"The Epiphany of Death," "A Vintage from Atlantis" and "The Abominations of Yondo" by Clark Ashton Smith

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are sparking joy by reading the magazine versions of stories included in the 1960 Clark Ashton Smith collection The Abominations of Yondo.  Scans of these magazines are available to all fans of fantasy, science fiction and the weird at the internet archive, an exemplar of the many ways the internet has improved our cultural lives.  Today the fourth, fifth and sixth stories from The Abominations of Yondo come under our leery gaze.

"The Epiphany of Death" (AKA "Who Are the Living?") (1934)

This one was first published in an issue of a fanzine, The Fantasy Fan, which I am not seeing at the internet archive.  Luckily, in 1942 Weird Tales reprinted the piece under the title "Who Are the Living?" 

This brief (little more than three pages in Weird Tales) story is a sort of mood piece with little plot.  It takes place on Earth, but feels like it is in some prehistoric fantasy setting, like Conan's Hyborian Age, after the fall of Atlantis but before the rise of the civilizations that we know of.

Theolus, our narrator, and his acquaintance Tomeron live in the vast bustling city of Ptolemides.  Tomeron is kind of a weirdo who makes Theolus uneasy; Tomeron spends his time reading old books from Hyperborea and Mu and Atlantis, wears clothes that recall the fashions of centuries before, and refers to events of long ago which others have forgotten...this eccentric has pale skin and even his posture suggests that he bears the weight of many centuries of memories.  Though Theolus is wary of him, Tomeron has a strong affection for Theolus, and one day, in melodramatic fashion, reveals to the younger man his unbelievable secret.  Tomeron leads Theolus outside the city walls to the crumbling tombs which have gone unused for many years.  Deep in the catacombs they come to the sepulchre of Tomeron's family, where there is an empty sarcophagus.  Tomeron asks Theolus to leave for a moment and return; when Theolus returns, Tomeron is laying in the sarcophagus, apparently dead, worms crawling in his face.

This is one of those pieces that has a striking idea but doesn't really have a story to tell.  Smith does a good job setting the mood and offering us strong images, so I am giving this trifle a passing grade, but there really isn't any plot or character development so it feels a little empty.  I love stories about immortality, but I like ones that look into the personality of the immortals and retail the sacrifices they make and the lengths they go to to achieve immortality (remember how much I enjoyed Edmond Hamilton's "Avenger from Atlantis.")  Smith doesn't touch on how or why Tomeron has staved off death for so long, or why he suddenly stops prolonging his life and embraces death.  I also have to question the gruesome shock ending of "The Epiphany of Death"; one minute Tomeron is walking around and talking like the rest of us, and a minute later he's already got worms eating him from the inside out?  Were those worms inside him already when he passed through the city gates with Theolus at his side?  I don't get it.

"A Vintage from Atlantis" (1933)

"A Vintage from Atlantis" made its debut in another issue of Weird Tales that we have already talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log, the one that features Robert Howard's "The Slithering Shadow" AKA "Xuthal of the Dusk" and Edmond Hamilton's "The Horror on the Asteroid," and reprints Frank Belknap Long's "Death-Waters."  And don't get me started about that Margaret Brundage cover!

"A Vintage from Atlantis" is another of these mood pieces with very little plot.  I prefer stories in which a person with an interesting psychology has some kind of motive, pursues an objective and faces obstacles, and so these kinds of plot-lite tales generally leave me a little disappointed.  In this story, narrated by a pirate who avoids alcohol, a pirate ship's crew is on their secret island where they stash their loot when a powerful storm hits, and a strange jar, I guess kind of like a very large amphora, washes ashore.  This thing is incredibly old, and covered in barnacles and shells.  The pirates all drink the wine it contains, though our narrator drinks only a little.  The booze gives them a vision of an ancient glowing city, complete with evocative music, and the pirates march off to the illusory spires, into the waters of the harbor where they, presumably, drown.  The narrator, having drunk less, comes to his senses before drowning himself.  But maybe there is a chance that the other pirates have gone off to a better world and the narrator should be sad to be left behind, like the sad lame kid in The Pied Piper of Hamelin?

This story is OK.  As I have suggested, I prefer it when Smith uses his powers of description to enhance a tale that has some kind of plot, as he did in the great horror story, "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," which I read back in August.

Besides various Smith collections, "A Vintage from Atlantis" has appeared in anthologies of horror stories about pirates and the sea.

The cover of the French edition of Abominations of Yondo bears a faithful
illustration of an undead monarch encountered by the narrator of "The Abominations of Yondo"

Contents page of the April 1926 issue
of Overland Monthly

"The Abominations of Yondo" (1926)

The title story of the 1960 collection, "The Abominations of Yondo," first saw print in Overland Monthly, a long-lived magazine published from 1868 to 1935; you can read the issue with the story, one of Smith's earliest, at the internet archive, but its cover is not available there, and my brief search for it online left me empty-handed.

Yondo is a grey desert, a region "nearest of all to the world's rim," and thus undefended by Earthly gods and subject to influence from outer space--half its mountains are fallen asteroids, its sand is the dust and ash of dead stars and corroded alien planets, its inhabitants include "genii" and "demons" whose worlds have decayed.  Our narrator was left on the border of this desert by the wizard-priests of Ong after they had tortured him, and as he seeks to cross it Smith describes its bizarre landscape, its ruined cities and mausoleums, its weird flora and fauna.  The beings living in the Yondo desert and ruins are so horrifying that the narrator abandons all hope of getting across the desert and flees back the way he came, even though he expects the wicked priests of Ong to recapture him.

Like the other stories we are talking about today, "The Abominations of Yondo" is well-written and gets a passing grade, but there isn't much actual story there.  Of today's three pieces, however, it is the best, as it has the coolest monsters and the most striking images and doesn't have the kind of nagging loose ends that left me scratching my head when I read "The Epiphany of Death."

Besides the expected Smith collections, "The Abominations of Yondo" was included in a 1979 French anthology and a 2017 anthology of old mummy stories (one of the creatures in the story is a living dead king.)

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We'll be taking a break from fantasy and horror for our next episode and reading something a little closer to "hard" SF by a Grandmaster who has won a pile of Hugos and Nebulas, so make sure to check the seals on your trusty suit of vacuum armor before I see you again.