The Averoigne Chronicles: The Complete Averoigne Stories of Clark Ashton Smith Paperback – Import, 13 January 2021

Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer of short stories from the 1930's and this book collects his Averoigne stories.Averoigne is a fictional province in Mediaeval France where magic, religion, horror and erotica clash and mingle. Smith's writing is poetic and the stories are adult horror tales with fantasy and faery and Greek elements.Highly recommended if you want to read something unique and but also familiar. The Colossus of Ylourgne is my favourite story from this collection.

Clark Ashton Smith was a master story-teller, and his tales, once read, will never leave you. Haunting you even while you sleep. It is difficult to collect his works without purchasing volumes with redundant stories; the idea to publish his tales based on geographical settings is most welcome. Thanks to the hard work of Ron Hilger, we have this collection of Clark's Averoigne stories. The map, pictures, and the painstakingly researched text and chronological ordering make this a must-read! My personal favourite is, "The End Of The Story." It has haunted me, and pulled me back like an echoing Siren. To own it now, in a volume of Averoigne tales, is priceless!

I became familiar with Clark Ashton Smith's work through my readings into the Cthulhu Mythos started by H.P. Lovecraft, but hadn't read much of his work due to the fact there didn't seem to be too many good publications of his stories. The few quality publications of Ashton Smith's work I could find had maybe only one or two of his Averoigne stories, so this collection of every Averoigne story he had lived to complete was an outstanding find.I should warn that many Cthulhu Mythos fans picking up this book might be a little disappointed, as while every story (with the exception of the first tale) is set in the fictional Provence of Averogine, there are only three stories in this collection really connect to the Mythos. This may explain why most of the Averogine stories have been left out of most of the other collections of Ashton Smith's work I've seen, since those collections focus on his contributions to the Mythos. The monsters appearing in many of the Averogine stories are of the more traditional variety (werewolves, vampires, etc.).If you're just a general fan of horror and/or fantasy though, this collection of stories is a definite must-have. There's a romantic quality to many of these stories, with a couple that are on the sexy side. Also enjoyable are the cover illustrations, and the map of the region of Averoigne and its supposed location in France. This book is a definite crown jewel in my horror collection.

Averoigne, c'est le lieu, librement inspiré de l'Auvergne médiévale, dans lequel Clark Ashton Smith a situé plusieurs de ses nouvelles. C'est une terre de sortilèges où l'on cotoie, de nouvelle en nouvelle, des sorciers, des enchanteresses, des nécromanciens, des vampires, des monstres, ... C'est un monde merveilleux pour adultes qui bascule régulièrement dans l'horreur (mais rien de gore). J'ai pris beaucoup de plaisir à lire ces nouvelles et cela m'a donné l'envie de découvrir davantage cet auteur.

This beautiful book gather's all of Clark Ashton Smith's works (both prose and poetry) set in the land of Averoigne (a fantasy counterpart to France's Auvergne).The poems are ok but the tales are very good, with macabre details and an accurate historical research; the only thing nthat modern readers might find annoying is the "purple prose" of the descriptions, but we mustn't forget in what age the author lived.It is also good to know that a well known D&D adventure module (X2) was based on these tales.

As a long time fan of Clark Ashton Smith, I had read all these stories before, but I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading them. It's great to have his Averoigne tales collected in one volume, along with some related poetry and prose poems. This Hippocampus Press edition uses the corrected texts, so the stories are as close as we will come to the way Smith imagined them. The stories are beautiful, enchanting, spell-binding, wildly imaginative. They are also funny (satirical, anyway) and sexy. Smith was a sorcerer with words, and also knew how to spin a yarn! The map and illustrations are great. I enjoyed the introduction by the late, lamented cartoonist Gahan Wilson, and the afterward by poet and Smith scholar Donald Sidney-Fryer.