This omnibus gathers for the first time all of the author's Cthulhu Mythos tales, together with two previously unpublished weird novellas and a large sampling of his fantasy poetry.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 The early works include the acclaimed "Derrick's Ritual" and "The Summons of Hastur" along with the unpublished "The Door in Lheil."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.