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.

This collection is split into three sections. The first is set in Smith's imagined far future on a decaying Earth, a setting used in more recent times by writers such as Gene Wolfe. In the land of Zothique, sorcerors abound and they feature largely in the four tales. In one, two sorcerors take over an abandoned city in a region laid waste by drought and disease, and amuse themselves by reanimating the dead who then become their servitors, even those of the former royal house. In another, a ruler is saved from a rapidly fatal plague by a ring created by his friend the court sorceror and is one of the few survivors. He sets off in a ship with his remaining slaves, but evil sorcery steers the boat to the Isle of Torturers with fatal consequencies. In another story, a tribal leader wanders for years searching for his kidnapped bethrothed until his ship is drawn to an island where sorcerors employ those they have lured there to be drowned, to serve them. The final story in the section, Xeethra, differs in having a young goat herd as the main character. One day, seeking pasture for his goats in his drought ridden country, he blunders into an enchanted land where his life and identity are irrevocably changed.

The second section is set in medieval France in the land of Averoigne which has also featured in previous collections I've read. There the threat is from the intrusion of a demon in 'The Beast of Averoigne' or from a time travelling sorceror and his sidekick in the other story. The final section is made up of four stories, one of which features Smith's fanciful science fiction - a man and his Chinese factotum travel through time and find it also involves travel in space but they are onlookers for the most part - or a man is transported to another world and finds that his return from it carries a high price. The two most effective stories, which are the last two in this collection, fall into the horror/supernatural category: 'The Hunters from Beyond' has a creepy conviction about it, starting with the experience of the narrator in a second hand bookshop, and 'The Treader of the Dust' shows what can happen when someone meddles with old books of arcane lore.

As with a lot of Smith's fiction, the main characters are fairly passive and don't really achieve anything but end up acquiesing in whatever besets them. The interest is in the setting and description rather than plot. I enjoyed some of the stories more than others - 'The Beast of Averoigne' and the two stories mentioned above, with which the book concludes - and overall am awarding this a 3 star rating. ( )