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OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY
The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany MEGAPACK™”)
The Wildside Book of Fantasy
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Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
INTRODUCTION, by Darrell Schweitzer
Klarkash-Ton, Sorcerer-Poet
Clark Ashton Smith was a prodigy, who wrote Arabian Nights novels in his mid-teens and was heralded as a major voice in American poetry by the time he was nineteen. In one frantic burst in the middle 1930s, he wrote nearly a hundred strange, wondrous, and grotesque stories, most of which were published in Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Wonder Stories, and other pulps, but he was by no means a conventional pulp writer. A direct heir to Edgar Allan Poe and to the late Romantics and Decadents, a translator of Baudelaire, Smith wrote in baroque, jeweled prose of distant times and remote planets, of baleful magics and reanimated corpses, lost lovers, eldritch gods, and inexorable fate. He is also a writer whose works refuse to die, even after nearly a century.
Think of him as the sorcerer-poet, alone in his eyrie in the dry California hills, dreaming his strange dreams and creating his unique worlds—of Zothique, the Earth’s haunted last continent at the end of time, Hyperborea, a prehistoric land, Poseidonis, the last foundering isle of Atlantis, and Averoigne, an unhistoried province of medieval France, thick with vampires. Think of the visions his stories conjure up as sendings, written in strange runes, transported from the sorcerer’s lair by indescribable genii or winged spirits. His stories are altogether unlike anyone else’s and quite wonderful, among the treasures of fantastic literature.
But we must not make Smith himself into a fantastic creation. He was a Californian, born in 1893, thus three years younger than H.P. Lovecraft. His schooling ended early, but he educated himself, it is reported, not only by poring over every book he could find, but by reading the dictionary cover to cover. He lived most of his life in a remote cabin, in semi-poverty, doing occasional outdoor, odd jobs to meet his modest expenses. He despised the confines of an office or shop. When he needed money, he preferred to pick fruit or dig wells.
He always thought of himself primarily as a poet, and worked steadily on poetry from his youth to old age. His first book, The Star-Treader (1912) was a volume of gorgeous, cosmic poetry somewhat in the manner of, but superseding the work of his then-famous mentor, George Sterling, who, along with Ambrose Bierce, was one of the leading figures in the California literary scene. Most of Smith’s fiction was written when he needed money as his parents entered their dotage. While some of the science fiction he wrote for Hugo Gernsback he candidly described as hackwork in his Selected Letters, the effort awakened new potential in him. His poetry is still admired, but it has been sidelined by the post-Pound, post-Eliot developments of the middle 20th century which seems to eschew both elegance and coherence; therefore it is his fiction which has become the basis of his permanent, popular reputation.
In many ways he was anything but the reclusive aesthete. His letters show him to have been quite practical-minded, willing to try new markets, attempting to reach out (albeit not always successfully) to markets as diverse as Astounding Stories, Terror Tales, and Esquire. In the early 1950s we find him suggesting to his then-agent Forrest J. Ackerman that some of his older, frequently erotic stories, if shorn of a bit of their more ornate prose, might be submitted to the new magazine, Playboy. Meanwhile Smith did what he could to develop his skills in painting and sculpture, at one point making more money selling weird little statuettes, mostly grotesque heads and faces, and alleged portraits of sinister cosmic entities.
He was a friend and correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft. Although the two never met, they
came to esteem one another highly. At first, Lovecraft wrote a admiring letter to Mr. Smith, the Poet, but soon the relationship warmed up. They became colleagues, Lovecraft inspiring Smith as much as Smith inspired Lovecraft. Elements of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos began to appear in Smith’s stories, as did various ancient gods and forbidden tomes of Smith’s invention in Lovecraft’s work. Lovecraft’s classic “The Whisperer in Darkness” even contains a playful reference to “The Commorium Myth Cycle” of “the Atlantean priest, Klarkash-Ton.”
Together, Lovecraft and Smith, with a third colleague, Robert E. Howard, dominated Weird Tales in the 1930s and significantly shaped fantastic literature for decades to come. While Smith’s output diminished after about 1940, he continued to write into the late ’50s, during which time his work reached as larger audience as August Derleth’s Arkham House publishing company issued more and more Smith in book form. Altogether, his fiction took up six volumes. Selected Poems appeared in 1971. His Selected Letters has appeared recently. He married late in life, moved away from his cabin, and died in 1961.
But in books like the present one, he is not dead. He may never be as popular as J.R.R. Tolkien or T.H. White or J.K. Rowling, but by the connoisseur of the darkest of dark and ironic fantasy, Smith will always be read. His work lives. Here is some of it. This book is a good place to start, if you’ve never read him before.
Read this. It will change you forever.
THE ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO
Overland Monthly, April 1926
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.
It was noon of a vernal day when I came forth from that interminable cactus-forest in which the Inquisitors of Ong had left me, and saw at my feet the gray beginnings of Yondo. I repeat, it was noon of a vernal day; but in that fantastic wood I had found no token or memory of a spring; and the swollen, fulvous, dying and half-rotten growths through which I had pushed my way, were like no other cacti, but bore shapes of abomination scarcely to be described. The very air was heavy with stagnant odours of decay; and leprous lichens mottled the black soil and russet vegetation with increasing frequency. Pale-green vipers lifted their heads from prostrate cactus-boles and watched me with eyes of bright ochre that had no lids or pupils. These things had disquieted me for hours past; and I did not like the monstrous fungi, with hueless stems and nodding heads of poisonous mauve, which grew from the sodden lips of fetid tarns; and the sinister ripples spreading and fading on the yellow water at my approach were not reassuring to one whose nerves were still taut from unmentionable tortures. Then, when even the blotched and sickly cacti became more sparse and stunted, and rills of ashen sand crept in among them, I began to suspect how great was the hatred my heresy had aroused in the priests of Ong; and to guess the ultimate malignancy of their vengeance.
I will not detail the indiscretions which had led me, a careless stranger from far-off lands, into the power of those dreadful magicians and mysteriarchs who serve the lion-headed Ong. These indiscretions, and the particulars of my arrest, are painful to remember; and least of all do I like to remember the racks of dragon-gut strewn with powdered adamant, on which men are stretched naked; or that unlit room with six-inch windows near the sill, where bloated corpse worms crawled in by hundreds from a neighboring catacomb. Sufficient to say that, after expending the resources of their frightful fantasy, my inquisitors had borne me blindfolded on camel-back for incomputable hours, to leave me at morning twilight in that sinister forest. I was free, they told me, to go whither I would; and in token of the clemency of Ong, they gave me a loaf of coarse bread and a leathern bottle of rank water by way of provision. It was at noon of the same day that I came to the desert of Yondo.
So far, I had not thought of turning back, for all the horror of those rotting cacti, or the evil things that dwelt among them. Now, I paused, knowing the abominable legend of the land to which I had come; for Yondo is a place where few have ventured wittingly and of their own accord. Fewer still have returned—babbling of unknown horrors and strange treasure; and the lifelong palsy which shakes their withered limbs, together with the mad gleam in their starting eyes beneath whitened brows and lashes, is not an incentive for others to follow. So it was that I hesitated on the verge of those ashen sands, and felt the tremor of a new fear in my wrenched vitals. It was dreadful to go on, and dreadful to go back, for I felt sure that the priests had made provision against the latter contingency. So after a little I went forward, sinking at each step in loathly softness, and followed by certain long-legged insects that I had met among the cacti. These insects were the color of a week-old corpse and were as large as tarantulas; but when I turned and trod upon the foremost, a mephitic stench arose that was more nauseous even than their color. So, for the nonce, I ignored them as much as possible.
Indeed, such things were minor horrors in my predicament. Before me, under a huge sun of sickly scarlet, Yondo reached interminable as the land of a hashish-dream against the black heavens. Far-off, on the utmost rim, were those orblike mountains of which I have told; but in between were awful blanks of gray desolation, and low, treeless hills like the backs of half-buried monsters. Struggling on, I saw great pits where meteors had sunk from sight; and divers-colored jewels that I could not name glared or glistened from the dust. There were fallen cypresses that rotted by crumbling mausoleums, on whose lichen blotted marble fat chameleons crept with royal pearls in their mouths. Hidden by the low ridges, were cities of which no stela remained unbroken—immense and immemorial cities lapsing shard by shard, atom by atom, to feed infinities of desolation. I dragged my torture-weakened limbs over vast rubbish-heaps that had once been mighty temples; and fallen gods frowned in rotting psammite or leered in riven porphyry at my feet. Over all was an evil silence, broken only by the satanic laughter of hyenas, and the rustling of adders in thickets of dead thorn or antique gardens given to the perishing nettle and fumitory.
Topping one of the many moundlike ridges, I saw the waters of a weird lake, unfathomably dark and green as malachite, and set with bars of profulgent salt. These waters lay far beneath me in a cuplike hollow; but almost at my feet on the wave-worn slopes were heaps of that ancient salt; and I knew that the lake was only the bitter and ebbing dregs of some former sea. Climbing down, I came to the dark waters, and began to lave my hands; but there was a sharp and corrosive sting in that immemorial brine, and I desisted quickly, preferring the desert dust that had wrapped me about like a slow shroud.
Here I decided to rest for a little; and hunger forced me to consume part of the meager and mocking fare with which I had been provided by the priests. It was my intention to push on if my strength would allow and reach the lands that lie to the north of Yondo. Theses lands are desolate, indeed, but their desolation is of a more usual order than that of Yondo; and certain tribes of nomads have been known to visit them occasionally. If fortune favored me, I might fall in with one of these tribes.
The scant fare revived me, and, for the first time in weeks of which I had lost all reckoning, I heard the whisper of a faint hope. The corpse-colored insects had long since ceased to follow me; and so far despite the eeriness of the sepulchral silence and the mounded dust of timeless ruin, I had met nothing half so horrible as those insects. I began to think that the terrors of Yondo were somewhat exaggerated.
It w
as then that I heard a diabolic chuckle on the hillside above me. The sound began with a sharp abruptness that startled me beyond all reason, and continued endlessly, never varying its single note, like the mirth of an idiotic demon. I turned, and saw the mouth of a dark cave fanged with green stalactites, which I had not perceived before. The sound appeared to come from within this cave.
With a fearful intentness I stared at the black opening. The chuckle grew louder, but for awhile I could see nothing. At last I caught a whitish glimmer in the darkness; then, with all the rapidity of nightmare, a monstrous Thing emerged. It had a pale, hairless, egg-shaped body, large as that of a gravid she-goat; and this body was mounted on nine long wavering legs with many flanges, like the legs of some enormous spider. The creature ran past me to the water’s edge; and I saw that there were no eyes in its oddly sloping face; but two knifelike ears rose high above its head, and a thin, wrinkled snout hung down across its mouth, whose flabby lips, parted in that eternal chuckle, revealed rows of bats’ teeth.
It drank avidly of the bitter lake; then, with thirst satisfied, it turned and seemed to sense my presence, for the wrinkled snout rose and pointed toward me, sniffing audibly. Whether the creature would have fled, or whether it meant to attack me, I do not know; for I could bear the sight no longer but ran with trembling limbs amid the massive boulders and great bars of salt along the lakeshore.
Utterly breathless, I stopped at last, and saw that I was not pursued. I sat down, still trembling, in the shadow of a boulder. But I was to find little respite, for now began the second of those bizarre adventures which forced me to believe all the mad legends I had heard.
More startling even than that diabolic chuckle was the scream that rose at my very elbow, from the salt-compounded sand—the scream of a woman possessed by some atrocious agony, or helpless in the grip of devils. Turning, I beheld a veritable Venus, naked in a white perfection that could fear no scrutiny, but immersed to her navel in the sand. Her terror-widened eyes implored me and her lotus hands reached out with beseeching gesture. I sprang to her side—and touched a marble statue, whose carven lids were drooped in some enigmatic dream of dead cycles, and whose hands were buried with the lost loveliness of hips and thighs. Again I fled, shaken with a new fear; and again I heard the scream of a woman’s agony. But this time I did not turn to see the imploring eyes and hands.
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK TM Vol. 6: Clark Ashton Smith Page 2