Summer Shorts ’14: The Garden of Adompha by Clark Ashton Smith read by Robert Fass

 

June is Audiobook Month, and to celebrate, a group of more than 40 professional narrators has teamed with Going Public and Tantor Media by offering Summer Shorts ‘14, an audio collection of poetry, short stories and essays. All sales proceeds from the collection go to ProLiteracy, a national literacy outreach and advocacy organization.

All month you can visit Going Public and various blogs to hear 1-2 stories stream for free on their release day. You can purchase the whole collection at Tantor Media and you’ll receive 20 additional tracks while supporting a great cause.

The Guilded Earlobe is proud to host Audie Award Winner narrator Robert Fass today, fresh off his 3 Audie nominations in 2014.

Winner of the prestigious Audie Award for his recording of Empire of Liberty: A History of theEarly Republic by Gordon S. Wood, veteran actor Robert Fass is equally at home in a wide variety of styles, genres, characters, and dialects. A multiple Audie Award nominee with over eighty audiobooks to his credit, Robert has also earned multiple Earphones Awards, including for his narration of Francisco Goldman’s novel Say Her Name, which was named one of the Best Audiobooks of 2011 by AudioFile Magazine. Robert has given voice to modern and classic
fiction writers alike, including Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Asimov, Jeffrey Deaver, and John Steinbeck, plus nonfiction works in history, health, journalism, and business.

Story Summary:

On Zothique, the last continent of Earth, lies the wide orient isle of Sotar. There, King Adompha and his powerful court magician Dwerulas keep a mysterious, infernal garden – filled with dark and exotic secrets known only to them. Copyright is held by Casiana Literary Enterprises.

Recorded with permission.

After many threats and cajoling, Robert agreed to submit to an interview with me,  getting me to promise to stick to the tried and true narrator interview format, which I readily agreed to. I then almost immediately broke my promise.

Today, as part of Xe Sand’s Summer Shorts Event we have with us Audie Award Winning Narrator Robert Fass, who brings us a decidedly horrifying little tale of lovecraftian horticulture from poet and speculative fiction author Clark Ashton Smith called The Garden of Adompha. Welcome to The Guilded Earlobe, Robert!

Thanks, Bob – I’m thrilled to have finally landed here for June Is Audiobook Month.

I know you probably have done hundred of these interviews –

4 or 5 really, but –

and I’m sure you get asked the same questions over and over again, so I’m going to try and hit the narrator pro forma questions quickly, and then we can move onto something a bit more interesting.

Whatever you like.

So, first off, with the boom of the Audiobook Industry and the cutthroat nature of the narration business, which of the ancient old ones did you need to sell your soul to in order to achieve your level of success?

Well, actually it’s funny you say that, you know, because not many people know that it really is cutthroat. I don’t want to name names, but Johnny Heller for instance – when he thinks I’ve done him out of a narration job, he has more than once actually blocked the door at some of my recording sessions, waving a bejeweled ceremonial dagger and shouting arcane spells. It took me a long time and the loss of a few fingers on my right hand to discover that he’s relatively harmless, and a damn good narrator too. He even shows up at my home studio. I have no idea how he gets in.

As for the soul-selling thing, it’s a gradual experience. At least it has been for me. When I started out I wasn’t too ambitious… Barbara Rosenblat showed me how to go out at midnight and make a small fire using some back issues of AudioFile magazine and then place an author’s icon in the center while chanting a prayer to Tezcatlipoca. That got me some short stories and children’s titles. It wasn’t until I began incorporating ritual sacrifice that my career really began to take off.

While I agree that Johnny Heller was relatively harmless, ever since he was murdered by Druids than resurrected in a Pagan ritual, he has seemed a bit off, and probably should eventually be taken care off. Relatedly, the story you read for Summer Shorts was about Gardening, on a demonic hellish level. Do you enjoy gardening?

Yes.

Do you grow exotic poisons?

Who doesn’t?

Do you bury the bodies of your enemies in your garden as fertilizer?

Not in my OWN garden, no. I live in an apartment so I just have a window box. I tried burying an early, homuncular version of Scott Brick there once, but the whole thing fell 18 stories, which (a) was hard to explain and (b) was extremely surprising since I live on the third floor.  But once I realized that the Bronx is the home of the New York Botanical Gardens, which covers acres and acres and features some incredibly exotic specimens, well… let’s just say that I have plenty of options.

I thought that your choice of story for for Xe Sands Summer Shorts event was an interesting one. Was your choice of recording The Garden of Adompha due to the resolution of a blood debt or just a reflection of your dark nature?

The real reason is that Xe (and by the way is that name right out of a Smith tale!) insisted that the stories be no longer than 30 minutes and my favorite Smith story, THE VAULTS OF YOH-VOMBIS, would probably have been about an hour. So I really had no choice. And the fact that VAULTS is my favorite Smith story pretty much obviates any feeble denial on my part that I have a dark nature. (That and the brimstone smell my neighbors complain about.)

As someone who also had been sold to an archdemon as a child, did you feel a special connection to Dwerulas?

You ask a lot of closed questions, don’t you? Yeah, Dwerulas (for those who don’t know, that’s the evil wizard in the story) was definitely someone I could identify with on a number of levels. I actually managed to contact him via Skype while I was doing my research for the story, and we kind of bonded. He does a terrific Mick Jagger imitation. Like me, Dwerry’s a big Katy Kellgren fan. We like the same single malts… Plus he tried several times to kill me and vice versa.

If you were a tree with a part of a human body grafted onto it, what kind of human body part tree would you be?

I’m tempted to make a joke about a “penis flytrap”, but that’s not a tree, is it? Besides, this is a serious interview. So, hmmm… I’d probably either be a maple with opposable thumbs or a gnarled cypress with the mouth of Samuel Beckett. What about you?

Well, obviously I’d choose a Bonzai Tree with grafted Mr. Miyagi hands. I mean, for someone who has never actually met me, you really don’t know me that well, do you?

As a narrator, do you take on a different process when preparing to record horror, as opposed to dark mysteries or say, non-fiction? For example, I hear when Peter Berkrot prepares for a serial killer tale he just applies lotion to the skin, where as for supernatural horror he wears his favorite Bill Murray human flesh mask while performing vocal exercises.

Yeah, I do. At first it was trial and error, and not without the occasional mishap. I tried Mr. Krot’s method of the human flesh mask before doing my first children’s book, and predictably I haven’t been offered another one since. Same goes for erotica… I recorded the notorious 50 Shades of Puce in a pair of smiley-face-covered footie pajamas. Didn’t work. It takes a while to figure it out, but now I’ve found a method that works for me. For horror I consume a lot of dairy products the day before recording starts so my voice gets really gloppy, then I munch on ladyfingers (real ones, natch) between takes. Dark mysteries I actually record in complete darkness, which requires me to memorize the entire book since I can’t see the pages. That increases my prep time considerably, but I think it helps create a mood. And I treat nonfiction like fiction because I’ve learned that you can’t believe anything you read these days.

When you decided to perform The Garden of Adompha for Summer Shorts, you told Xe Sands that you believed my blog would be a good fit for the story. Is this due to the strange Lovecraftian sex cult I founded, for which I am still waiting for my first acolyte? (Shameless plug!)

No, I thought of The Guilded Earlobe because it’s the funniest, most twisted, intelligent blog I know (out of two). What you do with your evenings is your own business. (Do you accept PayPal for the initiation fee? It’s, um, for a friend.)

If you are looking for another place to shill your awesome Clark Ashton Smith recordings, I would highly recommend the site LOLCthuhlu, which only exists in a twisted alternate reality that I created where people sell bits of their soul for pictures of mult-tentacled squid gods saying cutesy things like, “I CAN HAZ YOUR ETERNAL SOUL TO DEVOUR FOR ETERNITY.”

Thanks for the tip. If I ever have the good fortune to record any more CAS tales, that will be my first stop, I promise. Speaking of multi-tentacled squid gods, there are a couple of notable ones in JOE GOLEM AND THE DROWNING CITY, for which I won an Earphones award and which I hope all fans of MTSGs (not to mention stone men and steampunk) will listen to.

Finally, do you have any messages for the multitude of people out there that are always bothering me when I’m finally getting to the good part of an audiobook you narrated?

Answer 1. What do you mean, “finally getting to the good part,” you bastard? [at which point I could sprout tentacles and a walrus mustache and devour your eternal soul in my wrath. If you want.]
Answer 2. Since they are all inside your head, there’s really nothing I can say to them.
Answer 3. Are these zombies or real people you’re talking about?
Answer 4. Slap a pair of headphones on ’em and say, “shut up, you gotta hear this!”

What JUNE IS AUDIOBOOK MONTH post would be complete without an awesome Giveaway, right? So, for those who made it to the end of this interview, SCORE! Today, I will be giving away a copy of JOE GOLEM AND THE DROWNING CITY by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden to one lucky reader. You must have an Audible Account in order to claim the prize. To enter, simply answer the question I asked Robert in the interview.

If you were a tree with a part of a human body grafted onto it, what kind of human body part tree would you be?

You have until Midnight June 10th (Tuesday) to leave you comment. The Winner will be contacted Wednesday.

Spoken Freely: Summer Shorts will be a month long extravaganza! Don’t forget to check out the entire list of wonderful performances hitting blogs across the blogosphere. If you missed it, the wonderful Tavia Gilbert stopped by The Reading Date to read Beautiful Things, by Michelle Webster-Hein. Lucy has a great interview with Tavia plus a Giveway, so check it out.

Tomorrow, one of my favorites, Luke Daniels will be at The Book Nympho reading Act 2, Scene 2 from Hamlet by Shakespeare. I’m sure that Jennifer, our favorite Literary Nympho will have something special in store for us as well.