The Moon of Skulls by Robert E. howard

The Moon of Skulls

By Robert E. Howard

“Time Lost Series”

Centaur Press

1968. $0.60

                                            My  copy of the Centaur Press  edition.

Contents:

“The Moon of Skulls: Weird Tales, June & July 1930

“Skulls in the Stars”:  Weird Tales, January 1929

“The Footfalls Within”: Weird Tales, September 1931

I had planned on covering another anthology, but since Mr. Howard’s 107^th birthday was this past week the other anthology will have to wait until next Sunday.

Does REH even belong in a blog covering old Horror Paperbacks since he is most famously known for his "Sword&Sorcery” tales? I think yes, since one of the big differences between S&S and “Heroic Fantasy” is a very strong element of supernatural horror running through most S&S tales. And I think that Mr. Howard’s “Solomon Kane” adventures are a perfect example action filled horror stories or if you wish, horror filled action stories. In these stories the genre lines are very blurry.

The character of “Solomon Kane” appeared in 9 stories, 5 fragments and 2 poems all written between 1928 and 1932. The first seven stories were originally published in “Weird Tales Magazine”. The rest were first published during the 1960s.

Solomon Kane is Bob Howard’s 2^nd most popular character after “Conan” and some folks would argues that “King Kull of Atlantis” shares 2^nd place.  I personally enjoy the Kanes stories much more than the Kull stories.

Solomon Kane was Howard’s 17^th Century Sword swinging, pistol firing “Puritan” avenging angel. He was a very busy guy travelling around England, Europe and Africa. Kane was literally a one man arming who spent his life writing wrongs and battling evil, be it human, supernatural or both. Kane has gone up against Pirates, Ghosts, Slavers, Zombies, Demons, Lost civilizations and even Harpies!

I’m a huge fan of almost everything Mr. Howard wrote. He poured his heart and soul into to every story. Even though he was a working writer pounding out stories every single month from the time he was 18 up until his death at the age of 30, he put so much energy and conviction into every story that you get carried away immediately into every single word. Only god knows what heights he could of reached if he would have had the luxury to take his time with writing and not had to have worried about making a living purely as a Pulp writer. As far as I’m concerned much of his writing transcends pure “Pulpfiction”.  That’s why we are still reading his stories more than 77 years after his death.

Not being a “Howard Scholar” it appears, to me at least, that the qualities that made him “great” were also the things that drove him to take his life at the young age of thirty years. Mr. Howard’s passions were enormous. This meant that his hatreds were as large as his loves. This tends to weigh heavily on many of his tales, filling them with contradictions. He championed the under dog, hated fascism, slavery and injustice. At the same time he could be bigoted or  racist. He would abhor slavery and at the same time champion the superiority of the white race and Anglo culture. To me, this showed the war being raged in his soul. He spent almost the entirety of his life in the small isolated town of “Cross Plains” Texas. He grew up during hard times in a rough world. Our concepts of racial harmony and progressive thinking hardly existed back then, or at least not in popular culture. I think that because of his great passions, inexperience in the wider world and genius, these non-PC traits tend to slap you in the face at times. Depending on how you look at it, it can either harm the story or increase its (misguided) honesty, power and authenticity.

I won’t lie; I can forgive him almost everything. That’s how wonderful these stories are. Had he been a calmer, more open and level headed human being he probably would have been a much lesser writer. It’s seems that there is a very fine line between great artistic genius and self destructive madness.  Mr. Howard walked this very fine line only to finely slip over at the age of thirty.

I like to think that if he had lived longer and moved out into the wider world he might have become a more tolerant and open minded man. That is something that we will never know though.

So that’s the contradiction that was/is Robert Ervin Howard. The things that contributed to his greatness were also a madness that brought about the end of his life far too early.

Now let’s get to those stories.

“The Moon of Skulls”

Kane is travelling across Africa searching for a young English woman who has been kidnapped by pirates and possibly sold into slavery. While following her trail deep into the heart of unexplored Africa he finally finds her being held prisoner in the lost city of Negari which is the last outpost of sunken Atlantis. The city is ruled “Nakari, the Vampire queen of Negari”.  Nakari being “white” wants Solomon as her mate. He refuses and hilarity ensues. This is an entertaining mixture of  Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Opar” and Haggard's “She”. Sadly, the racism tends to be fairly overt and probably would insult many modern readers. I doubt that I could recommend it to a black friend.  So as I mentioned above, this is a real love hate kind of story. There are some serious “he’s gotta be fucking kidding!” moments in this story as far as the racism is concerned, that almost destroys the story. If you have a fairly healthy “bull-shit meter” then just ignore the racist comments and go along for the insanely enjoyable ride.

“Skulls in the Stars”

Back in England Solomon travelling across the moors, takes the path less taken and runs afoul of a ghost. Guess who wins?

“The Footfalls Within”

This is another tale chronicling Solomon’s travels across Africa and is one of those classic Bob Howard contradictions. This time he’s rescuing and avenging a tribe of Africans who have been captured by Arab slave traders and taken to the coast on a forced death march through the jungle. Kane ends up being captured by said slavers and joins the march as a prisoner. Luckily for Solomon and the natives the caravan runs across a temple/tomb from some ancient lost civilization. Lucky that is, because the Slavers just have to open it up to see if it contains treasure. Instead of discovering treasure then awaken and release the demon that has been imprisoned within. This is a fun short little story with sympathy for the African victims instead of disdain and of course, Solomon once more dishing out some seriously righteous ass kicking!

What I found so great about this slim volume containing a novelette and two short stories is that we get to see both sides of Mr. Howard’s world view. And huge warts and all, Robert E Howard will always have a place in my heart, library and who is someone whose stories I will always happily return to in the years to come!

Here are scans of the rest of my Howards! I don't have as many as I used to. I hope that these are still of interest though!

There are still two “Solomon Kane” collections in print.

The inexpensive “The Right Hand of Doom” from Wordsworth Books.

 Here.

And

The Deluxe illustrated "Savage Tales of“Solomon Kane” collection from DelRey.

Here.

And lastly I’d like to bring a new book from “Michael Brooks”, a successful new writer to your attention.

Go here!

This looks extremely promising! His first novel had received excellent reviews!!

That’s it for this week!

Take care and thanks for stopping by!!

Doug

Horror Hunters

„Horror Hunters“

„Nightmare tales of the dead and the undead“

Edited by Roger Elwood & Vic Ghidalia

Manor Books. 1975. $0.95

                                         The Front and Back cover to my 1975 edition.

                                        

                                                The 1971 edition that I can't find anywhere!!

This week’s book, Horror Hunters, is an early “themed anthology” originally published by Manor books back in 1971. The obvious theme of this anthology is seekers of horror or those who investigate it. I own the 1975 edition and can’t find a single copy of the 1971 edition anywhere. Once again Messrs. Elwood and Ghidalia deliver another enjoyable anthology of predominantly “Weird Tales” reprints.   I enjoyed it so much that I finished it in just one evening. The cover seems to be a very loosely based upon Theodore Sturgeons “One foot and the Grave”. The anthology is dedicated to “August Derleth”

Contents:

Ancient Sorceries - Algernon Blackwood

The Gateway of the Monster - William Hope Hodgson
The Unnamable - H. P. Lovecraft
The Thing on the Roof - Robert E. Howard
Mr Ames' Devil - August Derleth
In the X-Ray - Fritz Leiber Jr.
One Foot and the Grave - Theodore Sturgeon
I Kiss Your Shadow - Robert Bloch

Now let’s take a look at the stories!

Ancient Sorceries - Algernon Blackwood

 “Ancient Sorceries” is one of Algernon Blackwood’s most famous stories. It’s one of five “John Silence, Physician Extraordinary“ stories that he wrote. John silence is a British physician who handles supernatural cases. The structure of these tales usually has John telling his most interesting cases to his friends.  He’s basically passive in these stories and only at the end does he conduct a follow up investigation in an attempt to verify the facts of the case. I enjoyed this story a lot. It kept me guessing and on my toes up to the very end. It’s seems that a meek middle aged Englishman, while on vacation in the French Provence, decides to detrain at a small village in an attempt to escape all the noisy tourists who are sharing train with him. He doesn’t like crowds or noise. It seem that the ruin the atmosphere of his trip. As he leaves the train he is warned about the village by an elderly French traveller who had been sharing his compartment. As the Traveller only speaks broken French, all he understands is a warning about sleeping and cats. He is immediately enchanted with the medieval charm of the older part of the village and decides that getting off the train was a good choice. He notices how quiet the village is and how friendly the locals are. He books a room and immediately feels an amazing sense of peacefulness fall over him. He becomes so enchanted with the entire setting that he decides to stay for a few days. He ends up staying over 2 weeks since he just can’t bring himself to leave. This begins to frighten him a bit. He is also unnerved by realizing the villagers are keeping him under constant, if not extremely discreet, observation. He also begins to believe that the daily comings and goings of the villagers is purely for his sake and that they are all truly leading a completely separate existence that he knows nothing about.  Another interesting point is that the villagers always seem to remind him of cats and seem to be able to vanish after turning corners. He even goes out of his way to follow people just so he can discover how it is that they seem to disappear once they round a corner.  On the day that he finally pulls himself together and decides to leave he meets the innkeeper’s daughter and seems to fall under another spell of enchantment.  After spending a few more days in the company of this “enchanting” young woman he begins to think that villagers are waiting for him to make up his mind about something. He finally comes to the conclusion that once he makes of his mind, he has no idea about what though; they will reveal their secret to him and invite him to join their community.  I won’t give it all away though since I’ve all ready been run off at the keyboard. Let me just say we end up with a tale of black magic, executed witches, were cats, Satanism, the black mass and reincarnation!!  Lots of atmosphere makes this a top story in my eyes.

The story is available online is you want to read it. I recommend it very much!

John Silence Stories

The Gateway of the Monster - William Hope Hodgson

“Gateway of the Monster” is one of Hodgson’s “Carnackithe Ghost finder” adventures. And this tale truly is an adventure. Carnaki is a very competent and aggressive Edwardian Para-normal investigator who goes around the UK breaking ghosts. You could consider him to be the original “Ghost Buster”! In this adventure Mr. Carnacki is asked to investigate the goings on at an isolated country estate. Not that there’s any other kind of country estate in these kinds of stories. It seems that there is a haunted bed chamber terrifying the household. Carnacki ends up going up against a demon in the form of giant hand that is using a cursed ring as an inter-dimensional doorway. It has already strangled an entire family before Carnacki gets called in to send it packing.  Carnacki is a very modern sort of ghost breaker in that he not only uses magical spells, but also scientific equipment and a service revolver to battle the demon. So we get a monster hand, a strangled baby and a kitty cat that gets beaten to a shapeless pulp. Not bad for a horror story written 100 years ago. This story is grisly, gory and fun!

It’s available on-line if you want to read it.

Carncacki on-line

The complete Carnaki stories are also available from Wordsworth books at a very affordable price.

 Wordsworth Carnacki Collection

 

The Unnamable - H. P. Lovecraft

 “The Unanamable” is a transitional HPL story from when he was moving away from his “Dunsanyian” stories and had quite gotten started on the Cthulhu Cycle of stories. Personally, I like this story a lot. But sadly, I like it for all of the wrong reasons. This is exactly the kind of HPL stories that people love to make fun of and satirize. It has all of the qualities that a good “bad” Lovecraft story demands. The characters are stupid. The prose is so purple that the Caesar’s would have tried to wear it and it’s more hysterical than a Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobiac at a spelling bee.

The story starts out with two researchers of the unknown who are discussing if something can be truly “unnameable”. Researcher #one says no and researcher# two says yes.  They then go on to discuss a local legend about a 17th century family from the area who were dealing in black magic. Legend tells that the wife gave birth to a child so monstrous that they had to keep it locked up in the attic. I love this plot point. The only thing missing is the bucket of fish heads. This is terrible clichéd, but I honestly think that this is the origin of the cliché. So anyways the one researcher goes on to tell how this monstrous child broke loose from time to time and terrorized the vicinity. The researcher then goes on to tell his friend how after the parents died, the neighbours left the house abandoned and the attic locked. “Good riddance!” they must have thought.  Anyways baby mongo breaks out one last time and goes on a killing spree. The researcher tells of how when he went and investigated he found a pile of freaky deaky bones in the attic. The were so unnerving that  instead of sharing the discovery he goes and dumps them into the tomb of the things parents which is conveniently located in an old abandoned cemetery. It seems that the skeleton substantiates the old rumours of the thing having “ape like claws”, “hoofed feet”, “huge fanged jaws” and “horns”. AND it turns out they are discussing this the whole time while sitting on the aforementioned tomb as night closes in!  So they’re just sitting there “smokin’ and Jokin’ just as the moon gets covered by a passing cloud and something comes bursting up out of the tomb and goes all ninja turtle on them.

They wake up the next day in the hospitaly badly beaten and covered with hoof marks. Researcher #2 asks, “What was it that attacked us?” And researcher #1 replies “The “Unnamable”! 

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have a name for it. Monster!

 I love this story just for its awfulness alone.

Here’s the on-line text…..

 "The Unnamable" on-line

The Thing on the Roof - Robert E. Howard

 This is a fairly ok Robert E. Howard penned “Cthulhu Mythos” story about grave robbing gone bad. It seems that an archaeologist (tomb plunderer) didn’t read far enough into REH’s version of the “Necronomicon”, “Unspeaksble Cults”, and brings home the wrong kind of treasure. The “Treasure” turns out to be one of those cranky, stinky shapeless, tentacled, hoofed and flying monstrosities that don’t play well with others. HPL would have called it typical “YogSothothery”. What I really like, is that in a typical HPL Mythos story the protagonist/victim usually ends up insane, with soiled drawers, devoured or a combination of the three. In a Robert E. Howard Mythos tale the protagonist charges death head on with both barrels blazing and ends up with his skull crushed to a pulp with a giant hoof print in the middle of it. This story is a good example of wha REH was nicknamed “Two Gun Bob”.

 

Mr Ames' Devil - August Derleth

This one is enjoyable but a typical example of what Mr. Derleth termed one of his “filler” stories. I hobby sorcery actually manages, much to his surprise and chagrin, his own personal demon. Said demon then goes about fulfilling his master’s wishes whether his master wants him to or not.  The hobby sorcerer then tries to use a contractual loop hole and, as always in these kinds of stories, it backfires. This one is short enough to be enjoyable before it wears out it welcome. I have to say though that Mr. Derleth was capable of much better stories.

 

In the X-Ray - Fritz Leiber Jr.

 I would consider “In the X-Ray” a fine story, if say, August Derleth had written it.

But since it was written by the great “Fritz Leiber” though, I have to say that it’s pretty dull and underdeveloped. I admit though, in Mr. Leiber’s defence, that this is one of his very early tales and all of his greatness still lay in the future.

A young woman goes to her Dr. complaining terrible pain and swelling in her ankle. It seems that this happened after having a nightmare about the rotting corpse of her recently deceased twin sister coming out from under the bed and grasping her ankle. The surving twin claims the pain feels just as if someone had her ankle in a painful grip from the inside. Uncle Doctor makes a few X-Rays and discovers that the girls were actually triplets, but the 3 girl didn’t develop and was absorbed by the surviving twin while still in the womb. This young woman also confesses to the Doctor that her twin sister hated her, and up until her death, made her twin’s life a living hell. The evil sister even cursed her twin whilst dying and swore to come back and get her. One thing the doctor has held back from his patient so far, it the fact that it seems that the absorbed twin has now started to finaly develop and grow!

Now let me stop here for a minute. This story has all the making of a great “body horror” story. I mean what can be nastier than having an absorbed foetus starting to grow and come to life inside of you! I don’t even want to consider how many wonderful ways he could have taken it. Sadly he doesn’t. The story ends with a suicide before anything awesomely awful could take place. From anyone else this would be a good story. Coming from Fritz Leiber though makes the story a huge let down.

One Foot and the Grave - Theodore Sturgeon

Ted Sturgeon never, to my knowledge, wrote a pedestrian story and this one is no exception. He manages to condense a novels worth of dialogue and plotting into just 45 pages! I’m sorry, but I’m not going to go all that deeply into the plot. It’s so crazy and complicated that I can only describe it as a “Screwball comedy, love story, Horror and fantasy mash up. You get murdered enchanted lovers, entombed arch angels, wizards, their familiars, werecats, Satyrs hidden valleys, unrequited love and a ton of dense plot. I get dizzy and tired just thinking about it. I can assure you that it’s a wonderful and satisfying story. Even though this appeared in "Weird Tales" I think that it would have been more at home in John W. Campbell's "Unknown".

 

I Kiss Your Shadow - Robert Bloch

“I Kiss your Shadow” is typical Bloch insanity from the beginning of his career. I’m running against time here so I’ll sum it up in one sentence. Guy kills his wife and her shadow comes back and screws until she comes down with a bad case of “coffin birth”!  The idea is so deliciously nasty that it’ll fester in your mind for days.

Like I said at the beginning, this collection is pretty strong story wise and extremely entertaining. The two fairly weak entries serve as palate cleansers between the heavier stories. Check it out if you can find a copy.

Take care and thanks for stopping by!

Doug

Strange Eons

Strange Eons

By Robert Bloch

Blurb: „In the Fantastic Tradition of H. P. Lovecraft”

Pinnacle Books 1979.  $1.95

That is not dead which can eternal lie / Yet with strange aeons even death may die.“ – H. P. Lovecraft: The Nameless City

                                             Front and back covers to my copy.

                       Mr. Robert Bloch! Thanks to Will Erickson @ "Too Much Horror Fiction"

“Strange Eons” was Robert Bloch’s final tribute to his friend and mentor “H.P. Lovecraft”.  To my knowledge, Mr. Bloch never wrote another Cthulhu Mythos story after this novel. I figure that that is reasonable seeing that he brings the entire “Cthulhu Mythos” to an end in this book.  Yep, in the novel, the Stars are finally right!

     Mr. Bloch seemed to have had two shadows hanging over his career. The first one was that he was one of the original members of the “Lovecraft Circle” which means that he started out his career by writing Lovecraft pastiche. Luckily he quickly broke away from HPL’s influence to develop his own style of writing and afterwards only returned occasionally to “Lovecraft Country”. The second shadow was that after 1960 every single Bloch novel or short story collection (aside from only one that I know of. And Will Errickson over at “Too much Horror Fiction” had to point that out to me.) contained the following blurb, “by the author of PSYCHO”.  Alfred Hitchcockfilming Mr. Bloch’s novel was a huge boost to his career, but it would also be how he would ever after be recognized by the general reading public even though he was hugely successful from the 1930s onward.

     Mr. Bloch was a true multi-talent. He was extremely successful in several genres. He wrote Horror, Science Fiction, and Crime/Thrillers.  He was also an extremely canny businessman. From the 1940s onward he was also a very successful script writer for film, Television and Radio. Almost always adapting his own stories. Some of his original scripts were written for such shows as “I Spy”, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and even 3 episodes for the original “Star Trek”.  So here is a man who not only got paid to for his printed stories, He would then sell the film rights AND get paid a third time to write the scripts! Not bad for a Pulp writer.

     Now let’s take a look at “Strange Eons”. I can’t say that “Eons” is a great book. It is highly entertaining, but is such of an insider joke that I think that readers who have no knowledge or interest in H. P. Lovecraft will find little to love here. To be fair, Mr. Bloch includes a huge chunk of exposition explaining all you need to know about Mr. Lovecraft and his works. I feel though that this brings the story to a dead stop. I understand that he wanted to reach as large of a readership as possible with this novel. As a Lovecraft fan though, I can only think “C´mon! I know this shit already! Let’s get going!” The book is great fun; it’s just not great literature. Any HPL fan will see every shock revelation coming a mile away. And since this is basically a huge tribute/Love-letter to Lovecraft and his Mythos I wish that he could have been a bit more subtle for those in the know.

     The story itself is broken down into 3 sections and told as a mystery. The first section deals with two art collectors in Los Angeles who literally stumble across and purchase a painting that turns out to be the genuine painting that appeared in Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s model”. This sets off a chain or murders by some mysterious group who want the painting and will go to any lengths to recover it and to hide any evidence of it even existing. The murders themselves all appear to be modelled after famous death scenes from Lovecraft stories. This is quite apparent to the two collectors since one is an HPL aficionado and the other is the target of the fore-mentioned chunk of HP exposition.  Eventually our two collectors meet untimely and grisly ends. Thus ends the first section of the novel. The second section picks up about six months later and the ex wife, who is a photo model, of one of our dead art collectors gets dragged into the whole mess by being hired to model in some ads for a new cult that has popped up in LA.  She then gets approached by govt. agents who are investing the Sect as part of a supposed racketeering investigation. Turns out this sect is heavily involved with the Return of Cthulhu and the Government knows this. After a series of HPL inspired murders and chases involving denizens straight out of Lovecraft stories our heroine gets initiated into the inner circle of a international group of spies, scientists and diplomats who are waging a shadow war against the Cult and the Cthulhu Mythos deities. By the end of the second section we learn the Cult has infiltrated all levels of government and society by means of bribery and mind control. Our heroine is finally kidnapped and forced into a marriage of convenience with Cthulhu himself. She then on their wedding night she receives from Cthulhu the gift that keeps on giving and as a result of this gift she goes insane. The third section then moves up 30 years to ca. 2009 or 2010. We know this from two reasons. The first is that we are told that its thirty years later and the second reason it that everyone seems to have video-phones on their office desks. Our new protagonist is a young reporter who is investigating the resurgence of the Cthulhu cult from the first two sections. It seems that the cult had been busy recruiting member and spreading death and terror around the globe before being put down by various governments. Anyways it now seems that some one has been doing their best to convince the public that there never was any Cthulhu Cult and the end of the world is not approaching.  Our young reporter finds out other wise. It seems that his foster father is behind the efforts to convince the world that every thing is just fine and that there is nothing to worry about. We also find out that the young reporter is an ORPHANE who’s mother died insane after his birth without ever revealing who was the father of her child. I bet that you can guess where the final 20 pages of the book are going. Like I said earlier, the Stars are finally right!

All in all, “Strange eons” is a fun read for HPL and Robert Bloch fans. The 2^nd section is the best part of the book. It reads like an old “Mannix” episode then switches into high gear as “The Man from U.N.C.L.E vs. The Mythos”. We even get treated to an all out nuclear attack on “R’Ley”!

     What I did find really clever in the book is that the protagonists were never sure if the cultists were mocking them by recreating death scenes from Lovecraft, recreating the murders for their own (the cultists) amusement or that HPL was a visionary who saw these future murders in his dreams and then incorporated them into his stories. We do learn through the novel that Lovecraft knew what was going on through the visions he had while dreaming, personal investigations and that his stories were meant as warning to future generations.

So if you like Bloch or Lovecraft I can highly recommend this book.  You can give it a pass though If you’re not interested in either.

 

Lastly, I received a copy of a new collection of “Flash Fiction” published by Michael Faun and “Hyperpyrexia Press”.  I haven’t had time to get very far into the collection. What I’ve read so far has been quite enjoyable. You can check it out here……

“Feverish Fiction VOL#1”

Thanks for stopping by and I hope that everyone survived the holidays and that 2013 will keep all of you healthy, happy and sane!

Thanks for stopping by!

Doug

P.S.

I just found out the the "Oxford Univeristy Press" has a nice hardback Lovecraft anthology coming out in June 2013. It looks pretty interesting!
You can check it out here!

“Shadows with Eyes: Six Tales of Crawling Horror”

By Fritz Leiber.

Ballantine Books. 1962. $0.35

Cover by Richard Powers

Contents:
5 · A Bit of the Dark World · nv Fantastic Feb ’62
36 · The Dead Man · nv Weird Tales Nov ’50
62 · Power of the Puppets · ss Thrilling Mystery Jan ’42
84 · Schizo Jimmie · ss The Saint Detective Magazine Feb ’60
93 · The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity · ss F&SF Mar ’62
102 · A Deskful of Girls [Change War] · nv F&SF Apr ’58

                                                                         My copy.

This started out as a Face Book horror literature group entry that grew a wee bit too long. And since I’m a lazy shit, I decided to use it as this week’s blog entry! So you have my apologies that I’m not covering every story in the collection this time.

Some times it’s the little things that can make such a huge difference. I started reading Fritz Leiber’s anthology “Shadows with Eyes” last night. So far I’ve only made it through the first story (novelette) “A Bit of the Dark World” which originally appeared in the February 1962 issue of “Fantastic”. It’s a great story that reeks of modernity. Even though it was written over 50 years ago you can see that Mr. Leiber was going out of his way to write a cosmic weird tale that had absolutely no gothic or pulp trappings. The setting is the Pacific coastal mountains just an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles. We are introduced to our three main characters who are a Genre writer/Psychologist and a younger couple who are probably screen play writers for SF films. On the way to the Psychologist’s summer house in the mountains they discuss what place classic horror has in modern society since it seems that nothing can be considered unexplainable by modern science anymore. They also agree that since the world has become so busy and sophisticated that we don’t bother to look past the mundane horrors around us. The psychologist also postulates that since every scientific discipline has become so focused, cubby-holed and introverted that one discipline has no idea what the other is doing and no one seems to care that because of this situation there is no true “grand picture” of what reality is. Shortly before they reach the Psychologist’s house they all experience a phenomenon that appears to be both objective and subjective at the same time. Oddly the neighbour of the psychologist who is also riding along doesn’t seem to experience anything out of the normal. It’s also insinuated that the man is fairly mundane as far as sensitivity or imagination is concerned. This entire philosophical discourse takes place in the first few pages setting up everything else that comes. Damn! This is just a long short story that gives us more ideas in a few pages than most novels contain in hundreds of pages. It would take another 16 years, but Mr. Leiber has just set up the driving philosophical argument that is the basis to his 1977 novel “Our Lady of Darkness”. What we get here though is a wonderful story of truly cosmic weirdness/horror without any of the old clichéd trappings of the pulp tradition.

Read t if you can find it!

At the beginning I said that it’s the little things that can make such a huge difference.  “A Bit of the Dark World” is only 31 pages long and is divided into four chapters. Each chapter starts with a wonderful Epigraph which all fit beautifully into each chapter. The Epigraph to the fourth chapter almost brought me out of my bed though.

“But the third sister, who is also the youngest——! Hush, whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance; but, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles, and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger’s leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum—Our Lady of Darkness.”

                                                       

                                                              Thomas de Quincy in “Suspiria de Profundis”

This quote had my inner geek jumping for joy! Not only is “Our Lady of Darkness” one of my all time favourite novels (It was the subject of one of myvery first postings.), but I’m also a huge fan of Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy of films. This short Epigraph added that extra drop of joy that brought the cup, which was my reading experience, to over flowing.

Thank you Mr. Leiber, where ever you are, for sharing so much joy and wonder with me all these many years!

Lastly, I hope that everyone survived Christmas, the Apocalypse and that everyone has a happy New Year!

Let's make 2013 a good one.

I'm still waiting for my flying car though!

Doug

Clark Ashton Smith, the weird of it all!

  Clark Ashton Smith,

the weird of it all.

This week I want to discuss the works of Clark Ashton Smith. Mr Smith, as far as most contemporary readers are concerned, was the third member of “Weird Tales Magazine’s” Big Three. The other two are “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” and “Robert Ervin Howard”.  It’s unfortunate that Mr. Smith isn’t nearly as famous as his two friends. I think that his lack of wide spread fame is explained by several factors that he had no control over. I think that by not being as eccentric or as tragic a figure as Lovecraft and Howard has robbed his name of that certain romanticism that hovers over the reputations of HPL and REH. To put it bluntly, CAS just wasn’t the “character” that his two friends were. From all accounts even though Mr. Smith led a fairly reclusive life, it was a matter of choice and not because of any social inadequacies or awkwardness. There stories that he was quite the ladies man and lead a very energetic existence as far as relationships with the fairer sex goes.  In his introduction to “The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton smith” the great Gene Wolfe adds this statement….

     “At the time he wrote for the pulps, Smith lived in a cabin near an abandoned mine, far from any neighbour. The nearest town was Auborn, northeast of San Fancisco; Auborn is not large even today. There can be little doubt that strange lights shone in the windows of the cabin by night, and that strange sounds emanated from it. No source I have found reports these; but when a man like Smith lives in a place like that, he has visitors.”

Another big drawback for Smith is that he never managed to create a franchise like Howard’s “Conan” or Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos”.

I won’t bother going over Mr. Smith’s biography since it’s all online and so many people have done it so much better than I ever can or will. I’ll only point out that he was a famed poet before he became a writer, sculptor and painter. Instead, I want to speak about his writing.

Trying to describe the stories and style of CAS is like trying to describe the music of “Phillip Glass”. You know that its Glass music the second you hear it, but can you describe it to someone who hasn’t?  That’s not very easy is it?

 CAS had the most amazingly obtuse vocabulary that I’ve ever read. He supposedly memorized an entire dictionary as part of his “self education”. Just looking at his story titles makes you want to grab a dictionary. At least I need to at times. Here are some examples…

“The Dark Eidolon”

“The Seven Geases”

“Genius Loci”

and

“Chinoiserie”

Those are titles that make you have to scratch your head and wonder what they could be about. And it’s such audacious wordage such as this is one of the things that make Mr. Smith so wonderful to me.

His stories are not easy to describe. CAS heavily corresponded with HPL and REH, so there is some cross pollination of ideas among the 3. Each though was his own animal with his own distinct voice and vision. If I wanted to be lazy I would say that if you mixed HPL and REH in a blender, added a bit of erotic kinkiness and a strong does of sly humour than you might just come close to describing the style of Clark Ashton Smith.

He wrote predominately fantasies in a more or less “Sword & Sorcery” vein.  He wrote quite a bit of straight horror also a lot of early SF for the Gernsback Magazines.

The common thread in all of his stories was the pure weirdness of it all.  I would but it simply that Mr. Smith wrote “weird tales”. And I mean that this “weirdness” in smiths stories was much purer in his stories that in the stories of HPL and REH. Howard wrote what could be mostly described as Heroic fantasy/Swords and Sorcery and HPL mostly wrote SF disguised as horror. Regardless of what Mr. Smith was writing at the time, be it SF, Horror of quasi Sword & Sorcery, it could all be described as “weirdness” that was at a level that HPL and REH never achieved.

Mr. Smith created several story cycles/worlds that never managed to catch on like Howard’s  “Hyperborea” or Lovecraft’s “New England” did. These worlds were

“Poseidonis”, which was a remnant of sunken Atlantis.

“Xiccarph” a fantasy world circling a distant star.

“Hyperborea”, an ancient fantasy version of Greenland which is not to be confused with REH’s antediluvian fantasy home of “Conan”

And lastly my favourite,

“Zothique”!

“Zothique” is the original “Dying Earth” sub-genre series of the stories that inspired the “Dying Earth” series of “Jack Vance”. “The “Worlds End” series by Lin Carter and Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” series of novels.

Zothique is a far future Earth where the sun is a dying “Red Star”, the continents have sunken and only “Zothique” remains as the last continent. In this far future our present history has been forgotten, new gods have been created, old gods have been reborn and the world has become a decadent place of danger and magic.

There is only one writer today who I think of who has an understanding of the “weird tale” that is on the level of Clark Ashton Smith. And that writer is “Darrell Schweitzer”.

Mr. Schweitzer has his own voice and vision that still manage to evoke a weirdness that parallels the stories of Mr. Smith. Please grab a copy of one Mr. Schweitzer’s fantasy novels of collections and you will see what I mean. They are true treasures and a joy to read.

Clark Ashton Smith is one of the few writers who enchant me as much today as they did almost 40 years ago when I discovered him through Ballantine’s “Adult Fantasy “series edited by the late great Mr. Lin Carter.

Here are two CAS passages that have burned themselves into my mind over the past decades. The first is the opening paragraph to his prose poem “The Abominations of Yondo” and the second is the closing paragraph to his SF story “The Monster of Prophecy”.

“The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orblike mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.”

“When the poet had communicated this bit of astronomical information to Ambiala, that the star Atana was his own native sun, and had also told her of his Ode to Antares, a most affecting scene occurred, for the empress encircled him with her five arms and cried out:

'Do you not feel, as I do, that we were destined for each other?'

Though he was a little discomposed by Ambiala's display of affection, Alvor could do no less than assent. The two beings, so dissimilar in external ways, were absolutely overcome by the rapport revealed in this comparing of poetic notes; and a real understanding, rare even with persons of the same evolutionary type, was established between them henceforward. Also, Alvor soon developed a new appreciation of the outward charms of Ambiala, which, to tell the truth, had not altogether inveigled him theretofore. He reflected that after all her five arms and three legs and three eyes were merely a superabundance of anatomical features upon which human love was wont to set a by no means lowly value. As for her opalescent coloring, it was, he thought, much more lovely than the agglomeration of outlandish hues with which the human female figure had been adorned in many modernistic paintings.

When it became known in Lompior that Alvor was the lover of Ambiala, no surprise or censure was expressed by any one. Doubtless the people, especially the male Alphads who had vainly wooed the empress, thought that her tastes were queer, not to say eccentric. But anyway, no comment was made: it was her own amour after all, and no one else could carry it on for her. It would seem, from this, that the people of Omanorion had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.”

If you like this kind of writing then you can read much more at the CAS fan page “TheEldritch Dark”. They have the complete e-texts to his stories.

“TheReturn of the Sorcerer; The Best of Clark Ashton Smith” is still available/inprint.

“Penguin books” is planning a CAS collection of stories and poetry for 2013!!!


Ray Bradbury once said this about Mr. Clark Ashton Smith”

“Smith always seemed, to me anyway, a special writer for special tastes; his fame was lonely. Whether or nor it will ever be more than lonely, I cannot say. Every writer is special in some way, and those who are more than ordinarily special are either damned or lost along the way.” Knowing that they won’t damn Clark Ashton Smith, and that they are willing to recover what of his might be lost, gives his fans a sense of closeness to him."

I wish that this wasn’t such a rambling and disjointed post this time, but Mr. Smith’s stories are so unique, wonderful and special that I’m at a loss of words to even begin to describe them in the way they truly deserve. I just hope that that I have piqued your interest enough to take a look at the world of Clark Ashton Smith!

I was so deeply impressed by Mr. Smith's stories that I built a time machine during a my lunch breaks at work so I could visit "Zothique" myself! 

                                                    Don't try this at home kids!

Now check out some of these wonderful CAS covers from my collection.

Panther UK 1972. Cover by Bruce Pennington

                                                       

                                                                      Panther UK 1974

 

       Ballantine Adult Fantasy.  June 1970. Cover By George Barr

Ballantine Adult Fantasy. July 1973.

 Cover by Gervasio Gallardo

Panther Uk. 1974

Pocket Books. August 1981. cover by Rowena Morrell

Gollancz UK. 2002. Cover by J.K. Potter

Necronomicon Press. June 1995

 

     

 Prime Books. 2009. Cover by Peter Bergting

 Take care and thanks for stopping by!!

Doug