About the Stories | About the Authors

“Gaspard du Nord’s translation of the Liber Ivonis into medieval French in the 12th century brought about frightful consequences—the popular diffusion of certain rites and incantations causing Averoigne to receive that shadow of concentrated necromancy from which it has never quite emerged.” — H.P. Lovecraft

The lore of Averoigne didn’t end with Clark Ashton Smith. Over the decades other writers, fascinated by this “Lovecraft country” of medieval France, added their own contributions. Read over two dozen stories and poems of Averoigne (including some never before published) by Mythos authors like DJ Tyrer, Richard Tierney, Brian McNaughton, Michael Minnis, and James Chambers. Revisit Vyônes and Périgon, meet Luc le Chaudronnier and Azédarac once again, as tales of harpies and werewolves, ogres and giants, changelings and cockatrices await you!

THE STORIES

• The Oracle of Sadoqua by Ron Hilger
In the Regio Averonum, Roman officer Horatius goes in search of a missing comrade, Galbius. His search takes him to the Cave of the Oracle, guarded by druids of Sadoqua. What he finds within is more disturbing than his worst fears for his friend.

• The Wedding of Sheila-Na-Gog by Glenn Rahman & Richard L. Tierney
In Gaul, Simon of Gitta, betrayed by the Druids, captured by the Romans, and set to be sacrificed to the mysterious goddess Sheila-na-gog, has no choice but to seek the help of disreputable and unlikely allies: the Averoni.

• Cult of the Singing Flame by David Reid Ross
A young monk from Périgon is sent to investigate a new cult spreading throughout Averoigne, but what he ultimately finds threatens both his sanity and his soul.

• The Doom of Azédarac by Ron Hilger
Attempting to retrieve his stolen copy of The Book of Eibon, the sorcerer-bishop Azédarac drinks his time-travel potion to visit the past… but arrives in an alternate universe instead, where he must face his most dangerous foe yet—himself.

• The Pink Flower of Saint Zénobie by Aaron Hollingsworth
When a woman in Ste. Zénobie awakens one morning to find her husband’s headless corpse in bed beside her and her daughter kidnapped, a soldier, a hunter, and a monk set out to find the young woman—and never return. At least, not alive, and not in one piece…

• Hugh the Discerning by Garnett Elliott
When the ogre Chantillion terrorizes the village of Morraine, its reeve Hugh the Discerning sets out, alone and unarmed, to defeat the monster, confident his superior intellect can outwit a big dumb ogre. But Chantillion is not as stupid as he seems…

• The Circumstances of Ghostly Cats by Michael Minnis
When the beloved stray cat Matois, uncrowned king of Vyônes, is tortured and killed by a necromancer’s thuggish henchman, the ghostly feline achieves an unconventional—but deadly—revenge.

• Unhallowed Ground, Unholy Flesh by James Chambers
When people start going missing, the Archbishop of Vyônes convinces Luc le Chaudronnier to investigate the disappearances—near the Plain of Nathaire, where legend claims the necromancer’s infamous Colossus found its final resting place.

• The Little and the Big by Michael Minnis
Vyônes is besieged by a plague of toads that neither armored knights nor stone walls can stop… until a clever peasant woman has an idea.

• The Passing of Belzévuthe by Simon Whitechapel
The Inquisitor of Averoigne has set his sights on Moïse ben Belzévuthe, a Jewish man accused of sorcery. But the old man proves to be a worthy opponent, with more than one nasty trick up his sleeve.

• The Butcher of Vyônes by Michael Minnis
In a time of hunger and hardship, the butcher’s wife seems to grow plump and prosperous. The townspeople accuse her of witchcraft—but the truth is much, much worse.

• Black Art in Vyônes by Keith Chapman
While Vyônes is being terrorized by a harpy, a lowly painter’s apprentice stumbles across its secret lair. But can he do anything with this knowledge before he becomes the harpy’s next meal?

• The Cockatrice of Cordeliers by Michael Minnis
When the Cockatrice of Averoigne lays waste to a noble wedding party, only two criminals are left standing between the monster and the unsuspecting city of Cordeliers.

• Clotaire of the Cross by Colin Harker
A knight charged with finding and destroying the creature plaguing the Château Conflans must decide who is a bigger threat: the monster, or the marquis who tyrannizes the village.

• Symposium of the Gargoyle by Simon Whitechapel
In nineteenth century Averoigne, an invalid whose only entertainment is observing Vyônes through his telescope discovers a secret cipher sculpted into the gargoyles of the cathedral. If he can only decrypt the code, what mysteries might be revealed?

• The Quarry by Simon Whitechapel
Ignoring the dark reputation of the flooded quarry outside of the village of Grémoire, a young man goes fishing in its dark waters—and catches more than he expected.

• The Gargoyles of Notre Dame by Matthew Baugh
A mystic and a vigilante hunting down a sorcerer’s dark magic in Paris are lured to Notre Dame Cathedral—which recently had two gargoyles transferred from Vyônes.

• The Return of the Colossus by Brian McNaughton
France, 1916. Desperate to break the deadly stalemate on the Western Front, intrigued by the medieval legend, the Allies search for the buried giant… and get more than they expected.

• The Muse of Averoigne by Ron Hilger & Henry J. Vester III
On a trip to France, Philip Hastane becomes entranced by a La Frênaie tapestry depicting legends from Averoigne’s past.

• The Fell Fête by Manuel Arenas
A Spanish student visiting Averoigne is convinced by an enchanting local girl to attend her village’s traditional ceremony—to Iog-Sotôt.

• Boufonoula by D.J. Tyrer
An American tourist to the Averoigian countryside falls for a pretty young country girl who is older than she seems… much, much older…

• A Honeymoon in Averoigne by Trevor O. Childers
A newlywed couple on their honeymoon hiking the French forests get caught in a thunderstorm and take refuge in the ruins of an abandoned castle—the Château Faussesflammes.

• PLUS over a dozen poems of Averoigne by H.P. Lovecraft, DJ Tyrer, Ashley Dioses, Wade German, Cardinal Cox, Ron Shiflet and others!

• PLUS a Map of Averoigne by legendary Tolkien artist and multiple Hugo-award winning artist Tim Kirk!

THE AUTHORS

• Manuel Arenas currently resides in Phoenix, Arizona where he pens his Gothic fantasies and dark ditties sheltered behind heavy curtains, as he shuns the oppressive orb which glares down on him from the cloudless, dust filled desert sky. His work has appeared in various genre publications, most notably in the poetry journal Spectral Realms. For more information visit his blog at https://mannysbookofshadows.wordpress.com

• Matthew Baugh is the author of more than forty published short stories dealing with monsters, pirates, gunslingers, robots, elder horrors, dinosaurs, and whatever else strikes his fancy. His favorite authors include Umberto Eco, Robert E. Howard, R.A. MacAvoy, Raymond Chandler, and Alexandre Dumas. When not writing stories he is an ordained minister serving a church in Manhattan Beach, CA. Matthew’s most difficult challenge is always writing about himself in the third person for the “about the authors” section.

• Trevor O. Childers is a Vendor Management Specialist at Fidelity National Agency Solutions by day and a writer of horror, science fiction, and fantasy until the next morning. He writes from his home and sometimes from the local coffee shop. He lives in Plano, Texas with his girlfriend Kendall and their cat Luna. He attended the Virginia Military Institute where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with a Concentration in Writing. While there, he served as a tutor at the writing center, an Editor for New Horizons, the school’s undergraduate research journal, and the Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Brass, the school’s prose and poetry journal. This is his fifth publication, having been previously published in Lovecraftiana Magazine, Swords Against Cthulhu III: A New Dark Age, and Sounding Brass.

• Dan Clore is an avant-garde freelance writer and scholar of horror & weird fantasy with an excellent (albeit occasionally baffling) sense of humor. He’s published articles in Lovecraft Studies, Studies in Weird Fiction, and numerous other journals and critical anthologies, as well as authoring Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon. His fiction is collected in the volume The Unspeakable and Others.

• James Chambers is an award-winning author of horror, crime, fantasy, and science fiction who received the Bram Stoker Award® for the graphic novel, Kolchak the Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe and is a three-time Bram Stoker Award nominee. He is the author of the collections On the Night Border, described by Booklist as “a haunting exploration of the space where the real world and nightmares collide,” and Resurrection House as well as the Corpse Fauna novella series and the dark urban fantasy novella, Three Chords of Chaos. Publisher’s Weekly gave his Lovecraftian collection, The Engines of Sacrifice, a starred review and called it “…chillingly evocative.” His website is: www.jameschambersonline.com.

• Keith Chapman was an editor and contributor for various fiction publications in London in the 1960s, such as Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, before shifting to New Zealand where he spent nearly 35 years in newspaper and magazine journalism. “I’ve written fiction under several names in many genres besides fantasy: Western, adventure, supernatural, mystery, war, romance, whatever… novels, comic book scripts, and short stories. In fact, I can say that since leaving school I’ve never earned a dollar other than from written words.” In the 1990s Keith began writing the Chap O’Keefe Western novels and later edited the Black Horse Extra online magazine for six years. As well as standalone titles, the O’Keefe Westerns include the adventures of an ex-Pinkerton detective, Joshua Dillard, and the exploits of the engaging Miss Lilian Goodnight, a feisty heroine better known as Misfit Lil. Chap O’Keefe books were published in the series Black Horse Westerns (alongside reissues of such classic authors as Ernest Haycox, Max Brand, William Colt MacDonald, and Les Savage, Jr.) and Ulverscroft’s Linford Western Library and Dales Westerns. Many of the O’Keefe Westerns are now available as eBooks.

• Cardinal Cox first encountered the works of Clark Ashton Smith in tatty Panther Books collections. Now in his fifties, his work has been printed in the small press for around thirty-five years. When a schoolboy he worked in holidays on archaeological sites. Amongst the posts he has held he has been a Poet-in-Residence of a Victorian cemetery (for three years) and the Dracula Society (for two years). Out of the latter he was commissioned to write a one-man “spooken-word” show (High Stakes) that he toured around, including a performance at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland.

• Ashley Dioses is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and weird poetry from southern California.  Her debut collection of dark traditional poetry, Diary of a Sorceress, was released from Hippocampus Press in 2017. Her second collection of early works, The Withering, is forthcoming from Gehenna and Hinnom Books. Her poetry has appeared in Weird Fiction Review, Spectral Realms, Weirdbook Magazine, and elsewhere. Her poem “Carathis,” appeared in Ellen Datlow’s full recommended Best Horror of the Year Volume Seven list. She has also appeared in the Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase 2016 for her poem “Ghoul Mistress.” She is currently an Active Member in the HWA and a member of the SFPA. Aside from writing, her other passions include martial arts and delving into esoteric and occult studies. She blogs at fiendlover.blogspot.com.

• Garnett Elliott lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. Nominated for a Derringer award, he has had previous work published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and numerous online magazines. He wrote several volumes of The Drifter Detective series, available from Beat to a Pulp. More recently, he has published the role-playing games Neonpunk Crysis, Blood Sundown, and Red Venus with Filigree Forge, all available at DriveThru RPG.

• Wade German is the author of two collections of poetry, The Ladies of the Everlasting Lichen and Other Relics (Mount Abraxas Press, 2019) and Dreams from a Black Nebula (Hippocampus Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as Dreams and Nightmares, Fungi, Spectral Realms, Weird Fiction Review, Anno Klarkash-Ton (Rainfall Books, 2017) and Best of Black Wings (PS Publishing, 2019).

• Colin Harker is a scholar, author, and screenwriter of horror, with a particular predilection for the Gothic. Two of her stories have been performed by the award-winning NoSleep Podcast and her published works have appeared in anthologies such as The Book of Blasphemous Words and Dreams of Desolation. The haunting tales of Clark Ashton Smith have exerted a profound influence on her writing since she first began reading him as a teenager and the realm of Averoigne in particular, with its scheming sorcerers and sympathetic vampires, has always held a special place in her heart.

• Ron Hilger is a Northern California native who has organized such Clark Ashton Smith related events as “The CAS Centennial Conference” in 1993 and “The CAS Plaque Dedication” in 2002. Hilger has also edited The Averoigne Chronicles (for Centipede Press), Red World of Polaris (with Scott Connors for Night Shade Books, 2003), and Star Changes (with Scott Connors for Darkside Press, 2005.) Together, Ron Hilger and Scott Connors edited the five-volume set, The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith and The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith for Night Shade Books, which have come to be regarded as the definitive versions of Smith's stories. He is already at work on his next project, The Hyperborean Mythos.

• Aaron Hollingsworth is a Missourian of mostly Western European decent, with a touch of mountain goat and catfish. He has always been a storyteller, whether he was playing with action figures as a child, writing bad poetry as a teen, composing depressing love songs or GMing tabletop role-playing games in his twenties, or indie-publishing fiction in his thirties. His goal as a writer is to write “about the impossible in the best way possible”. While his influences are many, his discovery of Clark Ashton Smith was like finding the Holy Grail; something elusive that cannot be grasped for long, but an impossible level of artistry still worth striving for. Aaron Hollingsworth lives in Kansas City, and is the author of such works as the Four Winds - One Storm series, The Broken Bards of Paris, The Apothecary of Mantua, The Steel Tales series, as well as numerous RPG books. He invites the curious to visit his website at: aaronhollingsworth.com and to like his Facebook page: Aaron Hollingsworth-Writer.

• If H.P. Lovecraft is someone you’ve never heard of, hang your head in shame.

• The late Brian McNaughton was a reporter for the Newark Evening News during the day, while at the night writing fantasy-horror stories that mixed sex, satire, and black humor. Altogether he published about two hundred short stories in magazines and several books. The Throne of Bones, a collection of horror-fantasy stories about ghouls set in an opulent, decadent world reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith, won the 1998 World Fantasy Award for best collection, and was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection. Most of his work has been re-published by Wildside Press, including the short story collections Nasty Stories and Even More Nasty Stories.

• Michael Minnis was born and raised in Michigan. He read his first Clark Ashton Smith story, The Colossus of Ylourgne, at age 15. Mike’s stories have appeared in Dead but Dreaming, Eldritch Blue, Rehearsals for Oblivion, Horrors Beyond, Reves d’Ulthar, Lost Worlds of Space and Time, and Your Poisoned Dreams. Michael’s work was also compiled in the collections Anencephalous and The Girl Who Walked in Circles. In 2008, Mike received an Honorable Mention in Datlow and Windling’s 16th Edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for his short story Salt Air, Dead but Dreaming. Michael recently wrote and published a children’s and young adult book, Three Paws: Sophia and Her Story of Triumph. Michael is an avid student of the Civil War and World War II. His novels include The Last Confederate Freak Show and The Peoples’ Hare. Michael lives in Highland, MI.

• Glenn A. Rahman, in the ’Seventies and ’Eighties, was a frequent per-computer era contributor to the semi-pro scene, such as Fantasy Crosswinds, Eldritch Tales, and Crypt of Cthulhu. His first professional publication came with the release of the fantasy board game Divine Right, published by TSR, Inc. in 1979. This was followed by Knights of Camelot (1980, TSR), the Trojan War (1980, Metagaming), and Down with the King (1980, Avalon Hill). During this time, Glenn Rahman and his brother Philip (founder of the still-extant Fedogan and Bremer book company, specializing in Cthulhu Mythos and supernaturally-themed literature) created a two-part article for Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the Lovecraft Variant and the Monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos which amounted to the first successful transference of H.P. Lovecraft’s style of supernatural literature into a modern role-playing format. In addition, Mr. Rahman has continued to publish board gaming and fantasy role-playing articles and supplements widely. His first book-length fictional work was serialized in Dragon Magazine (beginning in 1980), entitled The Minarian Legends, which keyed off his original Divine Right universe. In 1989, Mr. Rahman’s HPL-inspired novel Heir of Darkness was released from New Infinities Productions, Inc., followed in 2001 when Sidecar Books of Minneapolis, MN published his Gardens of Lucullus, a Cthulhu Mythos novel in collaboration with Richard L. Tierney. Currently, a new edition of Divine Right is slated for release in 2020, to be followed soon by a second original board game, Scarlet Empire.

• David Reid Ross is an amateur historian with a lifelong interest in the “Late Antique” era in Europe and the Near East. He has written two books covering the early development of Islam: House of War and Throne of Glass. “The Cult of the Singing Flame” is his first fiction story, originally posted (somewhat chaotically) to fanfiction.net 2017. He also writes code; “TIMPIST” is a rendition of a TRS-80 game into C#, which can be had from CodeProject.com. He would like to dedicate this story to the memory of Robert E. Howard.

• Edward Stasheff is wanted in thirteen states for armchair anarchy, contributing to the delinquency of everyone, and criminally bad jokes. He runs Pickman’s Press, a publisher of Lovecrafian Horror, Weird Fiction, and Dark Fantasy, starting in 2018 with Corporate Cthulhu: Mythos Tales of Bureaucratic Nightmare. He has a short story appearing in Elm Books’ steampunk mystery anthology Death and the Age of Steam coming soon in 2020. Despite his growing notoriety and infamy, he remains a big nerd.

• Richard Tierney was born in north central Iowa. Beginning in his teens, he has been both a fan and scholar of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and other great names from the pulp fiction era. In 1961, he earned a degree in entomological science (Iowa State College) and served for many years with the U.S. Forest Service in the West of the United States and Alaska. An archaeological tourist by instinct, he has traveled widely, especially in Mexico, Central, and South America. Many of the ideas and images that he has employed in his stories have been inspired by his extensive travels. In the literary field, Mr. Tierney has frequently been both an editor and a writer of adventure fiction, mainly in the realm of dark fantasy. He has coauthored the Red Sonja series for Ace Books (early 1980s) and created the popular hero-adventurer, Simon of Gitta, a fictionalized version of Simon Magus. His major works include Collected Poems (1981, Arkham House), The House of the Toad (1993, Fedogan and Bremer), The Drums of Chaos (2008, Mythos Books), and Savage Menace and Other Poems of Horror (2010, reprint 2021, P’rea Press).

• DJ Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing and has been widely published in anthologies and magazines around the world, such as Chilling Horror Short Stories (Flame Tree), The Mad Visions of al-Hazred, The Idolators of Cthulhu and Miskatonic Dreams (all Alban Lake), What Dwells Below (Sirens Call), and Steampunk Cthulhu (Chaosium), and issues of Sirens Call, Cyaegha, Ravenwood Quarterly, and Weirdbook, as well as having a Yellow Mythos novella available in paperback and on the Kindle, The Yellow House (Dunhams Manor) and a comic horror e-novelette with Smith and Lovecraftian elements, A Trip to the Middle of the World, available from Alban Lake through Infinite Realms Bookstore. Check out his website at djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk, or follow him on Twitter @djtyrer.

• Henry J. Vester III spent his larval stage in southern California, feasting on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Sax Rohmer. His amazed discovery of the works of Clark Ashton Smith added new and unguessed dimensions to his life from that time forward. Vester has contributed tales, articles, and poetry to Fungi, Chronicles of the Cthulhu Codex, Eldritch Tales, and others, and has appeared in the Chaosium volumes The Innsmouth Cycle and The Tsathoggua Cycle. He has been a Guest Reader at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon, and has contributed material to The Eldritch Dark website, which honors the life and work of Clark Ashton Smith. Now retired from his career as a family therapist, Vester continues to elude both the FBI and the Brotherhood of the Silver Claw, and makes his home in the high desert country of southern Oregon.

• Simon Whitechapel has been a keyly committed core component of the Klarkash-Ton Kommunity ever since he bought a battered Panther paperback of Genius Loci on Tardebigge Market in 1987. He thinks that the world’s most powerful drugs are H2O, math and language, and that Clark Ashton Smith is therefore one of the greatest pharmacologists who ever lived. He blogs at OverlordoftheUberFeral.com and his CAS tribute stories are available at lulu.com/sortilege.