Our book today is a neat little old Timescape paperback from 1981 with an eye-catching cover by Rowena: The City of the Singing Flame by the fantasy pioneer Clark Ashton Smith, the third and least-known member of great Weird Tales roster that also included Smith’s friend HP Lovecraft and his correspondent Robert E. Howard. In this volume, editor Donald Sydney-Fryer includes both the title story, one of Smith’s best-known, but also a dozen other tales set in the variety of Smith’s dark fantasy realms, from Hyberborea to Zothique to Averoigne. Also, as is customary with editors of this writer, Sydney-Fryer offers some kind of explanation for why Smith isn’t as well-known as his two other triumvirs, namely that he wasn’t consistent enough in creating a central fantasy concept like Cthulu or Conan (as our editor notes, Smith might repeat a character he clearly enjoyed writing, like Satampra Zeiros, but that was about it).
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