Clark Ashton Smith: "The Hunters from Beyond," "The Isle of the Torturers," & "The Dark Eidolon"

In 2009 Prime Books published The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith, a collection of 18 stories.  I actually saw and handled a copy of this book in a Des Moines library when it was relatively new; I think I read the Gene Wolfe intro but nothing else from it.  Today let's hunt up some of its contents from the internet archive and get an idea what editor Robert Weinberg thinks are weird poet, sculptor, draughtsman and author Smith's finest stories.

Nota bene: I've already blogged about seven of the stories to be found in The Return of the Sorcerer:

"The City of Singing Flame"
"Beyond the Singing Flame"
"The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis"
"The Monster of the Prophecy" 
"The Empire of the Necromancers"
"The Devotee of Evil"
"The Enchantress of Sylaire"

Let's read three that have cool names, "The Hunters from Beyond," "The Isle of the Torturers" and "The Dark Eidolon."  I have actually read all these stories before, in the early 2000s in the Gollancz volume The Emperor of Dreams, but I don't remember them well at all.  I'd read them there again but I don't have my copy of The Emperor of Dreams with me here in the Old Line State.

"The Hunters from Beyond" (1932)

"The Hunters from Beyond" was first published in an issue of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror for which it is the cover story.  It has been reprinted many times, including by Robert A. Lowndes in a 1970 issue of Magazine of Horror, where Lowndes tells us that it shares a narrator with the two Singing Flame stories, and was published after those tales, though "Internal evidence suggests that the present story was written earlier than the two science fiction adventures...."

Our narrator, Philip Hastane, a writer of weird stories and I guess a sort of simulacra of H. P. Lovecraft, is in San Francisco to visit a cousin who is a sculptor, Cyprian Sincaul, whom he has not seen in years.  (Smith himself was a Californian.)  Being early for his appointment, Philip stops at a bookstore and looks through a volume of Goya's prints known as Los Disparates or Proverbs.  When he glances up he sees a hideous hairless monster with skin like a mummy's, a skull like an ape's and a jaw like a fanged dog's!  In horror, he drops the valuable book, drawing the attention of the bookstore owner.  The gargoyle vanishes, and, in a daze, our hero buys the book and leaves.

When the narrator gets to his cousin's studio he is shocked to see that Cyprian, whose work was formerly boring and mediocre, is now brilliant and striking!  The studio is chock full of figures in various materials, all of them horrible monsters the sight of which chills the soul!  Cyprian hints that this fine work has been inspired by his witnessing true supernatural phenomena, by looking into other worlds: "The world in which we live isn't the only world; and some of the others lie closer at hand than you think."  Philip finds himself telling Cyprian about the apparition in the bookstore, and Cyprian pulls the cover off an unfinished group of figures--a horrified naked girl being harassed by seven ravenous gargoyles exactly like the one Phil saw in the shop!  Then, from behind a Chinese screen, emerges the model for the girl, a half-Irish, half-Italian beauty.  Fully dressed, she talks quietly to Cyprian and departs.

When our boy Phil leaves his creepy cousin's studio he finds the beautiful young woman waiting for him downstairs.  She introduces herself as Marta Fitzgerald.  She is in love with Cyprian and is scared all these crazy sculptures are driving him insane, and begs Philip to do something to make Cyprian stop producing them--it seems like Cyprian is up to some stuff so crazy, so incredible, that Marta can't even bring herself to describe it, only darkly hint at it.  Philip has to tell her there is really nothing he can do, that he has no influence over his cousin and an artist has to pursue his vision to the utmost, etc.

The next day, after a rough evening and night of oppressive thoughts, scary dreams and horrifying visions, Philip is awakened by a call from Cyprian--Marta has disappeared!  Back at the studio, Cyprian explains to Philip that he can summon the incorporeal forms of monsters from other dimensions--these creatures can't physically harm you, but they will try to convince you to return to their hell with them.  Cyprian says that if you have a strong will you can easily resist their entreaties, but apparently at the most recent modelling session Marta had a nervous breakdown--or voluntarily sacrificed herself in hopes of saving Cyprian!--as the monsters were slavering over her and they dragged her away to their horrific dimension!  After Cyprian has finished his bizarre confession a naked Marta reappears, but she is a mindless idiot: her body is intact, but the hunters from beyond have devoured her mind and soul, leaving her beautiful body an empty shell.  Cyprian smashes all his sculptures--only he and Philip will have any memory of his finest work.

This story is pretty good--there are no real surprises, but the images and pacing and style work; I guess you could call it a highly competent but typical weird story.

"The Isle of the Torturers" (1933)

"The Isle of the Torturers" made its debut in Weird Tales in the same issue as one of the most famous of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, "The Tower of the Elephant."  It is a story of Zothique, Smith's far future dying Earth setting.  As you know well, a dying Earth setting may be in the far future but instead of computers and robots and space stations it is full of swords and sorcery and feudalism and that sort of business.

As so many astrologers have predicted, from space comes the Silver Death, a plague that can kill you in minutes, turning you into a stiff pale corpse!  Young King Fulbra finds that his kingdom, Yoros, has been almost entirely depopulated!  You might think he is still alive because he was all alone up in his tower, maybe refraining from touching his face and washing his hands a lot--like a lot a lot--but it was probably because his wizard Vemdeez had made him a magic ring.

Vemdeez is now a stiff silvery corpse like just about everybody else, but a few days ago he advised Fulbra to, after the plague had gone through, sail to the island of Cyntrom.  Fulbra finds three slaves have survived because they were stationed in the lower vaults, and these guys man his barge as they set sail for Cyntrom.  (The survival of these three slaves is a weakness of the story, I cannot deny.)

A storm hits, and the barge is driven to the island of Uccastrog, the famous Isle of the Torturers, home of wizards who can control the weather and use this power to drive sailors into their clutches so they can torture them.  This particular storm has not only snared Fulbra and his three slaves, but another ship full of merchants and sailors the islanders can torture.  Thank God in real life when there is a medical emergency everybody bands together and nobody would think of looting the department store or burning down the police station--I wouldn't want to live in Smith's fantasy world where people are jerks and a plague is the perfect time to commit even more crimes than usual!

I'm the kind of person who just eats his Oreos whole in a few seconds, crunching up an entire package in like four minutes, but we all know those people who lovingly take an Oreo apart and lick the goop out over the course of an eternity.  Well, these people on Uccastrog are like those Oreo lickers, except in the torture game--once they have you in their power they torture you for years in elaborate and subtle ways, making sure you don't die or go insane and thus escape them.  In Weird Tales, "Isle of the Torturers" is ten pages of text.  On the fifth page Fulbra is brought before the king of Uccastrog, Ildrac, and put in a special dungeon cell.  The fourth wall of this cell is made of glass, and looks into the ocean--through it Fulbra can see horrible sea monsters.  The islanders torture Fulbra's three slaves and then throw the corpses into the water where Fulbra can see them through the glass.  Smith then provides us several pages describing the hellish physical and psychological tortures inflicted on Fulbra.  These tortures have to be read to be believed--Smith must have been a real wacky guy to come up with this stuff.  (I did learn a new word: adipocere.  Yuck.)  The story ends in a way that was clearly foreshadowed early on.  Fulbra pulls a Brer Rabbit trick on the Torturers, getting them to remove his magic ring.  The Silver Death has been living dormant in his body, suppressed by the ring, but with the ring's removal the plague kills Fulbra in moments, liberating him from torture, and then spreads throughout the island, killing everybody, including Ildrac.

"Isle of the Torturers" is just alright; it feels a little slow and labored, overwritten, and lacks emotion and surprise.  As I have suggested, how the story will end is clear by the fourth or fifth page, and after that the entire appeal of the story is Smith's inventive and dreadful catalog of tortures, which I have to admit are pretty disturbing, but in a cold way--we don't really care about the characters.

"Isle of the Torturers" has appeared in numerous Smith collections, and one of those British anthologies by Christine Campbell Thompson, this one called Keep on the Light.  (Keep on the Light also includes a better than average Robert E. Howard story, "Worms of the Earth.")

"The Dark Eidolon" (1935)

Another Zothique tale from Weird Tales.  "The Dark Eidolon" was selected by L. Sprague de Camp for his 1965 anthology The Spell of Seven (which also features Fritz Leiber's "Bazaar of the Bizarre" and Robert E. Howard's "Shadows in Zamboula") and by John Pelan for his massive anthology The Century's Best Horror Fiction, which includes a number of stories the MPorcius staff recommends, like Karl Edward Wagner's "Sticks," Anthony Boucher's "They Bite," C. L. Moore's "Shambleau," Donald Wandrei's "The Red Brain," and C. M. Eddy's "The Loved Dead."

Zotulla is the decadent and evil emperor of Xylac, and spends all his time in his palace drinking and playing with his concubines and engaging in darker, more cruel, luxuries.  One night Zotulla proclaims a feast, and provides wine to all the people of his capital city of Ummaos.  Everybody in town falls asleep, and when they wake up a colossal mansion with domes and columns and balconies aplenty has mysteriously appeared across the street from Zotulla's palace, where yesterday there was an empty city common.  What wizardry is this?  Zotulla sends some chamberlains over to inquire what is up, and at the imposing new edifice they are greeted by an animated skeleton wearing a black turban, a skeleton taller than any man then living, the risen remains of a member of a warrior race now forgotten.  This horrifying revenant tells them the name of Zotulla's new neighbor: Namirrha!  Uh oh, Namirrha is one of the most famous, and famously evil, sorcerers in Zothique, a guy even kings and emperors are afraid of!

We readers are aware, because Smith opened the story by telling us, that Namirrha, before going off to the desert and meeting an evil wizard and being trained by him in the black arts, was a wretched beggar boy of Ummaos, and when Zotulla was still just the prince (before murdering his dad) his horse callously rode over the little beggar boy.  Namirrha, decades later, has come to Ummaos for revenge over this slight, which Zotulla doesn't even remember.

The rest of the story details Namirrha's revenge, Zotulla's futile efforts to escape it, and the strain Namirrha's campaign of vengeance puts on his relationship with the evil god Thasaidon, his primary patron.  Thasaidon has no beef with Zotulla and his subjects throughout the empire of Xylac, they being almost as evil as Namirrha, so to work some diabolical magicks Namirrha contacts other maleficent entities, rivals of Thasaidon's who live among the stars, an expedient fraught with peril.  After several pages of shocking tortures and abominable horrors all the mortal characters and the entire empire of Xylac have been destroyed, only the diabolical god Thasaidon remaining to observe the devastation.

Of the three Clark Ashton Smith stories I am looking at today, "The Dark Eidolon" is the best.  (H. P. Lovecraft loved it; in letters printed in Volumes 7 and 9 of Hippocampus Press's The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft he called it "magnificent," and "a notable masterpiece" and "one of the finest things appearing in W.T. recently.")  The magic and the monsters are good, the plot feels more fresh and has some surprises, and the characters are more interesting--unlike the people in "The Hunters from Beyond" and "The Isle of the Torturers," who were mostly flat one-note victims or tormentors who don't really make any decisions, Namirrha, Thasaidon, Zotulla, and even Zotulla's favorite concubine Obexah, whom we are told hails from Uccastrog, all have motives and make decisions (and suffer horrendous fates) that reflect their personalities.  Granted, the final torture and destruction scenes are somewhat too long, but they do showcase Smith's expansive and macabre (and totally politically incorrect, by today's standards) imagination.

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All three of these stories are worthwhile.  "The Hunters from Beyond" is a solid specimen of an archetypal weird tale, while "The Isle of the Torturers" and "The Dark Eidolon" are remarkable for their apocalypticism, sadism, and nihilism.  Smith really seems to revel in atrocity and genocide here, with individuals suffering agonizing deaths and entire empires being exterminated.  These are true horror stories, with no trace of justice or goodness evident in them--both the innocent and the guilty suffer terribly and accomplish nothing before being reduced to oblivion.

More weird stories in our next episode--if you can take it!