Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Some of Their Favorites

Reading through The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith, I found a note in the biographical sketch by Donald Sidney-Fryer which mentioned that both Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft noted their favorite weird stories in a fanzine one month apart. How many of these have you read?

Clark Ashton Smith: The Yellow Sign (Robert W. Chambers); The House of Sounds (M.P. Shiel; The Willows (Algernon Blackwood) A View from a Hill (M.R. James); The Death of Halpin Frayser (Ambrose Bierce); The Fall of the House of Usher (Edgar Allan Poe); The Masque of the Red Death (Edgar Allan Poe); The Novel of the White Powder (Arthur Machen); The Call of Cthulhu (H.P. Lovecraft); The Colour Out of Space (H.P. Lovecraft).

H.P. Lovecraft: The Novel of the Black Seal (Arthur Machen); The White People (Arthur Machen); Count Magnus (M.R. James); The Moon Pool (A. Merritt) (novelette version).

Sidney-Fryer says of Lovecraft's choices "Six of them duplicate Smith's choices, with only four titles different." The four listed above are the "different" but he does not list the "sames". Will have to do some searching!

I'll also have to cross-check this with the titles/authors mentioned in Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (online versions here and here).

3 comments:

Paul Weimer said...

The Chambers, the Bierce, both Poes, the Lovecrafts and the Merritt.

Frederick Paul Kiesche III said...

What you've read or what was missing from Sidney-Fryer's list? Having HPL on HPL's list does not make sense to me...

Paul Weimer said...

Those are the ones I've read.