Among the Worst Ways to Die...

Happy new year! Here's ten more reviews of Clark Ashton Smith stories (which puts us roughly 20% of the way through his catalogue). Be sure to take note of the dates to see how prolific Smith was; by the end of this post, we still won't have gotten all the way through the second year of his career!

I am a little surprised by how many of these stories I just didn’t like. Possibly a bit embarrassing, after I’d declared Smith my favourite short story writer in the previous post? I guess the various “Best of” collections I’d read in the past really did do a good job of filtering out a lot of crap. On the other hand, there’s one story in this set that I had never read before but was an absolute banger. So the endeavour continues to be worthwhile.

“A Rendezvous in Averoigne” (April/May 1931)

Boring, phoned-in vampire story. Smith must have been under a deadline for this one.

1/5

“The Venus of Azombeii” (June 1931)

A white explorer ventures into the depths of Darkest Africa, meets a Black goddess-queen, and has sex with her a whole bunch. This one was a real slog to get through—bloated, racist, and oppressively horny without ever actually being erotic. For a while I thought “Ah, this is the kind of story that Conrad was deconstructing in Heart of Darkness,” but then I remembered this was written 30 years after Heart of Darkness, so there's absolutely no excuse.

1/5

“The Satyr” (July 1931)

A seemingly unfinished and pointless piece, featuring two lovers in a magic forest that makes them scared, then horny. This was Smith’s only publication in La Paree Stories, an obscure magazine of softcore pornography. If this is what people had to wank over in the 1930s, then maybe the internet has done some good after all.

1/5

“The City of Singing Flame” (July 1931)

This is one of several Smith stories that begins with the narrator saying “Hey, I'm a writer of weird fiction who makes up fake stories all the time. But this thing actually happened to me for real!” I guess you could call this an early stab at metafiction, though it’s not very interesting compared to e.g. “The End of the Story”.

Anyway, the weird fiction writer stumbles through an isekai portal into an alien landscape, explores a mysterious city, and narrowly escapes being hypnotised by a magical flame. There is an odd pastel-coloured, Disneyish feel to the setting here. Nothing seems super threatening and in the end nothing much happens.

2/5

“A Voyage to Sfanomoe” (August 1931)

Some wizards build a spaceship and travel to Venus. It ends poorly for them. I think this could be the first first ever story to feature a nuclear powered spaceship. “They had found a way to release the typhonic power of the atom, to destroy, transmute, and reconstruct the molecules of matter at will... The explosion of atoms in sealed cylinders was to furnish the propulsive and levitative power and would also serve to heat the sphere's interior against the absolute cold of space.” Not bad for a story written a year before nuclear fission was demonstrated experimentally!

Anyway, structurally this is a bit all over the shop, but the final scene has to rank near the top of the list of Worst Ways to Die In A Clark Ashton Smith Story (a highly competitive field).

4/5

“The Immeasurable Horror” (September 1931)

Now this is more like it. Pure, bloodthirsty space pulp. Smith must have gotten a fixation on Venus; this is his second story in a row that depicts the planet as a place of virulent jungles and monstrously fecund life. The protagonists, kitted out with “electronic machine-guns” and “infra-red grenades”, set about blasting the Venusian flora and fauna like a squad of 1930s Space Marines. To the surprise of absolutely no-one, this turns out to be a bad idea. Their subsequent battle with the titular Horror is as entertaining to read as it is gruesome for the characters to suffer through.

5/5

“The Return of the Sorcerer” (September 1931)

The premise of this story—a guy being haunted by various chopped up body parts—really should be too silly to work. It's a testament to Smith's powers that it kind of does. You can feel him sweating over the manuscript, heaving with all his might to draw out moments of genuine horror from a guy being attacked by an evil torso.

4/5

“Beyond the Singing Flame” (November 1931)

A sequel to “The City of the Singing Flame”. Smith wrote various stories that are tied together by a shared setting (Averoigne, Hyperborea, Zothique) but I believe this is the only time he wrote a direct sequel. It revises a bunch of stuff from the previous story in convoluted ways: the evil hypnotic flame is actually good, because if you jump into it you go to Heaven, but now an actually evil city is trying to destroy the good flame city, so everyone in Heaven has to escape to an even better Heaven... All this requires a lot more of characters standing around explaining things than you really want to read in a 5,000-word story in Weird Tales magazine. Also there’s still that Disney thing going on.

3/5

“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (November 1931)

Smith does a parody of his friend R. E. Howard's Conan stories, and of sword & sorcery stories in general. Come on, you can't read a line like this and not think Smith is taking the piss at least a little bit: “So it was that Tirouv Ompallios and I, at the time of which I write, had found ourselves in a condition of pecuniary depletion, which, though temporary, was nevertheless extreme, and was quite inconvenient and annoying, coming as it did on the heel of more prosperous days, of more profitable midnights.”

Broke, the two protagonists set out to look for treasure in an abandoned city. But these guys must be the most ineffectual pulp heroes of all time. They spend the first half of the story getting drunk. When they finally arrive at the city, they immediately stumble upon an unkillable monster in the first room they enter. The rest is just them running away from this monster, for literally hours, in a sequence that's about as scary as a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. They never even see any treasure!

3/5

P.S. I got the La Paree cover from Galactic Central, which is an absolute treasure trove of information on long-dead fiction magazines.