Once, Ilalotha was lady-in-waiting to the queen of Tasuun. Now, slain by her own hand, she lies in state while the court mourns "The Death of Ilalotha" with the traditional debauchery. When her ex-lover, the Lord Thulos, returns to Tasuun in ignorance of her passing, he finds himself convinced that she still lives, and is only sunk in an enchanted sleep. Ordered to the bed of his current lover, the queen, Thulos finds himself instead drawn to the sarcophagus of Ilalotha—and, perhaps, to his own doom.

Zotulla, emperor of Xylac, is an evil tyrant, and his people love him for it. But one soul does not love Zotulla, because of a thoughtless cruelty done to him in boyhood, and that boy, now a man, is the necromancer Namirrha. Grown terrible in power, Namirrha seeks to wreak a strange and horrific doom upon emperor and empire—and even, if he is not careful, upon himself—under the shadowy gaze of "The Dark Eidolon."

Wandering a necropolis, the poet Valzain encounters "Morthylla," a curiously fascinating woman—if she is in fact a mortal, and not a deadly lamia. Meanwhile, "The Voyage of King Euvoran" sends a self-indulgent sovereign to a curious destiny among the isles that lie beyond the knowledge of maps and men. In "The Garden of Adompha," king and court magician tend a sinister secret plot. And many others—ruler and sorcerer, astrologer and soldier—tempt fate on the terminal continent of Zothique.

Influential but not quite timeless

Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) is, with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, one of the three greatest writers from the golden age of the legendary fantasy and horror magazine Weird Tales. Media adaptations of Howard's and Lovecraft's work have made them household names even in mainstream America, leaving Smith more obscure than his fellow gods in the weird fiction trinity. But writers ranging from Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon to Fritz Leiber and L. Sprague de Camp have acknowledged Smith's influence.

Smith has three great talents. One is his singularly ornate style, with its reliance on a "tell-not-show" approach and its preference for antique and obscure words. (It's this style [which never uses a plain Anglo-Saxonism like "east" or "torch" where a fancy locution like "orient" or "flambeau" may be substituted] that has earned him no little condemnation, perhaps because so many bad fantasy writers have borrowed the vocabulary while failing to appropriate the visual richness and prose rhythms that make Smith's odd word choices work.) Another of his talents is the ability to evoke a doom-haunted decadence. The third is his gift for envisioning strange and fabulous realms: the lost worlds of Atlantis and Hyperborea; the imaginary lands of Averoigne and Malneant; the distant planet Xiccarph; the last continent Zothique.

These talents are developed to their fullest in Zothique, which gathers the 16 completed tales, together with a poem, from Smith's greatest story-cycle. Sublimating his influences (Poe, Beckford, Bierce, Coleridge, Flaubert, the French Decadent poets) in his conception of a morally and physically decaying end-time, Smith created a vision of a dying earth that is unique—or, rather, was. For the Zothique cycle has directly or indirectly influenced several subsequent terminal-earth series (some better known), including Jack Vance's The Dying Earth and sequels; Gene Wolfe's New Sun and Long Sun sequences; Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time sequence; Lin Carter's World's End series; and Matthew Hughes' Archonate works.

It would be nice to say that the Zothique cycle is timeless. But, however much its ironic and sometimes shocking visions of a decadent final future transcend their era of origin, other aspects of Zothique are mired in the racial and sexual perceptions of the 1930s. While a couple of the black characters possess considerable power, all are confined to the roles of villain, cannibal, eunuch, lackey and/or slave (and their physical descriptions are vexing, to put it kindly). A couple of the female characters have the power of a queen and/or femme fatale—but all are prizes, slaves and/or lemans; and, unless they're black, they're beautiful. Also, in an odd blindness for a work that mordantly (if not gleefully) seeks to shock the 1930s bourgeoisie, Zothique fails to notice homosexuality and bisexuality. While it's a fascinating and influential place, deserving of the fantasy or horror fan's visit, Zothique is, to paraphrase James Brown, a straight white man's man's man's world.