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What are you Reading Now?

Incanus

Incanus

Shadow Lord
Mythopoet said:
I was speaking specifically about the Zothique stories. (I wouldn't call The City of Singing Fire depressing, for instance.) And I didn't mean depressing in the sense of "makes me depressed to read" but just that they pretty much all have very negative endings for the characters. Almost no one survives. (I think the guy and his wife survived in The Charnel God? But that's the only one I can think of.) There's nothing wrong with that. It's clearly exactly what he was going for. But it's certainly not my favorite thing.

Side note: I said to my husband (who is currently reading through all of Lovecraft) the other day that if one could say that Robert E. Howard's favorite word is "thews" and Lovecraft's favorite word is "non-Euclidean" then Clark Ashton Smith's favorite word is probably "cerements". ;)
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Ha! That's hilarious. "Thews" is REH all the way. I think Steerpike may be right about HPL - "Cyclopean" sure seems to pop up a lot. I'm not sure there's a single word CAS uses with that type of regularity, but "cerements" will do. Or maybe - "Funereal."

I understand what you mean about depressing now--thanks for clarifying. I've now read every existing short story available by CAS, and I'd say his protags don't end up faring well in a good three-quarters of them or so--it's not just Zothique. It's pretty common with HPL as well, I'd say. Probably one of the main reasons neither of them came up with a serial character like Conan--they always need fresh victims to send out to their nefarious deities and necromancers and other entities. With HPL in particular, it's the 'bad-guys' (for lack of a better term) who keep showing up in multiple stories. Fun stuff!
 
fiera43

fiera43

Apprentice
Just got one of Laurel K. Hamilton's books from both the Anita Blake series and her Fairy princess' series and 2 books by Niel Gaiman.
 
Russ

Russ

Dark Lord
And if you like Gaiman (like I do)...remember you have Moorcock to blame (or thank):

Dear Mike,

I started reading your work thirty years ago. I was nine, and the book was Stormbringer.

At the time it was a little like having the top of my head ripped off and magnificent multicoloured ideas poured in.

I read everything I could find you'd written as it was published-several feet of books rapidly appearing on my bookshelves over the next couple of years. I even read everything I could find by people you mentioned, discovering authors like Mervyn Peake in the process.

I took it for granted that a good author could and should be able to write anything and write anything well in any genre or way, and bend and break genres and rules at will-after all, you did it.

Looking back now, the things that stick are the strange ones that don't fit, from the Sex Pistols' novel-newspaper (Irene Handl as Mrs Cornelius?) to the mysterious newspaper-wrapped packages of The Chinese Agent…
You've been an inspiration. Or to put it another way, I'm probably mostly your fault.

It's good finally to have someone to blame-

Neil Gaiman
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