His style was always incredible, and I think the quality of his language may have held his work back from being as popular as it should have been. Some people are scared off by the language he uses and don't stick around to see that he could also craft a really engaging tale.
Yes, he could. He didn't always -- after all, much of his fiction was written in order to support his increasingly ailing parents, meaning he wrote some things he didn't give a hoot about -- but when he had his teeth into something, he simply couldn't be beat. "The Double Shadow", "A Night in Malnéant", "The Last Hieroglyph", "Empire of the Necromancers", "The Dark Eidolon", and so many others of his fantasies rank as some of the greatest weird fantasy ever written. He could also do humorous, or satirical, or ironic fantasies with equal ease.
And yes, people are a bit taken aback both by his lapidary style and his precise (and at times quite recondite) vocabulary... but then, Smith had read at least one unabridged dictionary, the entire encyclopedia, and
all the books in the local Carnegie library by a fairly young age; and he came into contact with George Sterling when he was still young, as well....
Speaking of which, as there was an interesting bit of influence there, I'll be reading at least several selections from my copy of
The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror by George Sterling, and
The Outer Gate: The Collected Poems of Nora May French as well. Considering the connections (Sterling was a protege of Ambrose Bierce, whose work I just recently read; Smith was a protege of Sterling and was praised by Bierce; Nora May French and Samuel Loveman were part of that circle of poets, too -- Loveman, as well as Sterling and Smith, had earned favorable comments from Bierce, and in fact was one of Bierce's last correspondents before the latter disappeared), I will probably also throw in my collection of stories by W. C. Morrow, who was also part of the California poets/writers group. Even though this is, in a sense, a subset of my work on HPL, all of these writers are quite fascinating and worthy of study on their own, as well as collectively. This should keep me out of the pool halls for a while, dontcha think....?
