Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith

By Stephen J. Servello © Nov. 2007

Linwood Vrooman Carter is well known for his pastiching of several authors among the various sub genres of science fiction/fantasy. The most immediately recognizable of these writers and styles that Carter paid tribute to are Robert E. Howard with sword and sorcery, Edgar Rice Burroughs with planetary and heroic adventure, Leigh Brackett with a combination of both and H. P. Lovecraft with horror.

It should be noted that pastiche writing may be viewed in two or even three ways, depending on one’s interpretation. The most obvious and strict sense is for an author to utilize the characters and/or world that another writer has created. Later, we will see that Carter did pastiche Smith in this fashion. A second and intermediate manner is to copy an author’s style, plots and character types, almost verbatim with only a change of names and places to differentiate. Carter did not dabble in this sort of pastiching at all. Lastly, when a writer strives to emulate the style and type of story written by another or prior author, it is the least defined form and one that Carter was a genius of, but not as concerns Smith. Well, not much at least…

Oh sure, there are a few more authors with their tell-tale styles, they’re just not so widely known as those I just listed. Lord Dunsany with his high fantasy and Jack Vance with his humorous futuristic fantasy come to mind. But what about Carter’s writings and thoughts on Clark Ashton Smith? Sure, CAS is extremely well known in the horror/fantasy field but Carter’s emulating of Smith is not nearly as discernible to the average reader as are those other masters I have briefly touched upon.

To address this anomaly I will be investigating Carter’s comments on Smith in three series he acted as an author, editor and anthologist: Zebra’s Weird Tales, DAW’s Years Best Fantasy Stories and Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series. I’ll throw in three stand alones as well, Carter’s Imaginary Worlds and Robert M. Price’s Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds and The Xothic Legend Cycle. The latter two will comprise what Bob Price perceived in the LVC/CAS “collaborations.”

The four compilations of CAS that were released under the sign of the unicorn by Ballantine are as good a place to start as any. Probably because they are the most recognizable to casual fans of both Smith and Carter. The first to be published was Zothique in June of 1970. In his Introduction: When the World Grows Old,” Carter makes reference to the three dominant writers at Weird Tales during the late 1920’s and early 1930’s: H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. He then laments that of these three gifted writers, only CAS had “yet to achieve the wide recognition his artistry so rightly deserved.”* It was Carter’s intent that Zothique (with other Adult Fantasy volumes to follow), would “help make his mordant and imaginative talents known to the many thousands of fantasy enthusiasts who have not thus far discovered him.”**

Concerning Smith’s short stories, Carter opined that “they are very much his own, and nothing quite like them has been written in America, at least since Poe.” Hazarding his thoughts on the real progenitors of his prose style, Carter ventures with “William Beckford’s nightmarish and erotic novel of the ‘Oriental Gothic,’ Vathek, and two novels by Gustave Flaubert: the luxurious Carthaginian romance, Salammbo, and the phantasmagoric extravaganza, Tentation de Saint Antoine. Smith’s jeweled and darkly

evocative prose is closer to the style of these three novels than to that of Lovecraft or any of the more recent writers of the macabre.”*** But Carter’s opinion on this doesn’t jive

* Zothique, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, June 1970, Page ix

** Ibid, Pages ix & x

*** Ibid, Pages xi & xii

with Smith’s who admits to being influenced by Robert W. Chambers, Ambrose Bierce

and Edgar Allan Poe.* Lin Carter begins to conclude his Introduction by listing those authors influenced by Smith’s use “of a final continent where magic is reborn to rule man’s sunset as it did his dawn.” Among them are Jack Vance with his Dying Earth duology, A. E. Van Vogt’s The Book of Ptath and Carter’s own World’s End series.**

Carter’s closing remark reveals the depth of his passion for Clark Ashton Smith, the writer and the man. “This present collection of Zothique stories will introduce you to one of the giants of modern fantasy, a puzzling, brilliant and enigmatic man of many gifts.”***

In the Epilogue of Zothique, Carter goes into detail as to how he arranged the tales into chronological order, citing outside sources and clues from within the stories themselves. Further, the sources of the various texts used, are detailed. Clearly, Lin Carter cared a great deal about Zothique and didn’t mind alerting the reader with the proper acknowledgements.

The second of four Smith collections under the sign of the unicorn was Hyperborea, April, 1971. In his Introduction: Behind the North Wind, Carter theorizes that the early Hyperborean cycle tales may well have influenced Robert E. Howard with his Conan stories set in the pre-historic Hyborian civilization. Yet, Carter also admits that Howard had already published two King Kull tales (the precursor to Conan), before The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, Smith’s first of Hyperborea which was published in the November, 1932 issue of Weird Tales.****

Carter also believes that the other of the “Big Three” was influenced by Smith’s Hyperborea cycle. I refer of course to H. P. Lovecraft and it is his incorporation of “the Commorian myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high priest Klarkash-Ton,” into one of his own Cthulhu stories as well as “adopting Smith’s Hyperborean demon-god, Tsathoggua, into the pantheon of his mythos.”*****

Carter actually wrote to Smith in 1961, inquiring about geographical data of Hyperborea, to which Carter received a reply. This may have been Lin Carter’s only direct contact with Clark Ashton Smith, personally.

Concerning Smith’s Hyperborean short stories, Carter states they “give clear evidence of Smith’s remarkable creative talent. It is by no means easy to create an imaginary continent or world, and to flesh it out with sufficient corroborative detail to make it seem like a real place in the mind of the reader, as anyone who has attempted this task will

* Zothique, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, June 1970, Page xii

** Ibid, Page xii

*** Ibid, Page xiii

**** Hyperborea, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, April 1971, Pages xii & xiii

***** Ibid, Page xiv

assure you. In between the lines of a fast-moving adventure story, the writer must somehow or other convey enough information of a geographical, historical, cultural and religious nature as to convince his reader that the story inhabits a very real and genuine

world.”*

Carter goes on to say that Smith ranks up with Edgar Rice Burroughs with his novels of Barsoom and Professor Tolkien with his books of Middle-Earth. Despite a vast wordage superiority by ERB and Tolkien, Carter feels “It is firm evidence of Clark Ashton Smith’s inventive talents that he could do as well in the space of ten stories and one prose poem.”**

Once again, Carter goes into extreme detail on the sequencing but not the textual derivation, and instead focuses on the geography of Hyperborea in his Epilogue: Notes on the Commorian Myth-Cycle. One of Carter’s premises here was that Smith’s tales of Hyperborea were not connected by continuing characters (for the most part), but by utilizing a geohistorical setting as the continuing element. Also, Hyperborea is a legendary land and not a newly created one like Thuria or Hyboria of REH in his Kull and Conan stories.***

Published in February of 1972, Xiccarph was the third release in the Adult Fantasy series. Right off the bat in his Introduction: Other Stars and Skies, Carter states “Few writers really get a chance to do something entirely new and original in the genre they have chosen for their own. Clark Ashton Smith was one of those lucky ones. The phenomenon of Clark Ashton Smith is a curious one, and much of it cannot be explained and may never be understood. He won his reputation as a poet, but about September 1929 he suddenly began producing short stories of a type seldom seen in American letters. Macabre tales, written in a lapidary prose, jeweled and studded with exotic words, ornamented with obscure mythological allusions—stories piquant and even witty, written with a mordant humor.****

Lin Carter believes that Smith’s contribution to Weird Tales resulted in the invention of his own miniscule sub-genre. “In composing a horror story set in the future or on another world and told in the luxuriant ‘gorgeous’ prose traditional to heroic fantasy, Smith did something quite new and different and exciting, something all his own.” Carter admits that he “finds this kind of fantasy delicious fare.”***** It would appear that Carter preferred the varied tales of Xiccarph over those of Hyperborea, Poseidonis and Zothique, because of their originality.

The fourth and final Smith book to be published by Ballantine was Poseidonis in July of 1973. At least two others were planned but alas, they never came to be! In Carter’s

* Hyperborea, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, April 1971, Page xv

** Ibid, Page xv

*** Ibid, Page 198

**** Xiccarph, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, February 1972, Page 3

***** Ibid, Pages 4 & 5

Introduction: The Magic of Atlantis, he states “Of all the writers who contributed to the Golden Age of Farnsworth Wright’s magazine Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith

stands out as a clearly superior talent. To my own taste, he is far and away a better writer than his good friends and correspondents Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. Howard’s stories have excitement and gusto and driving narrative force, but Howard was clumsy with coined names in his tales are grim and humorless. Lovecraft had great imaginative gifts, but was unable to create viable characters or write credible dialogue, and completely unable to create women. Their Californian colleague, however, shared few of their emotionally crippling hang-ups and could write rings around both of them. Smith mastered a bedizened lapidary style that savors of Vathek and Salammbo; he wrote with a lazy, mocking, sardonic humor that I find delicious; his tales are ornamented with exotic words and coined names as magical and evocative as the best of Dunsany’s.He seems to me not only the best of the Weird Tales writers, but one of the greatest fantasy geniuses of all literature, ranking not far beneath Eddison and Dunsany.”*

An concluding his Introduction with “In that brief span of only six years he created a series of masterworks that are among the most precious jewels of weird fantasy we possess. He was an astonishing man, a brilliant artist, a complex bundle of contradictions we have scarcely begun to unravel. And a writer who added new richness and luster to the legend of Atlantis, whose dark and virile magic continues to enthrall the imagination.”**

In his untitled Prelude (of sorts), Carter speaks of the popularity of Atlantean tales but insists “few writers of the imaginative have produced such tantalizing glimpses of richness as Clark Ashton Smith created in his Tales of Poseidonis. The embroidery of his extraordinarily graphic prose, the clarity of his weird images, are ideally suited to the re-creation of his own purely imaginary world.”***

Moving on to another Adult Fantasy book but written by Lin Carter himself, we have his Imaginary Worlds from June of 1973. Though not written by Clark Ashton Smith, it should come as no surprise by now that many are the references made by Carter about Smith. I will try to provide only new comments by Carter as I strove for with the four CAS written books.

Carter does credit Lord Dunsany with beating Smith to the punch with exploring “the potential spectrum of the fantastic tale in its widest possible variety, from the Oriental

* Poseidonis, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Books, July 1973, Pages 5 & 6

** Ibid, Page 6

*** Ibid, Page i

fable to the ‘grown-up fairy tale,’ from the heroic legend to the weird fantasy.”*

A bit further on Carter claims “Smith possessed brilliant talents in several of the arts: his poetry stands up to comparison with that of Swinburne, and even approaches Keats and Milton on occasion.” He then comments on Smith’s talent in sculptor, color painting, pen-and-ink drawing, verse drama and translations from French and Spanish. His opinions range from amateurish to highly regarded, depending on the art.**

Carter finally does venture a guess as to why Smith virtually stopped writing in 1933 while still in his early forties. “The broad range of his artistic interests, coupled with the fact that he owned his own house and did not require much of an income to get along, may perhaps explain why he quit writing fiction so abruptly. He may simply have become bored with the story form, and so stopped using it.”***

The last reference about Smith in Imaginary Worlds concerns the naming of places. Here Carter states “the bizarre rhythm of ‘Uzuldaroum’ and ‘Commoriom,’ the capitals of Hyperborea, or the unearthly weirdness of ‘Zothique’ and ‘Xiccarph’ and the ‘Eiglophian Mountains’ and ‘Mount Voormithadreth’ and many another name coined by the incomparable Clark Ashton Smith. The very sources of such magnificent names are beyond conjecture, happily unlike the over-obviousness of Howard’s names, which de Camp in his exegesis traced to their origins with almost embarrassing ease.”****

Moving on from Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series, we come now to DAW’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, presented and Edited by Lin Carter. He edited the first six books in this series from October, 1975 to November of 1980, with Clark Ashton Smith featured in the first four. In his Introduction: The Year in Fantasy, (for volume 2), Carter provides a nice bridge between the two series stating that the collapse of the good work done under the Sign of the Unicorn’s Head resulted in “freeing me up to take up new editorial duties, such as editing DAW Books’ Year’s Best Fantasy Stories anthologies.”*****

In the first volume, Carter takes a different slant than with Ballantine. Here he inserts unfinished Smith stories that he had completed, with the permission of the Smith estate (Mrs. Smith I presume). In his brief intro to The Double Tower, Carter also explains that he was given permission “to turn some of Smith’s notes and outlines into finished tales, crafted in what I earnestly hope to be a reasonable facsimile of his ornate and lapidary prose.”****** Oops, repetition! But the main point here is that Lin Carter has finally gone beyond being an exuberant fan of Smith’s to a writer of CAS pastiches! The Double Tower is a fantastic first (if indeed this was Carter’s first attempt), effort at writing in that

* Imaginary Worlds, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, June 1973, Page 30

**Imaginary Worlds, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, June 1973, Page 62

*** Ibid, Page 62

**** Ibid, Page 24

***** The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2 DAW, August 1976, Page 11

****** The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories DAW, October 1975, Page 49

Clark Ashton Smith style he had expounded on so often in the Adult Fantasy Series.

Carter and Smith go back to an age before even the rise of Hyperborea and mankind itself. Yet, it stretches to cosmos, even to the edge of our galaxy. Regardless, those who mettle where they shouldn’t, pay an awful yet seemingly appropriate price. Yes, Carter got it right the first time!

It would seem that Hyperborea was to become Carter’s favorite creation of Smith’s to pastiche. In his notes to The Scroll of Morloc he states most definitely that such is his intent and further, “It has also amused me to visualize each of these new stories as a chapter from the Book of Eibon, Smith’s response to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.” And naturally, Carter waxed eloquent on Smith’s glittering and suave prose as well as his list of invented names and story titles from the unpublished notes.* In this case the tale involves the primitive Voormis and again, a fellow (Morloc) who just would not leave well enough alone. I detected a bit of Carter himself in The Scroll of Morloc. More details on Hyperborea than Smith would usually give out and the ending, a reference to impending torture, practically screams Carter.

If I were to be asked which I prefer in the Carter/Smith collaborations, the totally Clark Ashton Smith-like writings or the Smith with a noticeable hint of Lin, I’d go with the latter. Somehow, Carter seems to know what want in a story, more details and structure. Robert E. Howard and Smith (for better or worse, take your choice), were somewhat lacking in both and Carter filled that void nicely for me with his Kull, Conan and Hyperborea pastiches.

The Stairs in the Crypt represents Carter’s third CAS pastiche, with DAW at least. I suspect his first attempt at a Hyperborean tale was published elsewhere, perhaps in the rejuvenated Weird Tales? In his notes prior to the story, Carter once again exults almost in the “fragments of unpolished prose, outlines, lists of unused titles and invented names, sketches of story-ideas and plots, none of which he lived to use.” He then goes on to say that he began “weaving the bits and pieces together, fleshing them out into new stories crafted in as close a style to Smith’s as I can create. I like to think he would have approved: occasionally, even I am fairly satisfied with them.”** I’m not sure what to make of this last statement. Should it be taken at face value or was Carter suffering from a case of false modesty? Depending on when I contemplate this question, I could swing either way. Carter was certainly capable of both.

Again, as in The Scroll of Morloc, Lin’s humor shows through in The Stairs in the Crypt, so much so that if this story had been inserted within the Ballantine publication of Hyperborea, I surely would have scratched my head and wondered why this one was so different. Not bad, just different.

* The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2, DAW, August 1976, Page 143

** The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 3, DAW, November 1977, Page 129

A trend I’ve noted with the first three collaborative pastiches, is that the time-line advances with each tale starting in pre-human Hyperborea, advancing to the continents’ first primitive cultures and finally, entering its’ golden age. Let’s see what the fourth and last of Carter’s attempts with DAW at capturing the genius of Smith brings us.

Surprise! Prince Alcouz and the Magician is an original and complete short story by Clark Ashton Smith. In fact, Carter ventures a guess that it may be among Smith’s very first works with an estimated writing date of 1910-1912. Explains Carter, “In its brevity (three pages) and extreme, almost poetic, precision of phrase, it seems to demonstrate that Smith was feeling his way from verse to prose narrative.” He then adds “A minor work, obviously. But even the minor work of a major fantasist is of interest.”* I couldn’t agree more. I detected the essence of Smith’s greatness to come but also his exploratory attempt at defining his own style. Ironically, the ending is almost Carteresque!

The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories saw three Carter/Smith submissions plus one totally by Smith. All were enjoyable, ranging from good to excellent with a very good sandwiched between but I was troubled by one thing. Precisely how much of each story from the first three books was written by Carter and what was the extent of Smith’s contribution? Possibilities are presented by Carter in general terms but not specifically for each tale. Inquiring minds want to know!

Penultimately, we move on to the third and last of the major series in which Lin Carter presented, anthologized, edited, commented on or wrote with and about Clark Ashton Smith. I speak of Zebra Books’ Weird Tales of which there were four, published between 1980 and 1983.

In volume 1, Carter continues where he left off with DAW. That is, with presenting a Carter rendition of a Smith fragment. In this case, my concern about the precision of authorship is answered by Carter in his notes just prior to The Light From the Pole. Here he informs us that this story is unique “in that it incorporates within its text some 3000 words of previously unpublished prose by Clark Ashton Smith, taken from the abandoned first draft of one of his later stories, The Coming of the White Worm.** Also, Carter confirms that The Light From the Pole is the fifth collaborative/pastiche effort with Smith and confirms that the first one was published in the first issue of the revived Weird Tales magazine in the Fall of 1973. Judging from Carter’s fairly precise comments on Smith’s contribution to this story and Lin’s lack there of concerning three others, I suspect he wrote the lion’s share based on Smith’s titles and outlines, as opposed to finishing up detailed fragments.

The Light From the Pole appears to me to be almost wholly Smith, with a few tell-tale sentences or paragraphs inserted by Carter. I suppose I could estimate or actually count

* The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 4, DAW, December 1978, Page 40

** Weird Tales # 1, Zebra Books, 1980, Pages 65 & 66

the total wordage and deduct 3000 in order to determine the ration between Carter and

Smith but that smacks of, well, I’m not sure, but I’d rather go with my gut instincts on this.

The second volume of Weird Tales was published by Zebra in 1980, the same year as the first volume. Again, Carter contributes a short story by Smith that he had completed but with no indication of how much each authored. Since the Table of Contents lists just Smith and only a footnote on the first page of the story denotes “Completed by Lin Carter,” I must assume that The Descent into the Abyss is largely the work of Clark Ashton Smith. Here, he once again returns to pre-human Hyperborea where a mighty sorcerer (perhaps a Serpent Man), descends deep underneath the continent in search of the knowledge of the Elder Gods. What Haon-Dor discovers leaves him profoundly changed but curiously, very much alive. It may well have been Carter that interjected references of Mu and its primitive humans plus Lovecraft’s Cthulhu into the mix.

In his untitled introduction, Lin Carter reiterates how for several years now he “has been posthumously collaborating with CAS—working up new tales in the Klarkashtonian style based on these notes and lists, and sometimes (as in our last issue) including sizable pieces of previously unpublished Smith prose.”*

Carter does not add anything significant in his introduction to Weird Tales # 3, only a comment on how “we are fortunate to have secured” the poem To the Nightshade. It was discovered after Smith’s death and may or may not be connected to Hyperborea. **

The fourth and last volume of Weird Tales was released two years after its predecessor, in 1983. It contains another poem by Smith, The Sea-Gods., which exudes more pf Poseidonis than Hyperborea to me. At this point I wonder if Lin Carter’s fascination and appreciation of Clark Ashton Smith is waning, as he makes absolutely no mention of Smith in his introduction and had reference him very briefly in Weird Tales # 3. In fact, I wonder just how many stories did Carter “collaborate posthumously” (as Carter liked to state), with Smith. Early on I got the “impression” of dozens but that may have been my eager imagination at work.

I have saved for last, the most recent (in my book collection at least), references of Carter and Smith together, the first of which is Robert M. Prices Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, published by Starmont House in 1991. Here we see what Bob Price thought of one of Carter’s Smith-inspired stories, From the Archives of the Moon. “One quite effective tale that strives to be high fantasy and somehow manages plausibly to work in elements of Sword & Sorcery as well as science fiction is From the Archives of the Moon, an idea suggested by a passage of Clark Ashton Smith: “The chronicles of Saturn, the archives of the moon in its prime, the legends of Antilla and Moaria—these are full of unsurmised or forgotten wonder. The single tale which might have gown into a series appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu # 54 (1988).”***

* Weird Tales # 2, Zebra Books, 1980, Page 257

** Weird Tales # 3, Zebra Books, 1981, Page 315

*** Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, Robert M. Price, Starmont Books, 1991, Page 85

Sadly, I do not possess a copy and cannot comment on the Smith/Carter aspects of From the Archives of the Moon.

Robert Price becomes much more critical of Carter’s Smith pastiches, when commenting in more general terms. “All of the Eibon tales are attempts to pastiche Clark Ashton Smith, and while one or two work pretty well as sardonic and grotesque black humor (especially the stomach-turningly hilarious The Stairs in the Crypt), the prose seems labored and artificial. The exotic vocabulary that gives Smith’s stories their sparkle of the fabulous only impedes Carter’s pastiches, actually making some of them cumbersome and difficult to read.” Price contemplates on whether Carter unwittingly said it best “Such epics in miniature savor more…of parody.” This, from an unpublished novel, Partholon.*

Beyond a few comments concerning the plot devices Carter used in his Smith pastiches and the titled stories in which they took place, Bob Price had little more to add on the literary relationship between Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith. But in his The Xothic Legend compilation (Chaosium Books from 1997) of Carter’s Mythos fiction, he states “Lin Carter saw himself as the fortunate possessor of a great inheritance, left to him by the likes of Lovecraft, Derleth, Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long and Robert E. Howard. Thus he was much like the typical protagonist of his own or Derleth’s Mythos tales: the scion of a doomed line, inheriting a legacy that is either a blessing or a curse, depending on which side you are on.”**

Though Price was commenting mainly on Carter’s Mythos tales, his comment holds true for Carter’s Smith pastiches as well. Indeed, the area between Lovecraft and Smith can be quite gray at times.

In conclusion, though Lin Carter was quite capable of and truly enjoyed offering up flowery platitudes for a plethora of authors, I suspect he might not have always been one hundred percent sincere. But when it came to Clark Ashton Smith, I detected the ring of truth with his tributary salutes. He believed Smith to be on a level with the greatest writers of all-time. Almost Olympus-like in fact, if I could lend a descriptive name to that level. Carter felt privileged and probably a bit unworthy, of finishing various Hyperborean fragments. The former galvanized Carter while the latter slowed him down not a bit! Yet, I feel Carter knew precisely what his literary limitations were and that he was hell-bent on making hay while he could. The back of his wondrously fertile mind

*Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, Robert M. Price, Starmont Books, 1991, Pages 99 & 100

** The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter, Edited by Robert M. Price, Chaosium Publication, February 1997, Page viii

might well have been occupied by wondering if the legacy he pursued was in fact a blessing or a curse, as Robert Price surmised. Personally, I lean toward the former since Linwood Vrooman Carter has (and continues) to bring me much joy, with his own writings and bringing forth those of Clark Ashton Smith. Not a bad legacy!

Bibliography

Zothique, Edited by Lin Carter, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, June 1970

Hyperborea, Edited by Lin Carter, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, April 1971

Xiccarph, Edited by Lin Carter, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, February 1972

Poseidonis, Edited by Lin Carter, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, July 1973

Imaginary Worlds, Lin Carter, Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, June 1973

The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, Edited by Lin Carter, DAW, October 1975

The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2, Edited by Lin Carter, DAW, August 1976

The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 3, Edited by Lin Carter, DAW, November 1977

The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 4, Edited by Lin Carter, DAW, December 1978

Lost Worlds, Edited by Lin Carter, DAW, August 1980

Weird Tales # 1, Edited by Lin Carter, Zebra Books, 1980

Weird Tales # 2, Edited by Lin Carter, Zebra Books, 1980

Weird Tales # 3, Edited by Lin Carter, Zebra Books, 1981

Weird Tales # 4, Edited by Lin Carter, Zebra Books, 1983

Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, Robert M. Price, Starmont Books, 1991

The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Myhos Fiction of Lin Carter, Edited by Robert M. Price, Chaosium Publication, February 1997