Weird Tales by Clark Ashton Smith from early 1932

You'll be disappointed to hear that there
is no sexy flapper in "The Monster of the Prophecy"

Wandering around the Second Story Books warehouse store in Rockville, MD recently, I came upon a copy of the 1971 Arkham House book of Clark Ashton Smith's Selected Poems, which was going for $75.00.  This brought Smith to mind, and, having enjoyed Smith's 1948 story "The Master of the Crabs" in June, I decided to read a bunch of Smith stories.  My copy of the 2002 Gollancz Masterworks collection The Emperor of Dreams being currently out of my possession, and none of the libraries in the suburban dead zone I now inhabit having any Clark Ashton Smith books, I resorted to the indispensable internet archive.  (I keep hearing talk about how the internet is ruining people's lives and ruining the country, but I find the internet has opened up innumerable avenues for me to pursue my hobbies and interests.)  I hit upon reading all the stories by Smith published in Weird Tales in 1932, which I believe comes to a total of eight stories.  We'll explore four today; three of them I read in scans of the original issues of Weird Tales, the exception being "The Monster of the Prophecy."

"The Monster of the Prophecy"

For some reason I couldn't find the January 1932 issue of Weird Tales at the internet archive.  Fortunately, in 1967 Robert A. W. Lowndes reprinted "The Monster of the Prophecy" in his Magazine of Horror, and that issue is available at the internet archive.  Lowndes presents a very charming intro to the story, all about the SF reading of his youth, with reference not only to C. A. Smith but also MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton and SF satirist Stephen Coblentz (you'll recall we read Coblentz's satiric 1935 novel Hidden World back in 2015.)

Smith immediately gets me on his side by setting his tale in New York City, where Theopholis Alvor, failed poet from "an upstate village," stands on the Brooklyn Bridge and contemplates suicide.  A mysterious figure appears, leads Alvor to his fine house, feeds Alvor his first decent meal in days.  Who is this character?  He is Vizaphmal, a space alien in disguise as a human, a mind-reading scientist who invented a means of travelling between star systems and has been hanging around the Earth, the inhabitants of which he finds "quaint and curious and monstrous," because he has "a taste for the bizarre."  It is time for him to go back home to the Antares system and he asks Alvor to come with (as my MidWestern relatives might say); he apparently chose Alvor because the poet looked like he was ready to leave Earth (the hard way) anyway.

Smith's description of the interstellar vehicle he devised for this story, a sort of projector with spinning disks for motors and strings like those on a musical instrument for controls, is pretty cool and interesting, but his description of the journey, on which Alvor faints and has insane hallucinations or visions, is mind-numbingly tedious--if this story had been written in the '60s or '70s I would have called it trippy or psychedelic (these terms are appropriate because the story includes references to opiates and narcotics.)  To the left find a sample, two long sentences that I was too lazy to type.

Alvor wakes up on Antares I, where the gravity is like a third greater than Earth's and the natives have three eyes, three legs, and five arms, and come in two classes: the small elite class of tall and sterile rulers and the short fecund working-class majority whom they control, eugenically guiding their breeding, for example.

Smith is into giving long descriptions, and "The Monster of the Prophecy" is a longish story, like 35 pages here in The Magazine of Horror, and we learn quite a lot about the material, political and religious culture of Antares I.  As for the plot, most of the inhabitants of the high tech and pleasure-loving kingdom of Ulphalor, where Viz lives, are superstitious, but scientist Vizaphmal is an atheist who is determined to take advantage of his fellows' credulity.  A prophecy says a white-skinned two-legged monster will be seen before the king's palace at such and such a date accompanied by a wizard, and this wizard will overthrow the current king and be crowned king himself.  Vizaphmal has been searching the galaxy for just such a creature, and of course Alvor fits the bill to a T.  The date Alvor recovers from his interstellar bad trip is the date in question, and when Vizaphmal and the Terran versifier show up at the palace the mob gathered to see if the prophecy was going to come true install Viz on the throne.

Alvor lives a life of lonely leisure for some time, but the priesthoods of the numerous gods of Antares I soon conspire to overthrow Vizaphmal, who, after a fight, disappears in his space travel machine, leaving Alvor in the hands of the priests, who inflict on him an elaborate torture--this torture is a good example of Smith's macabre creativity and the best part of the story.  Before he is subjected to any of the additional tortures the priests have on their agenda, Alvor, by luck, is able to escape the kingdom of Ulphalor and make his way to a less superstitious empire, where he is taken to the empress.  This empress is also a poet, and, despite their radical physical differences, Alvor and this three-eyed royal fall in love.

"The Monster of the Prophecy" is a fun story.  At times I feared the masses of description would overwhelm the plot, but this only happens on the trip between Earth and Antares I.  The story is vulnerable to the charge that the hero doesn't do anything, something I often complain about, but this problem is mitigated by the fact that Vizaphmal fills the role of active protagonist through much of the story, and because Smith doesn't really present "The Monster of the Prophecy" as a thrilling adventure so much as a travelogue and satire.  (In his intro to the story Lowndes contrasts the subtle satire of Smith to that of the heavy-handed Coblentz.)  Smith in this story pokes fun at modern tastes in art and poetry and takes aim at religion and intolerance, but this polemical material coexists comfortably with the fantastical and adventurous elements.  Thumbs up!

As SF historian Sam Moskowitz describes in his article, "The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales 1924 to 1940," Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright kept track of reader correspondence and judged--scientifically(!)--which stories were the most popular in each issue; it was "The Monster of the Prophecy" that was the most popular story in the January 1932 issue.  "The Monster of the Prophecy" has been reprinted in numerous collections of Smith's work, including the 1942 Out of Space and Time and the 2009 The Return of the Sorcerer.

"The Planet of the Dead" 

Francis Melchior is a romantic and a dreamer, a dealer in antiques who loves the artifacts of the past
and an amateur astronomer who loves to gaze at the stars and imagine what other worlds are like.  With no great interest in women or making friends, he is a lone eccentric.  One late night he is staring at a distant star for which he feels a strange affinity, and suddenly, through some impossible process, finds himself drawn through space to an alien planet that orbits that oh so attractive star!

Melchior finds himself in the body of a poet, Antarion, of that alien world, Phandiom, home to a civilization so old its towering monuments to the dead and their loftily spired tombs far outnumber the residences of the living.  After a few minutes, Antarion only dimly recalls the boring life of Francis Melchior, which he considers was only a dream!

Phandiom's culture is one of decadence and sterility--the current generation is stifled by the omnipresent reminders of their people's long past, by their ancestors' voluminous history.  Antarion is one of the most vital and vigorous of his generation, but he is in love with the beautiful princess Themeera of the city Saddoth, one of their cohort's most depressed and moody and erratic members.

The palace wherein she lived, and the very streets of Saddoth, for her were filled with emanations that welled from the sepulchral reservoirs of death; and the weariness of the innumerable dead was everywhere; and evil or opiate presences came forth from the mausoleum vaults, to crush and stifle her with the formless brooding of their wings.   

Things only get worse for blonde beauty Themeera and all of Phandiom.  The ruthless king wants to have sex with the unwilling Themeera, and the astronomers predict that Phandiom's sun has only one month to go before it is extinguished!  Under cover of a sort of Carnival where everybody wears elaborate costumes (Smith describes the festivities in elaborate detail) Antarion and Themeera sneak out of the city of Saddoth and make their way to an abandoned city, moving by night and hiding by day among the innumerable crypts and monuments to the dead that cover the countryside.  Their slaves have preceded them and prepared for them an abandoned palace, where they live out their last days, drunk on their mutual love, until the sun dies and they, like everybody the world over, freeze to death.

Melchior wakes up in the chair in front of his telescope, and cannot find the star he felt such an affinity for.  Was it all a dream, or did his soul really travel to the doomed world of Phandiom to enjoy the final embraces of the princess Themeera?

This is a mood piece, and I consider it more or less successful.  Of the four stories I'm talking about today, this is the weakest, but it is still acceptable.

After first appearing in the March 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Planet of the Dead" would show up in numerous Smith collections, including the various printings of 1944's Lost Worlds.

I believe those are Smith's own sculptures there on the cover of the 1944 edition of Lost Worlds

"The Gorgon"

The April issue of Weird Tales included "The Gorgon" along with Edmond Hamilton's "The Earth-Brain," which we just read, and H. P. Lovecraft's "In the Vault."  Smith doesn't even get his name on the cover of this one.

Our narrator, in hopes of forgetting the woman he loved, who was sundered from him by death, traveled across the Earth, settling for some weeks or months in fog-shrouded London, the city of labyrinthine streets where the sun rarely shines!  In the beginning of this memoir he tells us that he has been fascinated by the macabre all his life, but was never truly disturbed by anything until that thing he saw in London one day, the memory of which has his mind teetering on the brink of madness!

On the streets of London a terribly old man in terribly old clothes with a sinister smile accosted our narrator and offered to show him the genuine head of Medusa, the Gorgon slain by the hero Perseus!  As if hypnotized, our hero followed this character, whom he repeatedly compares to Charon, to his dilapidated mansion.  Smith gives the impression that this old man is able to travel through time because he knows of places where different eras and universes overlap, and that his house lies in just such a place, a place the style of architecture and decor of which the narrator cannot pin down because it exists in some grey zone between realities and is the product of influences from multiple cultures and time periods.

Once at the house the story proceeds more or less as we expect.  There are a bunch of "statues" from every period of European history that of course are the people who looked upon Medusa's head.  The narrator looks at the head in a mirror and resists the powerful urge to gaze upon its fascinating beauty and grotesquerie with his naked glazzies.  The old man attacks, trying to force our narrator to look at the baleful head, they wrestle with their eyes closed, the old man trips on one of the earlier victims and accidentally opens his eyes and is turned to stone himself, so our guy can escape.

This is a well-written and well-constructed story, but it suffers because the meaty part of it is kind of predictable. 

"The Gorgon" was reprinted in a bunch of Smith collections, including The Emperor of Dreams, which means I must have read it during my New York days, and a French collection of which it is the title story.  It has also been anthologized, including in a book credited to that beloved star of the cinema of the fantastic, the great Christopher Lee.

 

"The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis"

With the May issue, Smith's name is back on the cover of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual; inside lies his story "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis." This tale is categorized by isfdb as one of Smith's Mars stories and Sam Moskowitz reports that it was the second most popular story in the issue--with 25 votes it lost to David H. Keller's "The Last Magician," which received 26.  (Missed it by that much!)

The narrator of "The V of Y-V" is an anthropologist who has conducted excavations on Venus.  He is now on Mars, and writing a memoir to serve as a warning to those who may come after him, because he expects to die in a few hours!

The doomed man was a junior member of a team of eight humans and two Martian guides who went to explore the ruined city of Yoh-Vombis, which it is believed has been abandoned for over 40,000 years.  It is said the current race of Martians exterminated the race who built the city, the ruins of which lie close to the modern "commercial metropolis" of Ignarh.  For some reason, the eight archaeologists, who one presumes rode a space ship to Mars, didn't ride a helicopter or a truck to Yoh-Vombis from Ignarh, but spent seven hours marching there.  🤷

In the city, which the Martians refused to enter, the humans explored crumbling buildings and a vast network of catacombs full of oversized funerary urns--the Martians cremate their dead and every family has an urn of its own in which the ashes of the newly dead join those of their relatives who preceded them in death.  Smith does a great job of describing the subterranean vaults, and, more importantly, perhaps, of describing the horrendous monsters the Earthmen discover there, their vain efforts to combat the monsters and their feverish, nightmarish flight from them through the labyrinth.  The monsters are original and creepy, and Smith lays on not only the effective psychological terror but some shocking gore as the archaeologists all meet terrible fates at the suckers of their invertebrate tormentors.  In a story like "The Planet of the Dead" or "The Monster of the Prophecy" Smith sometimes seemed to be just piling on the baroque and rococo details for the hell of it, the images he painted being an end unto themselves, but in "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" Smith's vivid images serve the goal of conveying to the reader the foreboding, the shock, the horror and the disgust experienced by the Terran archaeologists.   

The narrator was the only human member of the expedition to escape Yoh-Vombis, and is in Ignarh as he relates his story, deathly ill due to a wound suffered in the catacombs and expected by the doctors to expire momentarily.  A postscript, however, indicates that our narrator suffered a fate worse than death--a portion of the protoplasmic Martian monster who wounded him has entered his brain, and he has an irresistible urge to escape the hospital and join his colleagues deep under Yoh-Vombis, where they will serve the prehistoric aliens in terrible ways we shudder to imagine! 

This is a very good horror story; I have noted that is is more economical and cohesive than "The Planet of the Dead" or "The Monster of the Prophecy," and will add that it benefits greatly by having a new and original monster, unlike "The Gorgon," which, while well-written, features a monster we already know all about.  Highly recommended.  Four and a half out of a possible five Martian cinerary urns!

"The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" has appeared in many Smith collections, was reprinted in magazines edited by Donald Wollheim and Robert A. W. Lowndes, and was chosen for inclusion in anthologies edited by S.T. Joshi and Martin H. Greenberg--I think we can call it an acknowledged classic of the weird.

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These are good stories--I'm looking forward to reading four more pieces from Weird Tales by Clark Ashton Smith in our next episode.