If the jeweled, archaic phrasing of poems like “The Hashish-Eater” and “Nero” thrilled you, you’ll sink right into the rolling, trumpet-blast sentences of The Worm Ouroboros. Eddison’s prose sings with the same decadent grandeur Smith channels—battles on Demonland, sorceries in Witchland, and the bravura speeches of Lord Juss and Brandoch Daha feel carved from the same rare ore as Smith’s most sumptuous lines.

The way “The Last Oblivion” and “The Eldritch Dark” dissolve boundaries between vision and world finds an eerie twin in The King in Yellow. Read “The Repairer of Reputations” and “The Yellow Sign,” where the forbidden play unhinges Hildred Castaigne and a haunted artist—the same vertigo of unreality, symbolic colors, and decadent dread that saturate Smith’s most oneiric poems.

If the mythic vistas of “Zothique,” “Hyperborea,” and “Poseidonis” stirred you—the sense of lost ages and handmade gods—then Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana will feel like opening a sibling grimoire. Meet MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, hear Skarl the Drummer keep time for creation, and wander parables that echo the ceremonial, twilight grandeur of Smith’s invented antiquities.

Poems like “Song of the Necromancer” and “The Sorcerer Eros” treat magic as perilous ecstasy; Machen’s The Great God Pan maps that same dark radiance onto a modern setting. Dr. Raymond’s experiment, Mary’s transformation, and Helen Vaughan’s trail of unnameable ruin embody the intoxicating, ruinous current Smith hints at whenever his mages summon more than they can master.

If the apocalyptic vistas of “The Hashish-Eater” and the void-longing of “The Last Oblivion” gripped you, Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland expands that vision into narrative: the recluse’s journal, the emerald Plain of Silence, the swine-things, and the stupendous flight through the dying cosmos read like Smith’s cosmic allegories unfurled into a single, shattering vision.