The Tomb-Spawn

 

cover art by Margaret Brundage

The May 1934 issue of Weird Tales is justly remembered as containing Queen of the Black Coast, one of Robert E. Howard's most important Conan tales.

But there are other gems within. Clark Ashton Smith, for instance, contributed a story from his Zothique cycle: "The Tomb-Spawn."

Smith had several story cycles going during his career. The Averoigne tales were set in a fictional province in Medieval France. The Hyperborea stories were set during a pre-Ice Age civilization, full of sorcery and cosmic dread, similar to Howard's Hyborian Age in its setting. 

The Zothique stories are also filled with sorcery and cosmic dread, but are set in the far future. Technological civilizationis long-gone and forgotten, replaced by magic.  The Elder gods have returned. The sun is red and dying. Zothique is the last surviving continent. That last continent has a history of its own probably at least as long as contemporary mankind does now, but it still represents humanity's last gasp.

"The Tomb-Spawn," like many of these far-future tales, has Death looking over your shoulder pretty much the entire time you are reading it. Two travelers, Milab and Marabac, here a tale about an ancient sorcerer-king named Ossaru, who keeps an alien being called Nioth-Korghai in a chamber beneath his palace. 

(Smith was influenced by Greek mythology in his Hyperborea tales, but there might be a bit of influence here as well, as this set-up--though not the rest of the story--reminds me slightly of the myth of Minos and the Minotaur.) 

The creature was Ossaru's advisor and aide, but eventually dies from unknown causes. Later, when Ossaru also dies, he has arranged for his mummy to be lowered into the same chamber that houses the body of Nioth-Korghai is entombed, with both corpses protected by magical wards.

Millennia go by and no one now remembers where Ossaru's capital was located. But when Milab and Marabac are ambushed in the desert by cannibalistic humanoid creatures, then stumble across the ruins of that city while fleeing. In search of water, they end up in the tomb, where they find...

Well, see for yourself what they find. You can read the story online HERE. I was reminded of the story when it was featured on the excellent HorrorBabble podcast recently, so you can also listen to it being read there:

The Martian Horrors of Clark Ashton Smith, Part 4

 

cover art by Margaret Brundage

Read/Watch 'em In Order #185

Smith's last trip to Mars takes us to the same version of the Red Planet as we visited in "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" and "Dweller of the Gulf." In other words, it's a planet you don't necessarily want to visit.

But it's fun to read about other people visiting it. "Adventure is bad luck happening to someone else," after all.

"Vulthoom" was published in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales.  The two protagonists are two Earthmen stranded on Mars. They are lured down into vast underground chambers, where they are sort-of introduced to Vulthoom, an alien who came to our solar system many millennia ago. Vulthoom, who often takes thousand-year-long naps, has become a sort of legend in Martian culture--an representation of evil.  There is good reason for this.

Vulthoom is now awake and has plans. He wants the help of the two Earthmen to carry out these plans, which would result in thousands of deaths and the horror of Vulthoom moving from Mars to Earth.

The protagonists are apparently helpless to either refuse to help or escape. In the end, Smith telegraphs the one way they can stop Vulthoom perhaps a little too obviously, but the story overall achieves its purpose in generating a sense of real dread.

In the end, the lesson we learn from Clark Ashton Smith is DON'T GO TO MARS! Maybe take a trip to Venus instead. 

You can read the story HERE. 

The Martian Horrors of Clark Ashton Smith, Part 3

 

cover art by Frank R Paul

Read/Watch 'em In Order #184

Smith's third trip to Mars can, I think, be considered to be in the same universe as the story "The Vaults of Yoh-Vambis." And like that story, it went through some pre-publication shenanigans before being published in a diluted form.

Before being published in the February 1933 issue of Wonder Stories, it had been rejected by Weird Tales. Strange Tales was his next try, but that magazine folded. He then tried Wonder Stories, but the editor there demanded the story be expanded to give it more "scientific explanation." The ending was also, as Smith himself put it, "cruel and monstrous."

Smith didn't want to make these changes. He felt (and he was right, by golly) that the story worked best if the horrors encountered on Mars were inexplicable rather than given a psuedo-scientific explanation. He was convinced that the horrific ending was appropriate to the story. He was right about that as well.

Smith tried and failed one more time to sell the story to Weird Tales. He then reluctantly the revisions needed to get it published in Wonder Stories. He refused to change the ending, but when it was published, he was shocked to discover that the ending had been toned down with an editorial re-write.

The story in its original form is great. Three human prospectors on Mars take shelter in a cavern during a sandstorm. They find an apparently bottomless abyss with a path running down the side. Unwisely, they decide to explore the path. What happens next... well, this is another case where I don't want to spoil anything.

Here's a link to the original story, titled "The Dweller in the Gulf." I also got the background information about the publication history from this site. Anyway, make sure the lights are on when you read this one. And, for gosh sake, don't go spelunking on Mars!

The Martian Horrors of Clark Ashton Smith, Part 2

 

cover art by C.S. Senf

Read/Watch 'em In Order #183

 

Smith's second trip to Mars was a vast improvement over his first. Perhaps because this was purely his own story--he didn't have to work from someone else's plot this time. But regardless of the reason, "Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," published in the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales, is fantastic. 

Well, the original version is fantastic. When Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright first received the manuscript, he asked for some revisions. He wanted faster pacing. Smith, in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft (whose At the Mountains of Madness is an obvious influence on Martian tale), wrote "I suppose I can throw out a lot of the descriptive matter, but it's a crime all the same."

Smith was right, of course. Smith's vivid description of Mars is a vital part of generating the proper atmosphere. Without it, it's still a good story. But it's not a GREAT story.

The story is a first-person account of the only survivor of an archeological expedition to the ruins of the ancient Martian city of Yoh-Vambis. The scientists are all Earthmen, but they know a far amount about Martian history and legends. For instance, they know the race that built Yoh-Vambis died off forty thousand years ago. They also know the legend that suggests the race was killed by "something too horrible and outre to be mentioned even in a myth."

Here's a teaching moment: If you are about to enter the vaults of an ancient alien city AND there's a legend about something horrible having once been in the area AND if the Martian natives you've hired refuse to enter the vaults with you.... DON'T GO IN. It won't end well for you.

They do go in, of course. They find a mummy. When the mummy collapses into dust, "the strange cowl it was wearing began to curl and twitch upward at the corners, it writhed with a verminous motion, it fell from the withered cranium, seeing to fold and unfold convulsively in mid-air as it fell. Then it dropped on the bare head of [one of the scientists]..."

Agony, screaming and the apparent control of dead bodies by the parasitic creature follows. I don't want to give too much away, because you should experience it for yourself. Just remember--DON'T GO INTO THE VAULTS!

You can read the proper complete version of the story HERE, which is also where I got the background information about its writing and publication. 

Smith will return to Mars twice more. Next week, we'll look at his third trip to the Red Planet and examine another case in which bad editing decisions lessen the impact of a good story. 

The Martian Horrors of Clark Ashton Smith, Part 1

 

cover art by Frank R. Paul

Read/Watch 'em In Order #182

In 1931, Wonder Stories had an Interplanetary Plot contest. A reader could send in a plot for a story involving another planet, with the chance of winning money AND having the plot expanded into a full-blown story by one of Wonder Stories regular writers. Johnston got 25 bucks and Clark Ashton Smith got a paycheck for turning Johnston's plot into a story.

"The Planetary Entity," sometimes reprinted as "Seedling of Mars," saw print in the Fall 1931 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly.

Now I am a huge fan of Smith's work. His dark fantasy and horror stories are written with style, wit and a wonderful fondness for obscure words.

But when I decided to review the four C.A.S. stories involving Mars, it meant starting with the first one published. I'd never read "The Planetary Entity" before and was curious to do so.

And the story just falls flat. Maybe--being someone else's idea--Smith's heart wasn't in it. I don't know. But where his stories are normally a joy to read, this one (dispite being only novella-length) took me three days to work through. I didn't dislike it, but it didn't engross me and I found myself easily distracted from it. 

In addition to the plodding nature of the prose, I had a few problems with the story that means I won't be able to avoid spoilers. So, if you want to experience it spoiler-free, click HERE to read it before continuing on. Let me know if you agree or disagree with my opinon.

An unmanned ship from Mars land on Earth. When a party of scientists, politicians and reporters climb aboard, the ship takes off and takes the to Mars.

They discover that the one life form on Mars is a giant plant stretching itself around the planet. They ship takes them to a sort-of central mode for the plant, which includes a couple of enormous eyes and the ability to build more ships.

The plant learns to communicate with the humans. It wants to set up a teleportation device on Earth that would send him water. In exchange, he'll teach the humans advanced science and social skills, ending war and bringing a utopia on Earth. But the plant compares itself to a god and talks of humans being his servant.

Half the scientists want to go for this. The other half is suspicious and manages to bring the ship back to Earth. Soon, civil wars are waging across the Earth. Finally, people in the pro-plant faction are given transport to Venus, where they eliminate the Venusian dinosaurs and set up a transmitter to send water to Mars.

On Earth, a giant seed crashes and a plant quickly grows to engulf the planet, emitting a gas to wipe out anti-plant humanity. 

And--well, that's it. Are the humans on Venus happy? Are they allowed personal freedom? Are they under the rule of the plant? Do they regret the planetary genocide carried out back on Earth? I dunno! The story fails to dive deeply (or even superficially) into the issues being raised. 

It's all very unsatisfying. But Clark's future Martian stories, set on another version of Mars, will be very, very satisfying (as well as bizarre). Next week, we'll see what we think of one of them.

A Really, Really Big Frankenstein's Monster

 

cover art by Margaret Brundage

Recently, I posted the above image (concept art by stop-motion pioneer Willis O'Brien) on Facebook. It's about a proposed sequel to the original King Kong. In this story, Kong would have survived the fall from the Empire State Building and eventually get into a fight with a giant monster made by Dr. Frankenstein's grandson.  I like Son of Kong and I'm not convinced that having Kong survive wouldn't irreparably hurt the emotional impact of the original film's ending. But, all the same, it's too bad we never got to see this story brought to live by O'Brien's genius.

Anyway, someone mentioned that this reminded him of the Clark Ashton Smith story "The Colossus of Ylourgne," originally published in the June 1934 issue of Weird Tales. 

This one is set in the make-believe medieval province of Averoigne, the setting for about a dozen of Smith's tale. A evil sorcerer named Nathaire has vanished from the city of Vyones. Soon after, dead men start digging their way out of graves or walking out of their own funerals, all traveling to the same creepy castle (known as Ylourgne). A former disciple of Nathaire, named Gerard, investigates.

Gerard discovers that Nathaire is using the corpses to build a colossus--a giant constructed from the bones and flesh of the dead men. Nathaire is dying, so he intends to transfer his soul into the colossus and rampage across Averoigne, destroying the city of Vyones and taking revenge upon them for former persecutions. 

Gerard ends up a prisoner in a pitch-dark dungeon, but manages to escape. By now the colossus is going full-on Kaiju against the province, but Gerard--with his own magical knowledge--thinks he might be able to stop it.

It's a great story--hitting an appropriately creepy vibe from start to finish, enlivined by Smith's great prose and his obvious enjoyment of dropping in obscure words. (Seriously, don't read a Smith story without a dictionary handy.)

Clark Ashton Smith must have been  influenced by Frankenstein when he wrote this one. Such is the influence of Mary Shelley that it's impossible to do a story about reanimating the dead without thinking about her novel. But Smith takes the idea in a different direction. It's interesting that Willis O'Brien was thinking about a similar take on the Frankenstein story just a year or so before "The Colossus of Ylourgne." I don't think O'Brien's idea was known to the public (though perhaps it was mentioned in a movie magazine at the time), so Clark was almost certainly thinking up a giant Frankenstein's monster independently. Great minds think alike, I guess.

A comment on my original Facebook post suggested a movie version of "Colossus" made in the 1930s could have starred Ernest Thesiger as Nathaire and Colin Clive as Gerard. I can see Thesiger as the main bad guy with no problem. I don't know if Clive is right for Gerard, who has a few action hero moments throughout the story that doesn't give me a Clive vibe. I think that a young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. would have been good in the part. With O'Brien animating the Colossus as it rampages acrosss medieval France, this would have been an awesome movie.

Thieves, Protoplasmic Monsters and Hounds from Before Time

Last week, we looked at H.P. Lovecraft's novella "The Whisperer in Darkness" and mentioned that Lovecraft included a couple of shout-outs to the horror stories of other writers, effectively making those stories a part of the Cthulhu mythos.

This led me to read both those stories, because it would have been literally impossible for me not to read them.

Frank Belknap Long's short story "The Hounds of Tandalos" appeared in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales and is impressive in how effectively it generates an atmosphere of horror in such a relatively short story.

The first-person narrator is asked by a guy named Chalmers (who has "the soul of a medieval ascetic") to participate in an experiment. The narrator is reluctant to do so, because he thinks the idea is insane--Chalmers wants to take a mind-expanding drug while concentrating on complex Einsteinian mathematics. This, he thinks, will allow his mind to travel back through time. He wants the narrator to write down whatever Chalmers observers.

Well, the experiment works--or perhaps Chalmers is just vividly hallucinating: "All the billions of lives that preceded me on this planet are before me at this moment. I see men of all ages, all races and colors. They are fighting, killing, building, dancing, singing. they are sitting about rude fires on lonely gray deserts, and flying through the air on monoplanes." Real or not, Chalmers provides us with some awesome imagery.

But then he goes back before life existed--only to discover that some sort of perverse life is there at the beginning of time: "All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment; I cannot be certain. But I heard them breathe. Indescribably for a moment I felt their breath on my face. They turned towards me and I fled screaming."

These were the Hounds of Tandalos--the source of all that is evil in our universe. Chalmers is terrified that they might follow him into the present and enter our world. The narrator at this point, deciding that Chalmers is now completely off the deep end, leaves in disgust. But later events may just prove that Chalmers had reason to be scared...

You can read the story HERE.

Clark Ahston Smith's creation--the evil god Tsathoggua--also gets a mention in Lovecraft's story. "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" was published after "The Whisperer in Darkness," appearing in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. But Lovecraft and Smith were regular correspondents. Lovecraft got to read the story before it was published and loved it.

There's a lot to love. Despite being a very effective and creepy horror story, Clark's story has a lot of humor in it. The story is set in Smith's Hyperborean cycle--a time before recorded history similar to the Hyborian Age that Robert E. Howard would create for Conan.

The title character is also the narrator, who claims that he and his partner are the best thieves in the world. One of the fun things about the story is that you can debate just how good these guys actually are at their chosen profession. Zeiros recounts some details of several amazing jobs they pulled off in the past, but at the moment they are broke. They spend their last few pennies on wine instead of bread because getting drunk will supposedly give them inspiration for their next job. So are they great thieves temporarily down on their luck, or are they mediocre thieves with delusions of grandeur?

In either case, they decide their next job will be to loot a city that was abandoned centuries ago and reputed to be a place of evil. Since the city was abandoned in a hurry after a prophesy warned the population to flee, the thieves figure there's likely to be a lot of valuables left behind.  They don't stop to wonder why no one had ever looted the supposedly empty city in the past.

The monster they inevitably meet is a protoplasmic creature that grows out of a basin full of thick liquid and pursues them relentless through the jungle surrounding the city and then back into the city once again. There is simply no escaping this thing and getting away with one's life will not be an easy task.

Like Lovecraft, Clark had a infallible skill at choosing just the right words and sentence structures to make his stories beg to be read aloud. The drawback to this, of course, is that you pretty much have no idea how to pronounce any of the names. And, no matter how smart and well-read you are, you will have to stop to look up word meanings at least a half-dozen times. None of this distracts from the fun of reading his stories, though. In fact, it enhances that fun.

"The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" is, like Long's story, very short but still very effective in generating the proper atmosphere. Where Long went for pure horror, Clark accomplished even more in that he inserted humor without lessening the horror. I have read a lot of Clark's stuff over the years, but this is one of my favorites.

You can read this story HERE.

"And the Evil of the Stars is not as the Evil of Earth."

Clark Ashton Smith is often spoken of in the same breath as H.P. Lovecraft. That's because the two were friends--they exchanged letters regularly for 15 years, though I can't for the life of me remember if they ever met in person. They both wrote horror stories often published in Weird Tales, often borrowing place names and and names of hideous Elder Gods from one another. Both presented a world in their fiction that was made frightening by the implication that there are powerful and inhuman beings flitting about the universe and occasionally stopping by Earth to sow a little bit of death and madness. In their worlds, there's a lot of stuff out there we're literally better off not knowing about.

In fact, it's really not hard at all to assume that Smith's and Lovecraft's stories take place in the same universe.Smith's "The Beast of Averoigne," for instance, was published in the May 1933 issue of Weird Tales.  Set in 14th Century France, it involves a creature that first appears on the night a red comet first appears in the sky. The horror "rises to the height of a tall man, and it moved with swaying of a great serpent, and it's members undulated as if boneless." It proves to have a taste for human bone marrow and feeds on a monk at an abbey and a couple of nearby villagers.

Smith, like Lovecraft, is a master of word choice and sentence construction--his Wikipedia entry accurately refers to his vocabulary as "wide and ornate."  There's an archaic feel to his prose--a style that fits his subject matter perfectly.

Smith's unique voice is what makes stories like "The Beast of

Averoigne"--which is essentially a pretty straightforward monster story--so much scary fun to read; the prose draws you back in time and sets you down in a different time and place. This time, we're transported to the side of a sorcerer who is recruited to destroy the beast. Using an ancient ring that contains a demon inside, he discovers that the beast "belonged to a race of stellar devils that had not visited the Earth since the foundering of Atlantis."  He also discovers a way of destroying it, but the act of doing so reveals something even more horrible about its existence here on Earth than was previously suspected.

It is, in fact, almost impossible not to assume the story is set in the same universe as Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" or "The Shadow of Innsmouth." Heck, the Beast could have been of the same race as Cthulhu or other Elder Things--maybe a toddler only a few million years old.

Gee whiz, now the toddlers I care for in my church's nursery don't seem so ill-behaved after all.