I don't remember when I started reading Clark Ashton Smith, but I do keep track of the stories I've read, so I know that as of yesterday (12-27-19) I have read all the stories in this book. I didn't love all of them (or may any of them), but there were plenty of interesting, horrific, cool stories there. There are 45 entries in this book and the back says it is "the first ever to encompass CAS's entire career as a writer", which may or may not mean it includes everything he ever published.

I have to say I enjoyed the "purple prose" more when I was younger, though his vocabulary is more humbling now that I've got almost 50 years under my belt. The number of words per page that I haven't heard before or don't recognize is sometimes stunning (to a life long reader). ( )

Ah, Clark Ashton Smith. For those of you unfamiliar with this writer imagine someone with the fevered imagination of Lovecraft and the lyrical stylistic chops of Lord Dunsany and you'll get an idea of what you're in for. For my money Smith is perhaps the best of the "Weird Tales Triumvirate" of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Ashton Smith. I would probably place Howard as a close second on that list...heresy I know, but for all of the coolness of Lovecraft's ideas he really was just a god-awful writer.
Take a dip into this tome and visit one of Smith's created worlds: medieval Averoigne, antediluvian Poseidonis, far future Zothique, or ancient Hyperborea, all tinged with the dark fantasy Cthulhoid elements borrowed from his friend Lovecraft and embellished with his delicious prose.
I'd heartily recommend the tales "The Double Shadow", "The Beast of Averoigne", "Mother of Toads", and the 'Malygris tales' "The Last Incantation" & "The Death of Malygris" as good starting points, though there are few places to go wrong here. ( )

Truly yours is a melancholy case.' There was concern in Famurza's voice. 'I have been reading some of your late verses. You write only of tombs and yew-trees, of maggots and phantoms and disembodied loves. Such stuff gives me the colic. I need at least a half-gallon of honest vine-juice after each poem.'

Clark Ashton Smith was a short story writer, poet and illustrator. A friend of H.P. Lovecraft, some of his stories belong to the Cthulu Mythos.

Although the quotation above is from one of his stories, it could well apply to Smith himself. His stories contain necromancers, demons, otherworldly gods, liches, ghouls, tombs and doom . . . lots and lots of doom (mostly of the eldritch kind). I read over half of the stories in this book a few months ago, and then stopped because all that doom was getting a bit much. I read the rest a story at a time, and have just finished. They are good stories but 550 pages all at once is too much, and spreading them out was a great improvement. I couldn't believe it when I was almost at the end and came upon a couple of humorous stories! ( )