Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith is a captivating read that seamlessly weaves together elements of fantasy and mystery. The intricate and detailed world-building draws readers in from the very first page, transporting them to a world filled with magic, dragons, and ancient prophecies.

The story follows a young heroine named Ebony who is chosen by a mysterious crystal to fulfill a destiny that is greater than she could have ever imagined. As Ebony embarks on a dangerous quest to save her kingdom from an evil sorcerer, she must navigate treacherous landscapes and face formidable foes.

Smith's prose is rich and poetic, painting a vivid picture of the fantastical world of Ebony and Crystal. The characters are well-developed and compelling, each with their own unique motivations and challenges. The plot is fast-paced and full of unexpected twists and turns that keep readers on the edge of their seats.

Overall, Ebony and Crystal is a beautifully crafted tale that will appeal to fans of fantasy and adventure. Smith's lyrical writing style and imaginative storytelling make this book a must-read for anyone looking for an escape into a mesmerizing world of magic and wonder.

Book Description:
As stated in L'Alouette: A Magazine of Verse, "Ebony and Crystal is an artist's intrepid repudiation of the world of trolleys and cash-registers, Freudian complexes and Binet-Simon tests, for realms of exalted and iridescent strangeness beyond space and time yet real as any reality because dreams have made them so. Mr. Smith has escaped the fetish of life and the world, and glimpsed the perverse, titanic beauty of death and the universe; taking infinity as his canvas and recording in awe the vagaries of suns and planets, gods, and daemons, and blind amorphous horrors that haunt gardens of polychrome fungi more remote than Algol and Achernar. It is a cosmos of vivid flame and glacial abysses that he celebrates, and the colorful luxuriance with which he peoples it could be born from nothing less than sheer genius.

The summation of Mr. Smith's exotic vision is perhaps attained in the long phantasmal procession of blank verse pentameters entitled, "The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil." In this frenzied plunge through nameless gulfs of interstellar terror the Californian presents a narcotic pageant of poisonous vermilious and paralysing shadows whose content is equalled only by its verbal medium; a medium involving one of the most opulent and fastidiously choice vocabularies ever commanded by a writer of English."

Clark Ashton Smith, referred to as one of the big three of Weird Tales, was a romantic-style poet, a Lovecraftian-style writer and a literary friend of H.P Lovecraft. As a poet, he was considered one of the last great West Coast Romantics. Ebony and Crystal, published in 1922, was Smith's last collection of pure poetry.
- Summary by Mary Kay and L'Alouette: A Magazine of Verse