A collection of short fiction by the friend of H P Lovecraft who was generally reckoned to be a better writer than Lovecraft. Smith's prose is baroque and lavish, full of detailed descriptions, long words and some you need to resort to a dictionary to understand. The effect of his prose is stronger in landscape building and imagery than in plot.

Volume 2 of his Lost Worlds collection deals with stories grouped according to setting. I was not that keen on the ones under the 'Atlantis' heading. In the first an ancient sorceror called Malygris conjures the likeness of a long dead love, but discovers that the self who loved her is himself long gone. In the second, two learned brothers create a vehicle to escape to Venus, intending to evade the destruction of the last island left of the once mighty continent which has been gradually innudated over centuries. Going off to another planet seemed a rather extreme method of avoiding a watery grave, and it was also odd that the other inhabitants of Atlantis, who all expected the final end, had not set sale in boats and escaped long before. The brothers' fate on Venus is also rather odd. The third story returns to Malygris and deals with his demise and those who seek to investigate it.

Four stories are grouped under Hyperborea, a fabled continent. A luckless thief tells the story of how he and his friend set out to plunder a lost city, having not done very well in their profession of late and needing some ready cash. In the second story, a sorceror takes a one way escape route to an alien planet to evade arrest by a rival religionist who follows him. This is more of a travelogue in which a strange environment is created, populated by odd alien lifeforms, but does not have much of a plot. In the third story, a wealthy hunter leads his men to a mountain to attack the ferocious hominid creatures that live there, but makes the mistake of offending a powerful wizard who puts him under a compulsion to visit various underground deities (one Lovecraftian) and weird lifeforms, as a sacrificial offering. This also becomes rather a travelogue.

The final story in the Hyperborea section, 'The Coming of the White Worm', is more interesting. A strange iceberg arrives at a fishing village where a warlock has been living as a recluse. The villagers are frozen to death, but he is allowed to survive as a worshipper of a hideous worm, latest recruit among other wizards from different lands. Gradually, as the worm's iceberg travels from land to land laying waste to all within reach of its inimical power, he realises that the worm sustains itself upon his fellow wizards and that he will eventually be on the menu. Unlike many of Smith's protagonists, he is not a passive observer of his own doom.

In the third section, Xiccarph, set on an imaginary alien planet, the two stories centre around a powerful wizard Maal Dweb. In the first, a young warrior undergoes many trials to enter the wizard's palace in a quest to rescue his love who, like many other young and beautiful women previously, has been spirited off there. In the second, the wizard, bored with his own omnipotence, journeys to another planet after putting aside most of his magic, to pit his wits against hostile inhabitants.

The final section is entitled 'Others' and consists of four stories. The first is set on the planet Lophai where a civilisation is in thrall to an evil sentient plant, which demands human sacrifice, and to the other plants it controls. The King conspires to defeat it, in order to try and rescue his love who has been selected as the next victim. As with a lot of Smith's fiction, this is a rich and baroque tale, and, not so commonly in his stories, the protagonist tries to act rather than watch helplessly. The second story reads very oddly to modern readers as, published in 1934 and it seems set in contemporary America, it deals with the effect of a drug upon human time perception - oddly, because the drug, supposedly brought back from Pluto, is called Plutonium! The dangerous element its name conjures up was not produced until December 1940, hence the unfortunate name. Sadly the end is all too predicable and it takes too long reaching it.

In the third tale, an antiques dealer, who is a part-time amateur astronomer, finds himself drawn to a particular star and is pulled bodily into an experience where he has a real existence there in the final days of a dying sun. Unlike his usual loner self, his alter ego has a deep relationship with a beautiful woman, and the story deals with their attempts to spend their last days in mutual bliss absorbed with each other. There is a huge astronomical clanger in this story as the star has vanished when he returns to his own life, when that would only happen if the events he experienced had happened centuries before - if it had only just died, as implied in the story, its light would have visible for a long time to come, which would have given the ending more poignancy in my opinion. . The final story, 'The Gorgon', is one of the better ones in the collection and concerns a man who is accosted in a London street by an old man who offers to show him the head of Medusa, the Gorgon in Greek mythology, sight of whose face turned anyone to stone unless viewed in a mirror. This story does succeed in creating an air of menace and suspense.

So as with other collections by this author, the stories are a mixture, but the better ones uphold the rating to a satisfactory 3 stars.


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