"The Nameless Offspring," "The Witchcraft of Ulua," and "The Devotee of Evil" by Clark Ashton Smith

A 1974 British paperback edition of The Abominations of Yondo

I recently enjoyed Tanith Lee's 1995 "These Beasts," a story which reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith and brought that poet, sculptor, and storyteller of the weird to the forefront of my mind.  So, let's read some stories by Smith from the early 1930s; today's tales are the first three presented in the 1960 Arkham House hardcover collection The Abominations of Yondo, which you can get at ebay for like two hundred bucks.  Lacking two hundred bucks, I'm reading the stories in scans at the internet archive of the old magazines in which they appeared, and you can, too!

"The Nameless Offspring" (1932)

"The Nameless Offspring" made its debut in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, a magazine that endured for seven issues from 1931 to 1933.  (Robert M. Price revived the magazine for three issues in our own 21st century.)  The issue with "The Nameless Offspring" also carries "The People of the Dark" by Robert E. Howard, which I hope to get around to reading someday.

"The Nameless Offspring" starts with an epigraph from The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazered; the main text is the memoir of Henry Chaldane, a Canadian beekeeper who was born in England and came to the New World as a child.  As an adult he goes back to England; riding a motorcycle around the countryside he gets lost in the fog and by chance comes to Tremoth Hall, the manor house of Sir John Tremoth, who was a good friend of the narrator's father when they were young men.

Henry Chaldane is not exactly thrilled to have stumbled upon the Tremoth estate, because he recalls crazy stories about John Tremoth's wife: she was buried alive in the family tomb and when rescued claimed she had encountered a monster in there!  Nine months after leaving the tomb she died giving birth to a monstrously deformed baby!  This monster child, which is obviously the product of rape by a ghoul, even if Smith doesn't come out and use those words, was kept locked in a heavily barred room; its birth and his wife's death marked the end of John Tremoth's social life, he becoming a recluse attended to be only one servant, the others fleeing after seeing the monster baby.  (Smith isn't shy about alluding to some pretty disgusting sex in his stories--you'll remember that in "The Empire of the Necromancers" the magic-users of the title took as lovers some of the corpses they had animated.)

Chaldane quickly finds evidence that all those crazy stories he heard as a kid in Canada are true!  When feeble Sir John Tremoth, suffering from heart disease, shows Chaldane to his room, they pass a heavily barred door and from within comes a hideous howl!  That night, in the room next to Chaldane's, Tremoth dies.  Tremoth's lone servant was instructed by his master to burn his corpse on a pyre immediately after his death, but it rains that day and the pyre will not light!  The servant asks Chaldane to take a revolver and sit with him that second night--they must guard the corpse of Tremoth because it sounds like the ghoul is trying to break out of its room to devour its foster father's body!

The build up in this one is pretty good, but I found the climax and denouement a little underwhelming.  The ghoul attacks, knocking out Chaldane and the servant.  When Chaldane wakes up a few moments later the monster has left, because during the attack a candle was overturned and the room is on fire.  Chaldane gets a brief glimpse of Tremoth's body before carrying out the servant, and sees that the ghoul started eating Tremoth before fleeing the flames.  Smith specifically indicates that Tremoth's hands and "features" have been destroyed, and then hints at something else:

Of the last horror that had overtaken him, I must forbear explicit mention, and I would that I could likewise avoid the remembrance.

Are readers supposed to think that the ghoul, Tremoth's wife's child by rape, ate Tremoth's genitals?  Or am I the sicko because that is my guess?  (I think this makes thematic sense, because the elder ghoul "unmanned" Tremoth by cuckolding him, and by castrating Tremoth the younger ghoul would be "unmanning" him a different way--don't think of me as a sicko, but a literary critic!)

Chaldane and the revived servant follow the monster's inhuman tracks out of the burning manor-house.  The ghoul has gone to ground in the family tomb, where there are "countless coffins" but no sign of the creature.  I guess readers are supposed to find it eerie and mysterious that the monster vanished inside the mausoleum, but personally I find it a little annoying.  I would have preferred if Smith had implied it was hiding in one of the coffins, or had just melted into the countryside, and might start attacking unsuspecting people or robbing graves at any moment. 

"The Nameless Offspring" was reprinted in 1946 in the British magazine Strange Tales, and by Robert A. W. Lowndes in 1970 in his Magazine of Horror.  This is actually the second time I have read "The Nameless Offspring," as I read it over ten years ago in the 2002 collection Emperor of Dreams which I bought while I lived in New York and which now is someplace in my brother's apartment in New Jersey, unless he has sold it or traded it to somebody.

"The Witchcraft of Ulua" (1934)

"The Witchcraft of Ulua" was first published in Weird Tales, in an issue with two stories I have already read and praised here at my little website, Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Returned" and Robert E. Howard's "Valley of the Worm."  Let's hope Smith's piece here is as good as those by Hamilton and Howard.

Ninety-three-year-old Sabmon lives in a house made of bones on the edge of a desert.  This taciturn recluse is an expert on astronomy and sorcery and often acts as a sort of sage for visitors seeking advice.  When his great-nephew Amalzain comes by, en route to the city of Miraab, the capital of Tasuun, to join the king's court, Sabmon gives him an amulet and warns him to stay clear of the evil women of Miraab, who are all "witches and harlots."

The king's court is luxurious and corrupt, and the king's daughter, princess Ulua, employs her strange beauty and the vast arsenal of spells and drugs at her disposal to try to seduce Amalzain, an innocent country boy who likes to do math problems and read old books in his free time.  Thanks to the amulet, Amalzain is the first man to ever resist Ulua's charms.  Enraged, Ulua punishes Amalzain by sending horrific visions and ghosts to haunt him.  Smith describes all these hauntings, which consist of such frights as dead bodies creeping into Amalzain's bed to kiss and caress him.  Amalzain flees to Sabmon's house of bones.  Sabmon not only exorcizes all these haunts, but shows Amalzain, via a magic mirror, that Miraab is doomed, about to be destroyed by an earthquake.  Amalzain stays with Sabmon, becoming his apprentice.

"The Witchcraft of Ulua," six and a half pages in Weird Tales, is plot-lite and mood- and image-heavy.  I found the mood diverting and the images fascinating, and so I'm giving "The Witchcraft of Ulua" a hearty thumbs up.  Of note is Smith's use of words you don't see every day, words I had to look up, like "anchorite," "besom," "gymnosophic" and "migniard."  Did people in 1934 have these words in their vocabularies, or did they read Weird Tales with a dictionary close at hand?  

Set in Zothique, "The Witchcraft of Ulua" would be included in the 1970 paperback collection of that title, which I saw in the flesh in New Jersey in 2018 along with three other gorgeous Smith paperbacks I was too cheap to buy.

"The Devotee of Evil" (1933)

isfdb indicates that this story first appeared in a small press book of 30 pages titled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies that collected six tales by Smith.  I read the version of "The Devotee of Evil" that appeared in 1941 in Donald A. Wollheim's magazine Stirring Science Stories.

The narrator of "The Devotee of Evil" is a novelist, Philip Hastane, who is living in Auburn, a little town in (I think) California.  Hastane meets a wealthy Creole who has just moved to Auburn, Jean Averaud.  Averaud has moved into an old mansion reputed to be haunted, the site of various murders and accidental deaths, along with his housekeeper, Fifine; Fifine, who is apparently also his lover, is a mute biracial woman (or as Smith puts it, a "dumb mulatress") with a perfect body and a face characterized by "semi-negroid irregularity."  Despite her inability to speak, Averaud assures Hastane that Fifine is "highly intelligent."

Averaud strikes up a friendship with Hastane, to whom he explains his weird theory: Averaud thinks that evil is a force, a radiation or vibration, like light or electricity, and that somewhere in the universe is a "black sun" that emits the evil that is the source of all decay, death, illness, insanity, etc. Some places on Earth are more receptive to this malign radiation than others--Averaud thinks the mansion must be one such place, and he has hatched the wild scheme of building a device to concentrate the evil force and distill a physical manifestation of absolute evil!

When he has made some progress in the construction of his device, Averaud shows it to the novelist.  In his 1932 story "The Monster of the Prophecy" Smith described a device that projected people across interstellar space, a device that had much in common with a musical instrument, and Averaud's receptor of evil device also has many of the characteristics of a musical instrument. A test run of the machine summons a sort of black light or shadow emanation, and contact with this force throws Hastane into a depression.

As with "The Nameless Offspring," Smith's build up in "The Devotee of Evil" is good but the payoff is a little disappointing. When the device is finished Averaud activates it and is subjected to the full power of that black sun, wherever it is. Averaud is hardened into a black statue, breaking the heart of poor Fifine, who loved him. As the woman clasps the knees of her petrified lover, Hastane staggers away from the mansion, psychologically scarred for life.  I guess Smith is trying to say something about the ultimate sterility of evil and disorder, but somehow the guy becoming a statue is just not that scary or exciting.  I also was hoping more would be done with Fifine; when Smith made sure to let us know she was intelligent and had deep feelings for Averaud, I thought maybe she was going to be revealed to be an evil manipulator who was in control of Averaud, or, that somehow she was going to try to save Averaud, maybe sacrificing her life to redeem him.  I even thought maybe there would be some kind of love triangle thing, with her (if she was evil) trying to seduce Hastane, or (if she was good) convincing Hastane to help her try to save Averaud, exciting feelings between them and/or inspiring jealousy on the part of Averaud.  In the event Fifine does very little in the story.  Too bad.   

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These stories are all good, but only "The Witchcraft of Ulua," in my opinion, lives up to its potential, feels like a finished package without loose ends or missed opportunities.  Maybe its setting in Zothique, a far future dying Earth, and its exotic, dark fairy tale tone give the reader more latitude to accept fantastical elements that strain credulity and require explanation when set in the 20th century.

More stories from The Abominations of Yondo in our next episode!