Return of the Sorcerer by Clark Ashton Smith (1931)
Tuesday’s Horror Tale, May 28, 2024
This is a story packed with high-quality pacing, solid tension, is atmospheric and gloomy, and wonderfully Gothic.
Scholarly recluse John Carnby lives alone in a rather haunted house. He is in need of a secretary and our narrator, Mr. Ogden is hired and expected to live with John for a period of time in a . . .
“two-story house, overshaded by ancient oaks and dark with a mantling of unchecked ivy, among hedges of unpruned privet and shrubbery that had gone wild for many years. It was separated from its neighbors by a vacant, weed-grown lot on one side and a tangle of vines and trees on the other, surrounding the black ruins of a burnt mansion.”
John has made a life study of demonism and sorcery and the Necronomicon’s magical practices. It is here that we learn . . .
“The will of a dead sorcerer hath power upon his own body and can raise it up from the tomb and perform therewith whatever action was unfulfilled in life.”
Alone, two men in an old house and the Necronomicon! Lovecraft fans will love this one for its elements of Cthulhu cosmology. The talents of Clark Ashton Smith come alive in this classic haunting tale.
Return of the Sorcerer was also an episode of the television series Night Gallery—known for its magnificent melodrama—starring Vincent Price as John Carnby, and Bill Bixby (Noel as Ogden). Watch the episode at this link (27 minutes):
Read it here at Eldritchdark.com:
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/183/the-return-of-the-sorcerer
Listen to the audio here:
Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) is a master storyteller of horror, fantasy, and scifi, self-educated, and considered himself a poet. His writing is greatly admired as phantasmagoric. His legacy in literature is still popular today. Smith was published alongside H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and E. Hoffmann Price.
“My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.” —Clark Ashton Smith.
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