depression from time to time, I’m not sure the mention was necessary. Smith definitely\u00a0experienced long-term physical<\/em> after-effects from a bout of scarlet fever contracted as a child, as well as battling what\u00a0may have been tuberculosis (the diagnosis is still unclear) for several\u00a0years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Owchar\u00a0then states that “Smith settled in a cabin not far from Auburn<\/a>.” Directly following the “mental issues” sentence, that statement might lead one to believe that CAS\u00a0had fled\u00a0to the wilderness\u00a0in an attempt to escape from society; a\u00a0sort of\u00a0proto-Kaczynski<\/a> or\u00a0McCandless<\/a>.\u00a0In simple\u00a0fact, Clark moved there with his parents when he was about\u00a0nine years old.<\/p>\n

It is then stated that Clark Ashton Smith stopped writing fiction completely\u00a0in 1935. This is patently false. While his prose output dwindled to about one story every two years\u00a0following the death of his father in 1937, Clark Ashton Smith did continue writing fiction. Smith had little incentive to do so following the death of both his parents (who depended on his income), especially in the ’40s and ’50s, which were hard times for virtually every weird fictioneer in the field. I recommend Allan Gullette’s short biography of CAS<\/a> for those wanting a succinct, accurate and accessible\u00a0picture of Mr. Smith’s long\u00a0life.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Referring to the initial (and eponymous) story in the collection, the LA Times<\/em> reviewer claims that it “reads like a Lovecraft clone.” Perhaps Mr. Owchar is unaware of the fact that\u00a0“The Return of the Sorcerer” was written in fairly\u00a0close collaboration with HPL. During January of 1931, the two giants of fantasy batted plot ideas for that tale\u00a0back and forth in their letters. It comes by its cachet<\/em> of Arkham-ness with all honesty and legitimacy. Lovecraft and REH both loved it, and “The Return of the Sorcerer” remains one of Smith’s most popular tales (thus its inclusion in this collection), if not one of his most characteristically “Klarkash-Tonian.”<\/p>\n

Owchar extends this “Lovecraft clone” business to Smith’s stone-cold classic, “The City of the Singing Flame<\/a>,” calling it “a pale tribute to Lovecraft’s ‘Call of Cthulhu.’ ” I just don’t know what to say to that. Somehow, this insight was denied to authors and\u00a0critics as perspicacious\u00a0as Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury and Tim Powers (not to mention HPL himself). If anything, the story strikes me as a soaring, ground-breaking tribute to some of the works of A. Merritt<\/a>, an author\u00a0whom we know CAS admired.<\/p>\n

The reviewer ends the essay by noting that Smith’s tales are “intriguing,” and possess “unexpected narrative turns.” He\u00a0vitiates this praise, in my opinion, by calling Clark Ashton Smith’s prose “reckless and messy.” Every scrap of data we\u00a0have to hand indicates that CAS was a meticulous word-smith, one who would go through several drafts of a tale, reading\u00a0each aloud in the haunted hills above Auburn.\u00a0Smith was a poet praised by his peers as a genius<\/em>\u00a0from the time he was a teenager. Reckless and messy?\u00a0\u00a0He was not. Vibrant, experimental, vivid,\u00a0self-assured? Yes, he was.<\/p>\n

\"cascabin\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

DEUCE ADDS<\/strong>: Mr. Owchar was kind (and assiduous)\u00a0enough to append a postscript to his review acknowledging that some of his facts might not have been as\u00a0accurate as he\u00a0would have liked. As veteran readers of TC may know, Nick Owchar\u00a0wrote a well-researched essay regarding Solomon Kane<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend, Nick Owchar reviewed The Return of the Sorcerer for The LA Times. The book itself is a new “best of” collection featuring the tales of Clark Ashton Smith and is published by Prime Books. Owchar starts out well enough, noting that the “Weird Tales Circle” does not get near the attention it should […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-authors","category-clark-ashton-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7967"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16761,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7967\/revisions\/16761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}