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This omnibus gathers for the first time all of the author's Cthulhu
Mythos tales, together with two previously unpublished weird
novellas and a large sampling of his fantasy poetry. The
Lovecraftian pieces range from stories written as a teenager in the
1970s, many of which saw serial publication in notable fanzines of
the day, to new pieces composed especially for this collection. The
early works include the acclaimed "Derrick's Ritual" and "The
Summons of Hastur" along with the unpublished "The Door in Lheil."
The two novellas represent the author's efforts at extending the
dreamlike atmospheres and weird states achieved in his shorter
fiction to greater length within modern or postmodern architectonic
structures. "The Green Transfer" is a light fantasy-adventure with
many dream elements; "The More, The Marigold" is a series of
tales-within-tales featuring increasingly strange tableaux. The
fifty-eight poems, gleaned from four decades of poetry writing,
display a variety of forms and styles while exploring themes both
mordant and metaphysical. Free verse and blank verse are found
alongside more traditional meters, evidence of an experimental
approach unusual for the weird genre. Striking, imaginative artwork
by veteran weird artist Denis Tiani embellishes both the cover and
the interior. In sum, this omnibus lives up to its title by
offering unique glimpses into an imaginary terrain that is the
author's own, expressed in an equally unique language and style
that playfully blends elements of the Romantic and Gothic, fantasy
and supernatural horror, Surrealism and the Absurd.
Born, raised, and intellectually and culturally formed in New
Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling capital of the world in the
1800's, Donald Sidney-Fryer came to the Golden State when he turned
twenty-one. During 1956 through 1960 and the summer of 1964, he
studied Theatre Arts, French, and Spanish at U.C.L.A., and received
his B.A. in French language and literature in September of 1964.
His discovery of the prose fictions and poetry of Clark Ashton
Smith led to Sidney-Fryer's investigation of that group of poets
and fictioneers to which Smith belonged, now known (thanks to
Sidney-Fryer) as the California Romantics. This fantastic pride of
scriveners includes Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Nora May
French, and others. In the five decades since 1961, the year of
Smith's death, Sidney-Fryer has written at length on these writers,
their lives, and their over-all achievements, as well as editing
significant collections of their writings, when otherwise they
remained almost totally neglected and unheralded. Apart from the
two dozen books and booklets he has compiled, written, and/or
edited, Sidney-Fryer has done more than pioneer in scholarship
concerning Ashton Smith and his fellow poets. Summoned by his first
and extended reading of Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene to
his own vocation as a poet (during the winter and spring of 1961),
Sidney- Fryer has in particular continued the traditions of the
California Romantics in an innovative and radical manner. He has
also given innumerable recitals not just of his own works but of
those by his chosen predecessors, including Spenser along with many
others. This volume gathers together for the first time the essays
and reviews of this pioneer of phantastick literature, mostly long
out of print and reprinted here for the first time.
Nora May French (1881-1907) is an enigmatic and ethereal figure in
American poetry and in the poetry of California. Born in Aurora,
New York, she came to Los Angeles with her family when she was a
little girl, and in the course of her brief and tragic life she
lived and wrote more intensely than many who live a full span of
years. Her poetry possesses its own kind of cosmic consciousness,
aligning it with the work of Clark Ashton Smith and her friend
George Sterling. Its delicacy and pathos render it an imperishable
monument to the throbbing emotions and aesthetic sensitivity of the
woman who, although beloved by all in Sterling's Bohemian circle,
suffered keenly from her own love affairs and committed suicide in
November 1907. Now, more than a hundred years after her passing,
her poems have been gathered in this volume for the first time. The
book includes an extensive biographical and critical introduction
by Donald Sidney-Fryer, tributes to French by her contemporaries
and by later admirers, and a selection of reviews. Nora May French
published no books in her lifetime, but her poems were assembled in
1910 by George Sterling and others. That volume, however, was
incomplete, and many fugitive poems have been added by Donald
Sidney-Fryer and Alan Gullette, two of the leading authorities on
California poetry and the poetry of fantasy and terror.
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R889
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