The Double Shadow

Clark Ashton Smith -- one of the "big three" classic authors from the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales (the others being H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard) -- began writing early in the twentieth century. By the 1920s, he became a regular poet and author in Weird Tales magazine, helping to usher in its golden age. "The Double Shadow" was originally published by the Auburn Journal in 1933 in an oversized edition limited to only 1,000 copies. Smith carefully signed and hand-corrected many typographical errors for years to come. A collection of six stories ranging from contemporary horror to weird alternate-world fantasy, it remains a fascinating introduction and showcase to his decadently jeweled prose.


Genre: Horror

"Take one step across the threshold of his stories and you plunge into colour, sound taste and texture; into language." - Ray Bradbury

"A monstrously vivid imagination, a keenly ironic sense of humour, and an uninhibited bent for the macabre.a giant in the weird-heroic field." - L Sprague de Camp

"More than any other writer, Clark Ashton Smith has captured the beauty and terror of fantastic worlds of dream and the imagination .virtually without peer in the genre of fantasy and the macabre." - August Derleth

"None strikes the note of cosmic horror as well as Clark Ashton Smith. In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer." - H P Lovecraft