Zothique revisited, and more Ashton Smith

I have wondered many times (and even tried to investigate as best I could) why Clark Ashton Smith is not in the Appendix N. Not only because his stories, genre, and era would make him a perfect candidate, but because he would be even MORE fitting than most of the books that are actually listed there.

He is certainly a precursor, considered one of the three giants of the "weird" fiction genre alongside Lovecraft and Howard, both of whom receive prominent placement in the Appendix. Clark Ashton Smith has a touch of Howard's sword and sorcery, a measure of Lovecraftian horror, but blends genres more freely than either (including also a larger dose of humor and imaginative worldbuilding).

His tales, like few others of his era, genuinely feel like D&D adventures, something that would only be matched by the later works of Leiber and Andre Norton (Leiber was influenced by Smith, although Norton's toad-like beings might be an indirect influence). He is one of the most important originators of the Dying Earth genre, which would go on to shape Jack Vance, himself a major influence on Gygax. In the same vein, Smith's ornate and vivid prose likely had an enormous influence on Gygax's writing style, perhaps also filtered through Jack Vance.

The Zothique stories are among Clark Ashton Smith's most impressive work. I recently reread the entire cycle, and truly each one of them could stand on its own as a D&D adventure. Dunsany's stories have a similar effect, but many of them seem to build toward a single climax of maximum strangeness, whereas the Zothique tales are more often defined by a succession of unusual situations, traps, monsters, and obstacles. His protagonists, too, are very D&D-ish: not legendary heroes like Conan or the largely outmatched humans of Lovecraft, but brave, sometimes foolish, often selfish, adventurers that live or die based on skill and sheer luck.

Could it be that Gygax simply did not know Smith? Given his enormous influence, I find that unlikely; several elements of D&D appear to be directly inspired by the author, such as the Geas spell (also adopted by Vance), and the rich vocabulary for the dead and undead: ghouls, liches, necromancers, and more. Another hypothesis, perhaps more plausible, is that Gygax simply was not a great fan (which, again, is odd given his influence and proximity to R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and H. P. Lovecraft , some of "the most immediate influences upon AD&D"). Maybe Smith was simply less popular, which seems to be the case.

At least the Zothique stories point to another reason, one that seems rather obvious in hindsight but that I may have overlooked because I am already a dark fantasy reader: many of the stories are too dark, and a significant number involve acts that constitute or suggest necrophilia (though not explicitly) alongside torture, alcoholism, cruelty, decadence, revenge, and so forth, sometimes with no heroic characters to serve as counterweight.

Even so, the Zothique cycle strikes me as particularly grim, and not all of Smith's stories follow the same tendency. It now seems worth revisiting his other tales (equally impressive and equally suited to D&D) to determine whether this explanation is sufficient, or whether another reason might yet be found. For now, the mystery remains.