accomplishing other tasks beyond the abilities of
ordinary people. Abbey seems much more confi-
dent about her material in this series, and the pro-
tagonist is certainly her most fully developed
character.
Abbey continues to intersperse her original
work with game tie-in novels of varying quality.
She is also well known as the coeditor with Robert
Lynn Asprin of the Thieves’ World shared universe
anthology series and has written one novel of her
own in that setting, Sanctuary(2002), as well as
several short stories. The series was revived re-
cently following a lengthy hiatus, having found a
home with a new publisher.
“The Abominations of Yondo” Clark Ashton
Smith(1926)
During the 1920s and 1930s fantasy fiction was
split into a number of different forms, including
fairy tales, medieval style adventures, and others.
In the United States in particular there was a sub-
set of fantasy generally referred to as weird fiction,
which blurred the borders of genres as we define
them nowadays to include elements of horror, fan-
tasy, and even science fiction. Writers such as H. P.
LOVECRAFTand Robert E. HOWARDwere promi-
nent among this group of writers, who interacted
with one another socially and by letter. One of the
most influential of these was Clark Ashton SMITH,
also a poet, who wrote a large number of compara-
tively short tales, many of them grouped into one
or another of his imaginary universes.
This story, one of his most provocative, does
not fit easily into any of those subsets. The setting
is the rim of the world in some distant past or fu-
ture that is never made explicit. Even the gods
have abandoned the region, which is populated by
twisted vegetation, grotesque animals, hints of
dark magic, terrible odors, and other imagery de-
signed to paint an atmosphere of decay and danger.
Even the hills assume the shapes of sleeping mon-
sters. The protagonist has been expelled into this
region for heresy by the priests of Ong, about
whom we learn virtually nothing, nor do we find
out much about the character himself, because
Smith’s purpose was not so much to tell a story as
to create a series of images that would linger in the
reader’s memory. He accomplishes this by means of
an intricate and colorful use of language that is
largely absent from contemporary fantasy fiction.
The nameless protagonist leads us through a
short series of strange encounters—a crying statue,
a spiderlike creature that dwells in a cave, a myste-
rious pursuer visible only by its shadow—before fi-
nally deciding that even the fate planned for him
by the priests of Ong is preferable to a longer stay.
References to events or scenes so frightening that
they have the power to drive people mad recur fre-
quently in weird fiction from this period, as does
the use of the menace or creature unseen and un-
described. As any fan of horror movies can con-
firm, there is almost always a letdown when we
finally see a creature, because our imagination cre-
ates much more frightening images than does Hol-
lywood. Conscious of that fact, Smith and other
writers suggested rather than described their shad-
owy menaces.Aickman, Robert(1914–1981)
Robert Aickman was a British writer and opera
critic who began producing short horror stories in
the late 1940s and who received considerable at-
tention after producing several quite memorable
ones early in his career, including the often-
reprinted “Trains” (1951). He is generally thought
of as a writer of ghost stories, but his short fiction
explored a number of other supernatural themes
as well, and a sizeable portion of his work draws its
conflict from psychological rather than supernatu-
ral sources. Even his overtly supernatural work is
less concerned with the nature of the threat than
with the mental processes of his protagonists, their
reactions to what is happening around them, and
their ability or inability to deal with it. Many of his
stories have decidedly downbeat endings, not so
much because his characters fail to win their
struggles as because they refuse to even make the
attempt.
The vast majority of Aickman’s supernatural
fiction consists of short stories, which have been
variously collected and cross-collected. The best
selections are Cold Hand in Mine(1975) and The
Wine Dark Sea(1988). Both of his genre novels are
quite short. The Late Breakfasters(1964) is a rather2 “The Abominations of Yondo”