Last week the Catholic traditionalist OnePeterFive considered Lovecraft’s worldview for Halloween, and Christian traditionalist blog The Orthosphere offered a long appreciation of Clark Ashton Smith’s “City of the Singing Flame” & Synchronicity. The latter post piqued my interest in an audiobook, as it soon becomes evident that the long essay has far many plot-spoilers and that it should be read after the work itself.

Is there a free audiobook version of quality? Yes. On Archive.org is “The City of the Singing Flame, read by the Late Great Harlan Ellison”, being a 90 minute audiobook via the venerable Cthulhuwho1. Recorded by him from the radio to mid-1980s tape, so you may want to use your audio-player’s graphic equaliser to fix sibilance and hiss and suchlike. I read elsewhere that Harlan Ellison consented to read it on air because it was a formative work for him as a youth. Ellison repeats a short section in the middle, with a better reading the second time around.

S.T. Joshi has called it “intoxicatingly exotic” in I Am Providence. This makes it sound quite interesting, to someone who’s so far found it impossible to get into what is supposed to be the best of Smith (vague memories of interminably dialogue-heavy wizards wandering around in a desert, given up on after XX pages, etc). What did Lovecraft think of it? I can only find a few instances of his mentioning “City of Singing Flame”. He was enthusiastic, but not gushing in his brief remark…

“The City of The Singing Flame” is certainly a memorable thing, & I was glad to learn that Wandrei shares my opinion. (Selected Letters III)

To Barlow he was equally terse in passing… “great story”, “worthy sequel”. To Bloch and Wandrei he mentions it not at all, judging by the indexes in the volumes of letters.

“City of Singing Flame” (the original title) and its sequel “Beyond the Singing Flame” (originally “The Secret of the Flame” on the typescript, now at Brown) ran in the pulp Wonder Stories in 1931. The stories were later reprinted in Famous Science Fiction, Winter 1966/67 and the follow-on Summer 1967 issue. Later both were collected in a single U.S. paperback, with generic ‘butterfly-dragon’ fantasy cover-art which was appears to have been hoping to appeal to the legions of female fans then avidly reading Anne McCaffrey’s best-selling Dragonrider series.

Turns out that Harlan Ellison also reads the sequel in his reading and both, shorn of the repeating middle section, run about 80 minutes in total. But if you want a variant reading there’s also a 2018 one-hour reading of the sequel on YouTube by Nemesis the warlock.

Update: I’ve now heard it. At times it’s very much like an audio-version of one of Moebius’s less convoluted graphic novels.