It pains me to write this because I know Clark Ashton Smith is beloved by millions and considered one of the paragons of the golden age of pulp fiction, but in reading this collection of tales you can't help but feel that Clark was the kid who spent his afternoons sitting in a gloomy bedroom, reading a dictionary and memorizing every word in the book line by line while other kids ran around outside and played. He knows words. He throws around cryptic terms like abrogation, perambulations, parapegms, heroclitic, armillary, auracaria, littorals, and fulgurous (meaning flashing with lighting) with astounding accuracy that often sent me running for a dictionary (oh yeah, and here are some more culled all from one page: purpureal, voluble, plenilune, troublous and inenarrable - all actual words at one time). But he doesn't get people and the work suffers the worst for it.

His prototypical character is the studious wizard with gnarly joints donning long flowing robes dappled with arcane symbols and designs – the dungeon master eons before D&D – everyone else is a paper doll who hangs in the distance, only occasionally venturing in close to be destroyed by some wizardly mechanization.

On a side note, too bad Gary Gygax is no longer around because I'd love to ask him about “The Death of Malygris” which seems suspiciously like a smaller version of the adventure module S1 “Tomb of Horrors.”

Anyways. The problem is that without character interaction the stories become terribly predictable despite their weird aspects. In “The Uncharted Isle” our narrator slips through a dimensional gate while lost in the Pacific and returns to ancient Lemuria. He walks around the place, sees the sights, then returns to modern day. There were people living in Lemuria, but once again we have paper-dolls in the distance refusing to interact with the narrator and give the story some much needed.... Um, what is the word for it, oh yes, story.

In the movie Castaway, at least Tom Hanks had Wilson the busted out volleyball to bounce his thoughts off of! Here, well, we get travel writing. It's not very intriguing travel writing because one of the most engaging aspects of travel is getting out and meeting people and dealing with differences and putting up with all the wringers they wind us through. Some might even be so bold as to say that this is what story is. Do you think?

So what is this book? Poseidonis is a collection of tales written during the twenties and thirties loosely bound to the settings of Atlantis and Lemuria. It is very richly written, but it rarely ventures forth from the wizard's tower and in the end proves to be all frosting and little cake.

I'm giving it three stars for the effort and the age in which it was written, but that's only to keep Clark Ashton Smith's demi-lich from rising from the grave to kill his critics.

Hopefully.