Wine from Atlantis. Fantasies, nightmares, and mirages.

Mind-blowing unknown planets, long-vanished or yet-to-emerge continents, journeys between worlds and times, in time and in timelessness, deadly forests and deserts, terrifying creatures from distant galaxies, flower-demons and corpse-eating demons (guess which is scarier), ancient sorceresses and ambitious necromancers, risking both soul and body, as well as werewolves, vampires, the risen dead, nameless monsters, petrified prehistoric nightmares, and animate stone… Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) is one of the three pillars of "weird fiction" of the 1930s (along with Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, and, of course, the creator of the "Cthulhu Mythos" Howard Phillips Lovecraft, in whose stories Smith's inventions frequently appear), a follower of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. He transformed fiction in the last fire of romantic poetry and reached new limits of genuine horror — thus the world learned what infinite horizons can be opened before us by fiction, horror, and Smith owes a lot to Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, and Stephen King. This collection presents stories from 1925–1931, most of which are published in new translations.