The enduring appeal of horror is its capacity to peer over the edge of whatever social and cultural boundaries we have nervously sought shelter behind, to confront the terrifying inadequacies of our intellectual conceits – including the humanist ideals that ‘prestige’ drama clings to as it seeks endless reassurances to its own self-importance.

Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘weird’ short story from 1931, ‘The city of the singing flame’, presents the journals of Gilles Angarth (also a writer of weird fiction) and his accidental discovery of a portal to another dimension near the California-Nevada border – a place of lush vegetation surrounding a strange and cyclopean city.