The Ensorcellment of January

Clark Ashton Smith occupies a peculiar and sometimes uneasy place in the history of fantasy literature. He is neither obscure nor widely celebrated, frequently cited yet rarely dwelt upon. For many readers, he exists at the margins of awareness: a friend of Lovecraft, a regular contributor to Weird Tales, a stylist whose prose is admired in quotation more often than his stories are read in full. Yet those of us who do venture deeply into his work quickly discover something far more imposing. Smith’s imagination is vast, luxuriant, and final, as though one had strayed into a world already immeasurably old, already in decline, and wholly indifferent to human ambition or consolation.

Smith was a poet before he was a fantasist and that origin is, I think, essential to understanding his work. His fiction bears the unmistakable stamp of a writer for whom language was not merely a means of conveying a narrative but a source of power and pleasure in its own right. His tales linger over sorcery, extinction, voluptuous cruelty, and the slow unraveling of civilizations that have exhausted their last illusions. Zothique’s dying earth, Hyperborea’s sardonic barbarism, and Averoigne’s sensuous medievalism are linked less by genre than by sensibility – a worldview in which beauty and horror are inseparable and where cosmic immensity inspires not only dread but a dry, almost amused fatalism. Smith’s audience has always been comparatively small, but his influence has quietly seeped into fantasy, horror, and even roleplaying games that prize atmosphere, decadence, and the poetry of ruin over straightforward heroics and tidy resolutions.

The Ensorcellment of January will be a month-long exploration of Smith’s life, work, and legacy. Like The Shadow over August before it, this series is intended neither as hagiography nor as corrective, but rather as an effort to better understand a creator whose contributions to fantasy literature are both substantial and too often overlooked. Longtime readers of this blog already know of my fondness for older, stranger currents of fantasy and horror, works shaped as much by language as by plot, by implication rather than exposition, and by a fascination with time, decay, and forgotten worlds. In that regard, Smith’s influence is widespread, even when it goes unrecognized.

Smith’s legacy, like the man himself, resists easy classification. He was a friend and correspondent of both H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, yet his sensibility remained distinctly his own. He was deeply pessimistic but never humorless, luxuriant in style yet frequently merciless in outcome. This series, therefore, aims to honor that complexity. Over the course of January, I’ll be drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources in an effort to present a clearer picture of who Clark Ashton Smith was and why his work matters within the broader history of fantasy and weird fiction.

The Ensorcellment of January is therefore less a survey or reassessment than a sustained act of attention. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be returning to Smith’s stories, poems, and letters, sometimes to analyze them and sometimes simply to admire them. I’ll share my own reflections along the way, but my central concern will be understanding why I believe Smith continues to speak so powerfully to certain sensibilities and why his work still surfaces, unexpectedly, across contemporary fantasy. This is not an attempt to rescue Smith from obscurity so much as an invitation to linger with him awhile, to listen closely to a voice that remains singular in its cadences and uncompromising in its vision. If you’re willing to slow down and let the spell take hold, I can think of no better time than the month of Clark Ashton Smith's birth for such enchantments.