It is the Year of the Black Tiger in Commoriom, the greatest city of Hyperborea, a prehistoric civilization full of wizards and monsters and so on. The greediest money lender in Hyperborea, the Avoosl Wuthoqquan of the title, buys two colossal emeralds from a thief. While he is playing with the emeralds (he passes time by pouring his gem collection out onto his table and sifting through them and making patterns with them like a child) they, of their own accord, roll off the table and out of the room! The money lender chases them outside, down the street, outside of town, into the jungle, and finally into a cavern, where the emeralds join their fellows in a deep pool of thousands of fabulous jewels. Avoosl Wuthoqquan greedily jumps into the pool of precious stones but begins sinking, as if in quicksand. He panics and calls for help, and is addressed by the hideous monster who lives among the jewels, a creature with a toad-like face and a long pale body with limbs like the tentacles of an octopus or cuttlefish. After the monster explains how it lost its emeralds and how it got them back, is swims over to the money lender and saves Avoosl Wuthoqquan from the indignity of drowning by eating the usurer alive.
"The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan" has some of the feel of a fairy tale that warns you against being greedy--there is even a prologue in which Avoosl Wuthoqquan refuses to give any money to a beggar and the beggar prophesies that he will suffer a terrible fate (don't take it too personally, Avoosl, when I refuse to give money to beggars in Dupont Circle and Union Station sometimes I get yelled at, too!) But it also has some of the edge of a sword and sorcery story. As with "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," which I praised in my last blog post, Smith's extensive descriptions here add to the story rather than distract from it and help to build a mood and inspire emotion in the reader. I especially liked one of Smith's metaphors:
Somehow, somewhere, he had taken a narrow path that wound among monstrous trees whose foliage turned the moonlight to a mesh of quicksilver with heavy fantastic raddlings of ebony. Crouching in grotesque menace, like giant retiarri, they seemed to close in upon him from all sides.Clever and evocative, and, of course, flattering to the reader who knows what a retiarius is.
Quite good. As well as in many Smith collections, "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan" has appeared in several anthologies that purport to represent the cream of Weird Tales or fantasy stories in general.
It is 1138, the year of the completion of the cathedral in Vyones, the principal town of the French province of Averoigne. The two most accomplished of the cathedral's gargoyles were carved by Blaise Reynard, who grew up in Vyones but then left to wander the country and spend time in Paris. Perhaps because of his ugly face, the people of Vyones never liked the temperamental Reynard, but he returned anyway because of his desire for Nicolette Villom, the tavern keeper's daughter. He came back just before the cathedral was completed and was hired to carve those two gargoyles. One of these exquisite masterpieces of the carver's art is a ferocious expression of Reynard's hatred for the people of Vyones, and the other the very quintessence of lasciviousness, an expression of the craftsman's lust for Nicolette. Some of Reynard's many detractors claim the striking power of these representation of sinfulness could only have been created by a man in league with the Devil!
To the surprise of everybody in Vyones and nobody reading Weird Tales, not long after the cathedral is completed, citizens who venture out of doors at night are subjected to deadly attacks by a flying demon! The efforts of the authorities temporal and spiritual to fight the airborne nocturnal killer with halberds and holy water are fruitless, and many people are mangled to death. A second flying demon joins the first, but this one merely leers at women, often through windows, but does not assault them, as if "it was seeking throughout Vyones for someone whom it had not yet found."
One evening Reynard the unpopular stone cutter is sitting in the tavern of Villom, gulping down wine and staring at Nicolette. He becomes enraged when Nicolette starts flirting with some guy, and Villom and his friends move to prevent a fight. Suddenly, the flying demons burst through a window, one of them killing all the men save Reynard, who is knocked unconscious, and the other raping Nicolette.
When Reynard comes to, he collects a hammer and goes to the cathedral to destroy the gargoyles, which he now realizes are the monsters terrorizing the town, but he is killed in the attempt.
This story is just OK; it is not surprising--we all know that the gargoyles are going to come to life--and there isn't much to it that feels original.
The component of "The Maker of Gargoyles" that is sticking out at me is its ambiguous dealing with the matter of moral and personal responsibility. Even if Reynard's rage and lust are to blame for the demons who kill all those people, including himself, he is not in fact consciously in league with Satan. He does have a ferocious temper and a powerful lust--Smith makes it clear he would love to kill the guy Nicolette flirts with and then ravish Nicolette whether or not she was willing--but we don't actually see him commit any trespasses against other people. So are we supposed to sympathize with him as a victim of society's prejudice, to recognize that he is an outsider merely because of his ugly face? Or condemn him because of his hatred and lust, and see that (like the usurer in "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan," a victim of his own avarice) it is his own bad character traits that have undone him? Similarly, should we think of the townspeople who are killed by the monsters as somehow deserving their terrible fate because of their unfair suspicion of Reynard? In the same way Reynard carved the murderous demons from stone, did they by shunning Reynard make him into a sinful monster?
This is a lesser piece by Smith; we can surmise something about its reputation by the fact that while it has been reprinted in many Smith collections, it has never been featured in an anthology.
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| "Il Destino di Antarion," which I assume means something like "The Fate of Antarion," is the title affixed to the Italian translation of "Planet of the Dead," which we talked about in our last blog post |
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| This cover by Brundage seems more mature and sophisticated than much of her work, particularly the overall composition and the individuals' faces. |
Where Hyperborea is set in the distant past, Zothique is "the last continent" of a far future dying Earth where the sun is dim and people are depressed. Smith, in a little prologue, tells us the story he is about to tell, that of Mmatmuor and Sodosma, is a legend told among the people of Zothique--it is a story of death and those who welcome it, a meet entertainment for those living in end times.
Mmatmuor and Sodosma were necromancers, driven from the town of Tinarath into the desert of Cincor by traditional-minded people who were uncomfortable with the duo's practice of raising the dead. Two hundred years ago Cincor was a mighty empire, but a plague wiped out the entire population, and M & S find the desert sands littered with the skeletons and mummies of men, women and domesticated beasts. With their black arts, they return to a semblance of life all these dead people and animals, as well as those they find in tombs. At the head of an army of the dead, astride the dried cadavers of horses, M & S enter the capital city of Cincor, Yethryleom, and they raise from the dead everyone there, including every generation of the royal family that ruled Cincor for two thousand years! The best preserved of the female corpses M & S take as their lovers--I know love comes in all shapes and sizes, but, yuck!
Mmatmuor and Sodosma are now dictators of a populous slave empire, their living dead subjects cultivating gardens, farming, building towers, etc., all the things they did in life. The risen dead feel an ache to return to the peace of true death, but their death-diminished and sorcery-entranced minds are unable to resist the necromancers' commands. But even from the ranks of the dead can heroes arise! The last emperor of Cincor, who died two centuries ago, and the first emperor, who died twenty centuries ago, and are now serving as M & S's wait staff, begin to recall their days of glory and to resent the indignities visited upon them and their people by the necromancers! The first emperor of Cincor was a wizard in life and recalls a prophecy (always with the prophecies in these stories) about the two necromancers that not only predicted their abominations but prescribes how to overthrow them.
In a secret vault the two undead emperors get a special sword with which to decapitate and then quarter the sleeping M & S. Then they lead their people to a secret stairway that descends to a pool of magma ("the verge of that gulf in which boiled the ebbing fires of Earth")--the people of Cincor, happy to return to the sleep of death, jump into the lava and are annihilated. Finally, before joining his people in eternal rest, the first emperor of Cincor casts his own spell of necromancy on M & S, each of whom is in five pieces. Mmatmuor and Sodosma will live in the eternal torment of living death, unable to do more than wretchedly wiggle around the floor.
I like "The Empire of the Necromancers;" it is more strange and feels more fresh than "The Maker of Gargoyles," even if the plot relies on yet another prophecy. According to Sam Moskowitz, who acquired some of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright's records, "The Empire of the Necromancers" was the story most popular with readers in the September 1932 issue of the unique magazine.
"The Empire of the Necromancers" has of course been reprinted in plenty of Smith collections, but also in several foreign anthologies.
This is a first-person narrative written by the former government executioner of the biggest city in Hyperborea, Commoriom--it is the story of why Commoriom was abandoned by all its many inhabitants! The writer, the Athammaus of the title, warns us not to believe what others say about the fall of Commoriom, assuring us that we can trust him to give us the real story because he was there and saw the whole thing!
Of all nine of the 1932 stories by Smith I read for these two blog posts this one is the most successful at presenting a vivid and sympathetic character. In Athammaus the executioner Smith depicts a man with a realistic personality, a writer who displays a false modesty about his writing ability and career accomplishments, a pride in his work, civic pride in his city of Commoriom, and a deep feeling of loss for that city, which is now being overrun by the jungle. The way this guy, now old, brags about how in his youth he daily chopped off numerous people's heads and in the next paragraph expresses his contempt for the "vulgar multitude" and their credulity is at once endearing, amusing, and a little disturbing!
Athammaus outlines for us the career of Knygathin Zhaum, a notorious bandito who terrorized the countryside in the last years of Commoriom's prominence. Smith's descriptions of the physical nature of the marauder, and the rumors of his parentage, are fascinating, both funny and chilling. Knygathin Zhaum is a sort of throwback to an earlier race who walks in a way that reminds one of a serpent and is reputed to have flowing in his veins the blood of Tsathoggua, one of the extra-galactic monster gods we find so often in stories by H. P. Lovecraft and his corespondents. It was Smith who invented Tsathoggua in 1929, but many other writers have made use of him--for example, he is mentioned in two quite good stories co-written by Lovecraft and Hazel Heald that we read back in 2017, "The Man of Stone" and "Winged Death."
Under mysterious circumstances Knygathin Zhaum is captured by the authorities and after a trial is brought to the block to be decapitated by our narrator:
As I looked upon him with a calculating eye, and made ready for the lethal stroke, I was impressed more powerfully and more disagreeably than ever by the feeling of a loathsome, underlying plasticity, an invertebrate structure, nauseous and non-terrestrial, beneath his impious mockery of the human form.Knygathin Zhaum is beheaded and buried in a disreputable grave in the city dump. But the next morning he is up and about, and in full view of scores of citizens who are helpless to stop him, commits a shocking atrocity--eating a small businessman alive! The fiend is again tried and executed, and this time buried in a pit carved out of the bedrock and covered in boulders. Regardless, Knygathin Zhaum reappears again and repeats his crime of the day before, this time devouring a government official. After his third execution the monstrous brigand's head is buried in one part of the city and his body in another, and an armed guard, led by our narrator Athammaus, spends the night where the head is interred in a metal sarcophagus.
Knygathin Zhaum has looked somewhat different, less human and less stable, after each of his resurrections, and when the head breaks out of the sarcophagus, as we knew it was going to, and starts rolling across town to rejoin the body, it is a sort of blob of goo. When the monstrous creature is again whole it is a mish mosh of human and mostly inhuman body parts, with tentacles and suckers and the like, and after it has devoured some innocent townspeople, it begins to grow to kaiju size. The monster being invincible, the entire city is evacuated.
This story is compelling and fun; Smith had my full attention from the first paragraph. With its comic mix of understatement and hyperbole and its farcical repetition of impossible events, one might consider "The Testament of Athammaus" a joke story. I regularly denounce joke stories with some venom, but Smith overcomes all such objections. For one thing, the jokes here are actually funny, and for another, they are accompanied by truly effective horror elements and the rich descriptions that characterize Smith's work in general--"The Testament of Athammaus" feels like a legit sword and sorcery story, not a parody of fantastic literature, that is transmitted to us through the sensibilities and prejudices of a not quite trustworthy narrator whose own character adds a layer of humor to a fundamentally horrific tale of weird mayhem.
Very good--nine out of a possible ten flesh-eating orifices!
L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. W. Lowndes saw fit to include this classic in their publications.
Here's the one science fiction story we're talking about today; our narrator for this caper is a bitter and jealous chemist, Felton Margrave! Jasper Trilt financed Margrave's chemical research, setting up a lab for him in an old mansion, but then he took the lion's share of the profits that came from our hero's innovative work! And then Trilt married the girl Margrave was sweet on, Norma Gresham! And so, for years, the chemist has been plotting to murder Trilt, researching the most effective and the most untraceable poisons and synthesizing them in the lab Trilt himself had finance the construction of!
One evening Trilt comes by the lab, drawn there by Margrave's hints that he has made some kind of breakthrough. Margrave tells Trilt, who is a fatso who enjoys fine foods in mass quantities, that he has developed an elixir that will provide the drinker immortality and guarantee an "inexhaustible capacity for pleasure, a freedom from all satiety and weariness." Trilt credulously gulps down a glass of the stuff and immediately falls to the floor paralyzed, unable to move but still conscious, still able to see and hear. This is a torture we see people suffer all the time in genre literature; at this blog in October of last year we saw Clifford Simak and Poul Anderson inflict this fate on characters, though Simak's victim used her 1000 years of time off from moving to become a genius at higher maths. Margrave's poison isn't meant to suspend animation however, just to kill Trilt after an hour, an hour during which Margrave insults and disparages his paralyzed employer.
After he thinks Trilt must be dead he calls up Norma to tell her that her husband just died of a sudden "seizure." To his shock, before he can get a word out, she blurts out that Trilt has just died in their house of some kind of seizure. When a disbelieving Margrave goes over to the Trilt house, sure enough, there is a corpse identical to that in Margrave's lab!
Margrave fears for his sanity, but examination of both corpses proves they are real, neither a hallucination or fake. The body that Norma witnessed fall dead is embalmed and buried as per normal, but the body in the lab has queer properties--it does not decay, and the acids with which Margrave tries to destroy it have no effect!
I was curious to see how Smith would resolve this story, what explanation he would provide for this bizarre phenomenon. Unfortunately, Smith offers no explanation. Margrave says something vague about the universe being inexplicable, and predicts that he will go insane, and that is that. Smith, bro, don't leave me hanging like that!
An inferior effort. Not only is the end a disappointment, but the main plot has some weaknesses--would a cunning businessman in the field of scientific research just drink some goop that was there in the lab without having first seen hard evidence of trials? Trilt obviously has some kind of antagonistic relationship with Margrave and he expresses skepticism that an immortality potion is even possible, so why does he just drink it then and there? If the rest of the story was solid such a flaw could be overlooked, but the weak ending makes the weak middle less forgivable. Let's be generous and call this one barely acceptable because the whole "shy boffin resents slick operator who got his girl" beginning showed promise.
"The Supernumerary Corpse" has only ever reappeared in collections of Smith's work, with good reason.
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I enjoyed these nine Clark Ashton Smith stories more than I had expected to--maybe The Emperor of Dreams, which I read over ten years ago, was not a good selection of his best work? Or maybe my own sensibilities have changed over the years. Whatever the case, this has been a successful foray into weird territory.
One of the things that struck me about most of these stories has been a sort of similarity to the work of Jack Vance. There is the dying Earth setting of Zothique, obviously, but more importantly the subtle humor, the evocative lists of weird items and the esoteric words, as well as the gruesome scenes of horror, remind me of memorable facets of Vance's fiction.
I prophesy that there will be more Weird Tales and more Clark Ashton Smith in the future of MPorcius Fiction Log, though not the immediate future.
Did you need to keep a dictionary by your side when you read these? I almost always need one with CAS?
ReplyDeleteI knew "retiarius," but I was definitely googling some of the words Smith was flinging at me--it triggered warm memories of reading Shadow of the Torturer.
DeleteReading Clark Ashton Smith reminded me of consuming a luscious, sinfully delicious dessert. I found that spacing Smith's confections out worked best for me.
ReplyDelete