Somewhere in Northern France with a timeset between the 12th and 16th centuries, it is covered with "brooding woods" (The Beast of Averoigne, Lost Worlds, Vol. 1 , Panther, ISBN 586039643, c.1974, p.113), medieval townships and nobility castles, religious abbeys and convents, and various ruins from earlier aeons. It is a time of magic, religion, and social caste, with natural and supernatural catastrophe. The cycle contains a dozen stories, and, although the locale seems quite banal, Smith's extraordinary imagination and verbiage transforms it into a backdrop as macabre yet captivating as any of his specious, more inclement worlds.

This cycle contains the customary dueling sorcerers, conniving lamias, and destructive demons, but it also provides Smith with the opportunity to explore human emotions within recognizable institutions and surroundings. This is best exampled in The Maker of Gargoyles. For a newly-built church, Blaise Reynard, a gifted stone cutter, fashions two gargoyles, one which comes alive as his "answering spleen and hatred toward the people of Vyones", and the other as his "dour and satyr-like passion for the girl Nicolette" (Tales of Science and Sorcery , Panther, ISBN 586043527, c.1976, p.149). Unlike the revenger Nathaire in The Colossus of Ylourgne, Reynard is neither wizard nor aware of what he's created. He is an anomaly in Smith's canon as someone who is actually repentant, even when faced with insistent prejudice. There is a community sense that God exists merely to engender his enemies and thereby test the populace, as this society seems "a clotted, seething, devil-ridden gloom of superstitious obsession" (p.152).

Concerning religion—whether it be the bloody rituals of Paganism or the iconoclastic Christian church—Smith sees it strictly in terms of power. Brother Ambrose of The Holiness of Azedarac falls prey to a succubus and is henceforth "unable to attach any true conviction of sin". He lives his life out as a "happy pagan" (Lost Worlds, Vol. 1, p.101), although his assignment from the Archbishop was to reveal Bishop Azedarac as a Satan-worshipping sorcerer. And, without Ambrose's evidence, this malignant patron to "Azazel and the Old Ones" (p.83) ends up a dominant influence in the church to the extreme of canonization. Smith clearly sees both men's destinies as right and true, as a Christian God is decidedly absent and without providence in human affairs.

In The End of the Story, an innocent young law student retires overnight at a wayside abbey. Prideful of his library that contains "certain unique writings that survived the holocaust of Alexandria " (Out of Space and Time, Vol. 1, Panther, ISBN 58603966x, c.1974, p.15), the abbot warms him off a non-descript volume that is cursed. Of course our protagonist reads it and is enveloped by a succubus, but what is startling is Smith's duplicitous presentation of customary mores. "'The power of Christ has prevailed like a black frost on all the woods'" (p.21), says a satyr before Christophe Morand enters the pagan underworld he describes as "a sense of ever-growing ecstasy before the utter, ineffable beauty of the landscape" (p.27). Is it a spell or has he penetrated the true, underlying reality? But before too hasty a judgment, remember this is a first-person narrative, and, since his "unaccountable disappearance" (p.13) is stated in the beginning, it is implied he returns to Nycea after the spell is broken .

In a similar amorous adventure, Smith adds his own inimitable warts to an age-old theme when, in The Enchantress of Sylaire , a hopeless romantic falls in with Sephora, a self-confessed bewitcher and empress of a fantasy world. Smith beguiles us that not only is love blind, but it should be to achieve happiness.

This cycle, while admittedly lacking the phantasmagorical mesmerizations found elsewhere, adds much-needed flesh to Smith's familiar closet of character skeletons. Smith will always be savored as a poet and a dreamer, and, in this respect, Averoigne adds another newt's head to an already-robust potion.

Zothique

Hyperborea

Xiccarph

Poseidonis

Selected Stories

© copyright 02/19/2006 by Larry Crawford