The Sorcerer Departs

I pass… but in this lone and crumbling tower,
Builded against the burrowing seas of chaos,
My volumes and my philtres shall abide:
Poisons more dear than any mithridate,
And spells far sweeter than the speech of love…
Half-shapen dooms shall slumber in my vaults
And in my volumes cryptic runes that shall
Outblast the pestilence, outgnaw the worm
When loosed by alien wizards on strange years
Under the blackened moon and paling sun.

—fragment of an unfinished poem by Clark Ashton Smith (Spring, 1944)

As The Ensorcellment of January draws to a close, I find myself with a sense of unfinished business. Unlike last year’s The Shadow Over August, this series proved more difficult to bring into focus and I can’t quite shake the feeling that I did not do as good a job with it as Clark Ashton Smith deserves. I think that speaks to the particular challenge Smith presents as a subject. His work is less immediately graspable than Lovecraft’s, less defined by a single mythos or set of ideas, and more rooted in atmosphere, language, and sensibility. Smith’s influence is more easily felt rather imitated, which makes it harder to point to clean lines of descent, especially in something like roleplaying games.

I would be less than honest, too, if I didn’t acknowledge that this January has been a more distracted one than I had anticipated. An unexpected family matter demanded time and attention, inevitably affecting not just this series but all my projects over the past few weeks. Such things have a way of reshaping one’s plans, even when one would prefer otherwise. If The Ensorcellment of January sometimes felt less cohesive and expansive than I had originally hoped, the reasons lie as much there as anywhere else.

Still, I hope the series has had some value. If it has prompted even a few readers to seek out Smith’s stories or poems or to look again at familiar fantasy and science fiction through the lens of his luxuriant imagination, then it has served its intended purpose. Clark Ashton Smith remains one of the great wellsprings of the fantastic, a writer whose visions of decadence, desolation, and dark wonder continue to resonate in subtle but enduring ways.

Naturally, the end of this series does not spell the end of Smith's appearances on Grognardia. His influence on fantasy, weird fiction, and the hobby of roleplaying games is too deep and too strange to be confined to a single month. If, as I suspect, The Ensorcellment of January has fallen short of fully doing his unique genius justice, perhaps that is only fitting. Smith, after all, cannot easily be contained and that, in no small part, is why I return to him and his works again and again. I hope more of you will now do the same.