Clark Ashton Smith

The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith

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It seems to be a time of wrapping up reading projects. With this, I’ve read – if not reviewed – all of Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction except for his juvenile novel The Black Diamonds.

Review: The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith, eds. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, 2011.

Cover by Jason Van Hollander

Obviously, with a title like that, you’re not going to get a lot of top of the line Clark Ashton Smith fiction here. For that, you need to get Night Shade Books’ five volume set of his stories. (I’ve reviewed volumes 1, 2, 4, and 5.) But, if you’re a Smith completist or even just a fan like me, you will want this book. Not only does it have reprints of rare Smith items, but it also prints, for the first time, several of his works.

Editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger’s able “Foreword” has several surprises.  It seems “The Abominations of Yondo” in 1925 was not Smith’s first published fiction or even his first fantastic fiction. It also gives a reason why Smith stopped submitting stories to Weird Tales magazine. It changed ownership in 1938, and, in an interview, the new owner, William J. Delaney, said he didn’t want “nasty” stories that left a “sickish feeling in the reader”, and no more stories where characters spent a lot of time talking in “French, German, Latin, etc”. Now, he may have been thinking of Smith for the “nasty” stories (the interviewer thinks Delaney was thinking of Smith’s “The Coming of the White Worm”), but I’m pretty sure it was Smith he was thinking of in the third banned category: “stories wherein the reader must constantly consult an unabridged dictionary”.

It seems that Smith eventually entered into a partnership with E. Hoffman Price. Smith would provide one of his unpublished manuscripts, and Price would modify it, and they would split the sales proceeds with Price taking two-thirds.

Donald Sidney-Fryer is the closest thing we have to a literary biographer of Smith as well as compiling bibliographies on Smith. He actually met Smith in 1958 and remained Smith’s friend until his death in 1961. His “Introduction: The Sorcerer Departs” was written in 1963 since Sidney-Fryer was worried Smith would be forgotten. This is the third reprinting of it since then.

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“A Vintage from Atlantis”

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This week’s bit of weird fiction being discussed by the Deep Ones over at LibraryThing is a Clark Ashton Smith story I haven’t reviewed before.

Review: “A Vintage from Atlantis”, Clark Ashton Smith, 1933.

Cover by Jason Van Hollander

Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, in their notes for this story in A Vintage from Atlantis, state that several of Smith’s stories for Weird Tales were specifically written as “fillers”, usually less than 3,000 words in length, between longer stories. 

This is one though Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected it twice before finally printing it. 

It has a simple plot. 

Recounted by a Stephen Magbane – oddly enough, a Puritan, it’s a tale of pirates and not set in one of Smith’s fictional worlds of the past or future. 

On an island ideally suited to keep their vast loot, the crew of Captain Barnaby Dwale notice a peculiar large jar – seemingly something like an ancient amphora – that has washed up on shore.  Dwale is a man of some learning and notes its similarity between old earthen wine jars and pronounces it a “rare vintage” from Atlantis. 

He decides to sample it. 

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Searchers after Horror

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It’s not often that I personally get sold a book, but that’s what happened with this one. I was in Dreamhaven Books contemplating whether I should buy this shrink wrapped title or not because it had a Brian Stableford story in it. Dwayne H. Olson, shareholder in its publisher Fedogan & Bremer (and supplier of the Hannes Bok story in the anthology) talked me into it.

Low Res Scan: Searchers after Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic, ed. S. T. Joshi, 2014.

Cover by Richard Corben

After finishing this book, I contemplated writing an essay on just the bad stories in it. But, after actually making notes on the stories, I realized there actually weren’t that many bad ones. But I’ll be getting to them later and the matter of unsatisfying endings in weird fiction.

I’ve already reviewed “Et in Arcadia Ego” by Brian Stableford and “Exit Through the Gift Shop” from Nick Mamatas. I don’t think my original interpretation of the latter is correct, but it’s not a story I’m spending more time on.

First story in the book is Melanie Tem’s “Iced In”. I’ve known, professionally and personally, women like the one in this story. Poor, a hoarder, chronically and dangerously indecisive, she finds herself trapped in her house after an ice storm. Told with empathy and memorable, it’s well done.

In the town I’ve recently moved to, a frequent question is “Do you ice fish?”, so I have a fondness for Donald Tyson’s “Ice Fishing”. In it, two Camp Breton Island ice fishermen, Gump and Mickey D, going out fishing one night. There is idle talk about the disappearance of an acquaintance a couple of weeks back and puzzlement why the local Indians aren’t fishing as usual. Tyson continues to impress me with his versatility, and this one has some humor too.

While it’s not a Cassie Barrett story, I was pleased to Ann K. Schwader’s “Dark Equinox”. It’s another tale of archaeological horror, here once removed because we’re dealing with strange photomontages of archaeological artifacts. Why did the photographer lock herself up in her studio one night and torch everything? And, more importantly, why do the photos seem to change over time?

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“The Nameless Offspring”

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It’s this week’s weird fiction being discussed over at LibraryThing

Review: “The Nameless Offspring”, Clark Ashton Smith, 1932.

Cover by Jason Van Hollander

Coincidentally, Arthur Machen, subject of several recent posts, has a connection to this story. Smith had read his “The Great God Pan” and decided he would like write a story with a woman impregnated by something inhuman.

It’s an effective story though it does rely on the great coincidence of the narrator, Henry Chaldane, accidentally ending up, while on a motorcycle trip through England, at the isolated house of Sir John Tremoth. He just happens to be a friend of Henry’s deceased father.

Henry vaguely remember the story of what happened to Lady Agatha Tremoth, Sir John’s wife. She went cataleptic and was mistakenly buried alive. 

The day after she was interred in the family vault, Sir John doubted that Agatha was dead. He went to the crypt and found Agatha sitting upright. Somehow, she got her nailed coffin lid off.  She was shattered in brain and body and remembered only a hideous, unhuman face looming over her. Its limbs were semi-human, and the figure seemed to go about sometimes like an animal. 

Nine months later, she gave birth to a monstrous child and died. The child was locked away from the world. 

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News of the Black Feast and Other Random Reviews

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Low Res Scan: News of the Black Feast and Other Random Reviews, Brian Stableford, 1992, 2009.

No, I am not going to review a collection of Stableford’s book reviews.

However, I will briefly note a few I found especially interesting.

His introduction notes that book reviews are mostly fillers that few people read. But authors do, and he apologizes for being hurtfully frank in some.

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“Outside the Human Aquarium”

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I’ll be doing a post on each essay in Outside the Human Aquarium since readers seem to like that format.

Review: “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith“, Brian Stableford, 1987, 1995.

This essay is the reason I bought this collection. 

I found Stableford appreciative and insightful on Smith. Stableford points out that Smith had no interest in the “human condition”.  Like the other two of Weird Tales‘s “Three Musketeers”, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, he is not appreciated by some readers.

Stableford argues that each of the three are sometimes cited as having weaknesses which are really the result of peculiar idiosyncrasies. 

Lovecraft’s allegedly stilted prose is the result, to Stableford, of “anxious consciousness”, Howard’s reputed hackneyed blood-and-thunder is hard-bitten romanticism, and Smith’s exotic vocabulary and elaborate descriptions are an attempt to escape the restrictions and boredom of the world with, to use Arthur Rimbaud’s phrase, the “alchemy of words”.

Smith was influenced by the French Decadents who were, in turn, inspired partly by Edgar Allan Poe and the Jansenist thought of France, the belief that God had created the world and then abandoned it, that nowhere in the bleak universe is any real comfort to be had. This influence of the Decadents shows up in the drug element in many of Smith’s stories and also the Oriental elements – especially in his earliest stories. 

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Turn Off Your Mind

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I’ve longed liked Gary Lachman’s articles in the Fortean Times. I’m also an admirer of his work, under the name Gary Valentine, with the rock band Blondie, particularly his song “X Offender”.

So, it was only a matter of time before I decided to read one of his books.

Review: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, Gary Lachman, 2001. 

Lachman’s basic thesis is that several elements of the mystic 1960s led not just to the Summer of Love but the murders of Charles Manson and that the strains of thought that produced both go back to the late 1890s.

It’s an interesting story, but most parts of it were familiar to me already, and I’m not going to talk much about them. I am also not sympathetic to mysticism, the Summer of Love, or the spirit of the 1960s.

What I am going to talk about is the surprising amount of material in the book about writers and works of fantastic fiction and how they were connected to the mystic Sixties.

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s not only wrote the very popular The Morning of the Magicians, but Bergier also wrote a letter praising H. P. Lovecraft that appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. The Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960, had Fortean material and centered on mysticism, transcendence, mutation and the evolution of consciousness. It was a heady mix that drew from the zeitgeist.

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“Bells of Horror”

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This week’s weird fiction being discussed over at LibraryThing.

Review: “Bells of Horror”, Henry Kuttner, 1939.

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos
Cover by Gahan Wilson

This is a fairly good bit of Lovecraftian fiction from Kuttner.

He uses a typical Lovecraft structure. Our narrator opens by mentioning a weird event then gives the back story of what led up to it and concludes with a not all surprising event. (Sometimes Lovecraft managed to surprise with his last lines, sometimes not.)

Our weird event is the recovery – and then deliberate destruction soon afterwards – of the “lost bells of Mission San Xavier”. They were rung once, after vanishing for more than a 150 years, and “an unpleasant blackness . . . shrouded San Xavier” then. That’s our hook.

The bells were lost until Arthur Todd, a friend of our narrator Ross, finds them hidden in a cave. Todd is head of the California Historical Society; Ross is its secretary. With the bells was a carving warning “Let no man hang the evil bells of the Mutsunes” . . . lest the terror of the night rise again in Nueva California”. The Mutsunes were Indian shamans who helped cast the bells and may have put a curse on them.

Todd asks Ross to come and help him get the bells out of the cave. So, Ross takes a drive. Continue reading →

“Robert H. Barlow’s ‘A Memory’ in William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land”

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Review: “Robert H. Barlow’s ‘A Memory’ in William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land”, Marcos Legaria, 2014.

Voices from the Borderland
Cover by Daniele Serra

R. H. Barlow critic Massimo Berruti thought Barlow’s “A Memory”, a far future tale, greatly resembled The Night Land. (I have not read it.) This article tracks the passing around of Hodgson’s novels from the 50-year-old Herman C. Koenig, a book collector and a key figure in keeping interest in Hodgson alive, to various members of the Lovecraft Circle: Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and R. H. Barlow.

Barlow seems to have written his story around September 1934. We just can’t determine from extant letters when, if ever, Barlow got a hold of a copy of The Night Land though we know approximately when he saw Hodgson’s other novels.

“Pioneering Essays”

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Review: “Pioneering Essays”.

Voices from the Borderland
Cover by Daniele Serra

This is a collection of the earliest essays on William Hope Hodgson, mostly by writers.

H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Weird Work of William Hope Hodgson” says Hodgson is one of the few writers that can capture “the inmost illusive essence of the weird” and puts Hodgson just below Algernon Blackwood in his skill even if his conception of the universe and man’s place in it is “conventionally sentimental”. I’m not sure exactly what Lovecraft meant. Hodgson’s stories don’t appeal to God or any higher power save man. Perhaps he was noting Hodgson’s characters often have love interests whereas Lovecraft’s (with the exception of “The Thing on the Doorstep”) never do. Lovecraft uses variations on the word “siege” in describing every Hodgson novel except The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”. He finds the prose of that novel inaccurate and “pseudo-romantic”. Of The Night Land, Lovecraft says that, despite all its faults, it is one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever conceived. Generally, Lovecraft is not fond of Hodgson’s Carnacki stories but concedes that some have “undeniable power” and show Hodgson’s peculiar genius.

Clark Ashton Smith said that Hodgson’s work had the quality of the “realism of the unreal”. He thinks Hodgson at least the equal of Algernon Blackwood and perhaps exceeded him in The House on the Borderland. Of The Night Land, Smith said “there are few works so sheerly remarkable”. Smith thought those two novels were Hodgson’s masterpieces though he liked the beginning scenes on the island in The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”. He thought The Ghost Pirates was “one of the few successful long stories dealing with the phantasmal”. Continue reading →