(1893-1961)
Clark Ashton Smith lived an isolated, eccentric existence, ill at ease in the 20th century. He spent most of his years with his parents in a primitive cabin in rural Auburn, California, near the gold mines of Placer County. In this rugged region, among the miners and farmers, the self-educated Smith found an unlikely calling as a writer of fin-de-siecle verse. His first topic of poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems, was published in 1912, when he was 19. It was not until the late 1920s that Smith began to write the otherworldly fiction for which he is remembered. For a dozen years or so he became a regular and acclaimed contributor to that strange and special pulp magazine, Weird Tales, and to the handful of other pulps that were willing to print his unusual fantasy and science fiction stories.
Most of Smith’s 110 stories were set in one of his wholly imagined earthly locales: Zothique, the last, barely habitable continent in a fading future where magic has replaced science; Poseidonis, one of the isles of the doomed Atlantic; medieval Averoigne; and the prehistoric polar continent of Hyperborea. In addition, there were several jaunts to the extraterrestrial settings of Mars and planet Xiccarph. Smith could write conventional horror fiction, and he created some of the most grotesque and unsettling beasts in the literature. “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” (Weird Tales, May 1932) for instance, an electrifying tale of a group of archaeologists who encounter leechlike, skull-sucking monsters in a deserted Martian catacomb, is pure scream-out-loud entertainment.
Smith’s more characteristic work, however, was unconventional: baroque, poetic, and haunted by specter and regret. His settings were often worlds on the eve of destruction. The malevolent and powerful wizards and necromancers who figure in many of the tales are at the end of their reign, resigned and melancholic. There is Malygris, the magician of “The Last Incantation” (1930), whose reviving of the long-dead girl he loved in his youth is a soul-shattering disaster—”He could believe no longer in love or youth or beauty, and even the memory of these things was a dubitable mirage, a thing that might or might not have been.”
In “The Maze of Maal Dweb,” (1938) a tour de force of intense imagining and descriptive power, a valiant young man of Xiccarph pursues his kidnapped lover to the dangerous labyrinth of a tyrant-wizard. In a stunning climax, the brave hero is suddenly, horribly defeated and the perspective abruptly switches to evil Maal Dweb himself, rueful and alone with his metal automatons: “And it may have been that there were times when he wearied a little even of this, and preferred the silence of the petrified women, or the muteness of the beasts that could no longer call themselves men.”
Nostalgia and psychic pain haunt another of Smith’s masterworks, “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), arguably his greatest story. Mmat-muor and Sodosma, two practitioners of black magic who are capable of raising the dead, attempt to create their own kingdom from the deceased citizens of a city doomed by plague. The corrupt wizards succeed, filling their kingdom with a populace of resurrected skeletons and plague-scarred corpses. But the dead, longing to return to their interrupted sleep, rebel, and the necromancers are given their just deserts:
Hestaiyon lifted the great sword and struck off the head of Mmatmuor and the head of Sodosma, each with a single blow. Then, as had been directed, he quartered the remains with mighty strokes. And the necromancers gave up their unclean lives and lay supine, without movement, adding a deeper red to the rose and a brighter hue to the sad purple of their couches.
Smith had the poet’s love of rare words and elaborate imagery. His best work had a narcotic, incantatory effect on the reader. “Take one step across the threshold of his stories,” Ray Bradbury wrote, “and you plunge into color, sound, taste, smell and texture—into language.” Smith virtually ceased writing after 1937. He occupied himself with other things, including the carving of grotesque sculptures, now highly prized. He married at age 61, but continued to lead an isolated life in the backwoods of California, and died there in 1961. Why he gave up writing has never been explained.
Works
STORIES
- “Adventure in Futurity, An” (1932);
- “Beast of Averoigne, The” (1933);
- “Beyond the Singing Flame” (1932);
- “Black Abbot of Puthuum, The” (1937);
- “Chain of Aforgomon, The” (1935);
- “Charnel God, The” (1934);
- “City of the Singing Flame, The” (1932);
- “Colossus of Ylourgne, The” (1934);
- “Coming of the White Worm, The” (1941);
- “Dark Age, The” (1938);
- “Dark Eidolon, The” (1935);
- “Death of Ilalotha, The” (1937);
- “Death of Malygris, The” (1934);
- “Demon of the Flower, The” (1933);
- “Dimension of Chance, The” (1932);
- “Disinterment of Venus, The” (1934);
- “Door to Saturn, The” (1932);
- “Double Shadow, The” (1939);
- “Dweller in Martian Depths” (1933);
- “Empire of the Necromancers, The” (1932);
- “Enchantress of Sylaire, The” (1941);
- “End of the Story, The” (1930);
- “Eternal World, The” (1933);
- “Flight into Super-Time” (1932);
- “Flower-Women, The” (1935);
- “Garden of Adompha, The” (1938); ”
- Genius Loci” (1933);
- “Gorgon, The” (1932);
- “Great God Awto, The” (1940);
- “Holiness of Azedarac, The” (1933);
- “Hunters from Beyond, The” (1932);
- “Ice Demon, The” (1933);
- “Immeasurable Horror, The” (1931);
- “Invisible City, The” (1932);
- “Isle of the Torturers, The” (1933);
- “Last Hieroglyph, The” (1935);
- “Last Incantation, The” (1930);
- “Light from Beyond, The” (1933);
- “Maker of Gargoyles, The” (1932);
- “Mandrakes, The” (1933);
- “Marooned in Andromeda” (1930);
- “Master of the Asteroid” (1932);
- “Master of the Crabs, The” (1948);
- “Maze of Maal Dweb” (1938);
- “Metamorphosis of Earth, The” (1951);
- “Monster of the Prophecy, The” (1932);
- “Morthylla” (1953);
- “Mother of Toads” (1938);
- “Murder in the Fourth Dimension” (1930);
- “Nameless Offspring, The” (1932);
- “Necromancy in Naat” (1937);
- “Necromantic Tale, The” (1931);
- “Night in Malneant, A” (1939);
- “Ninth Skeleton, The” (1928);
- “Offering to the Moon, The” (1953);
- “Phantoms of the Fire, The” (1930);
- “Planet Entity, The” (1931);
- “Planet of the Dead, The” (1932);
- “Plutonian Drug, The” (1934);
- “Powder of Hyperborea, The” (1958);
- “Quest of Gazolba” (1947);
- “Rendezvous in Averoigne, A” (1931);
- “Resurrection of the Rattlesnake, The” (1931);
- “Return of the Sorcerer, The” (1931);
- “Sadastor” (1930);
- “Satyr, The” (1931);
- “Second Interment, The” (1933);
- “Seed from the Sepulchre, The” (1933);
- “Seven Geases, The” (1934);
- “Supernumerary Corpse, The” (1932);
- “Symposium of the Gorgon” (1958);
- “Tale of Satampra Zeiros, The” (1931);
- “Testament of Athammaus, The” (1932);
- “Tomb Spawn, The” (1934);
- “Treader of the Dust, The” (1935);
- “Ubbo-Sathla” (1933);
- “Uncharted Isle, The” (1930);
- “Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, The” (1932);
- “Venus of Azombeii, The” (1931);
- “Vintage from Atlantis, A” (1933);
- “Visitors from Mlok, The” (1933);
- “Voyage to Sfanomoe, A” (1931);
- “Vulthoom” (1935);
- “Weaver in the Vault, The” (1934);
- “Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, The” (1932);
- “Who Are the Living?” (1942);
- “Willow Landscape, The” (1939);
- “Witchcraft of Ulua, The” (1934);
- “Xeethra” (1934)
BOOKS
- Abominations of Yondo, The (1960);
- Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, The (1933);
- Genius Loci and Other Tales (1948);
- Hyperborea (1971);
- Lost Worlds (1944);
- Other Dimensions (1970);
- Out of Space and Time (1942);
- Planets and Dimensions (1973);
- Poseidonis (1973);
- Rendezvous in Averoigne (1988);
- Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964);
- Xiccarph (1972);
- Zothique (1970)
