In 1927, H P Lovecraft wrote about Clark Ashton Smith: "In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale?" If you relish horror or dark fantasy, and you have yet to discover Klarkash-Ton, you have a real treat in store. This beautifully produced Arkham House collection is a bejeweled corridor into the dark worlds of vampire-cursed Averoigne, Zothique of the dying sun, primordial Hyperborea (which, with its black, amorphous god Tsathoggua, is close in spirit to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos), and others. Smith is a consummate stylist whose evocations of lush exoticism and languid evil led critic Brian Stableford to call him "the poet of American Decadence," and yet his tales are also humorous--in a wry, macabre way. A Rendezvous in Averoigne collects 30 tales, with illustrations by J. K. Potter and an introduction by Ray Bradbury.