If the incantatory sentences and opulent diction of stories like “The Dark Eidolon” and the Zothique tales enchanted you, Dunsany’s prose will feel like home. In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Alveric’s rune-sword quest for Lirazel saturates every page with moonlit glamour and archaic cadence—much like the jeweled, decadent descriptions that make Namirrha’s rituals or the skull-strewn deserts of Zothique so intoxicating.

You admired Namirrha calling upon Thasaidon and the general aura of doom-laden thaumaturgy across Zothique. In Vance’s The Dying Earth, wizards like Mazirian and Turjan barter with perilous entities, memorize lethal spells (think Phandaal’s Gyrator or the Excellent Prismatic Spray), and roam a waning world of ancient ruins and perfumed corruption—echoing the sinister rites and end-of-days frisson that animate “The Dark Eidolon” and “The Empire of the Necromancers.”

If the hallucinatory vistas of Hyperborea or Xiccarph—and those nightmare-tableaux that drift through tales like “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis”—stayed with you, The Etched City will, too. In Ashamoil, the mercenary Gwynn and the healer Raule wander through fever-dream salons, living statues, and unsettling art that bends reality, conjuring the same surreal shimmer and oneiric dread that suffuse Smith’s strangest cities.

If you relished the ruthless arc of Namirrha—his spite, his daemonic pacts, his opulent cruelties—Beckford’s Vathek gives you a caliph driven by insatiable hunger for forbidden knowledge. Guided by the Giaour, Vathek builds palaces to flatter his senses and finally descends into the halls of Eblis, a fate as richly horrific and morally baroque as the punishments and infernal audiences that shadow Smith’s villainous magi.

If you liked how The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies assembles discrete tales—Averoigne’s abbeys, Zothique’s necropolises—into a shared atmosphere of decadence and dread, Chambers’s collection does the same. Stories like “The Repairer of Reputations” and “The Yellow Sign” orbit the forbidden play that unhinges minds, building a lattice of motifs and unease much like Smith’s interlinked cycles and recurring, baleful names.