S0209 The Maker of Gargoyles by Clark Ashton Smith

S0209 The Maker of Gargoyles by Clark Ashton SmithClark Ashton Smith was born in 1893 in Long Valley, California and died in California in 1961. He began as a poet and wrote decadent, overblown Romantic poetry after the manner of Swinburne. He got early recognition for his work in California. Lovecraft loved him and with Robert E Howard and Howard Philips Lovecraft he was one of the big three writers of Weird Tales. Ray Bradbury was also a fan. A few months ago, I re-read Bradbury's *Something Wicked This Way Comes* , and I can see that Bradbury too was a lover of poetic, sometimes overblown language—like myself! Smith was clear that his use of language and rhetorical stylings as deliberate. He talked of trying to create a "sort of verbal black magic." He uses some obscure words, such as 'vans' for wings and 'ferine' which neither I, nor my spell-checker, had come across before. I must have heard the word before because I read all of these stories as a teenager. But I'd forgotten ferine. Turns out it's a version of feral: savage and untamed. I did enjoy the word 'troublously' and also 'lubricous'. Smith wrote poetry from the age of 11, and his first novel by the age of 14. He began to sell his stories aged 17. His influences were The Arabian Nights, and he was clearly entranced by fairy-tale realms. He is also influenced by Edgar Allen Poe and the Brothers Grimm as well as the classic Gothic novel Vathek. Interestingly, he loved the decadent poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He translated his poetry from French as Baudelaire in his turn had translated the works of Poe into French. He had a period of ill health. He was a correspondent of Lovecraft and also knew Jack London and Ambrose Bierce. Smith and Lovecraft used the strange names and ideas they conjured in mutually influenced stories. This 'open source' was Lovecraft's greatest gift to horror: he allowed other writers to build on his ideas and so the Cthulhu Mythos was created. Smith was a massively prolific author, but more or less gave up writ