We are coming to the end of our very short overview of Clark Ashton Smith’s opus, and once again I selected a Zothique story, The Isle of the Torturers, from 1933.

This was in in the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales (the same issue that included the Conan story, The Tower of the Elephant), and was later reprinted in an anthology edited by Christine Campbell Thomson and called Keep on the Light. The volume was the ninth in a series of horror anthologies called Not at Night, from the title of the first volume, and published in the UK by Selwin & Blount.
Thomson was a British writer, editor and occultist – she was friends with Dion Fortune – and her anthology series provided a British showcase for American writers out of Weird Tales, including H. P. Lovecraft.

I honestly knew nothing of these anthologies, but for all interested parties, here is the table of contents of the volume in question

The Library by Hester Gaskell Holland
Golden Lilies by Oscar Cook
The Chadbourne Episode by Henry S Whitehead
Worms of the Earth by Robert E Howard
The Black hare by Flavia Richardson
Tiger Dust by Bassett Morgan
The House of Shadows by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
Green Slime by J Dyott Matthews
The Seven Locked Room by J D Kerruish
Legion of Evil by Warden Ledge
The Head of Wu Fang by Don C Wiley
The Way He Died by Guy Preston
The Cult of the White Ape by Hugh B Cave
Althorpe Abbey by Rosalie Muspratt
Isle of Torturers by Clark Ashton Smith

So yes, CAS is in fine company, sharing the book with one of the best Robert E. Howard stories (the same could be said for the Weird Tales March ’33 issue), and with works by weird/supernatural greats Hugh B. Cave and Henry S. Whitehead.

And The Isle of the Torturers is an excellent story, it is often listed with Smith’s best works, and is one of the best examples of CAS doing “a story proper”. Too often Smith’s stories are plot-light, and focus on the mood and the ambience. But in this case, the structure is very solid, it has a nice set up and payoff structure, and the dialogues, if brief, are spot on.

Prince Fulbra is the only survivor of his people after a lethal plague, known as the Silver Death, has depopulated a fair chunk of Zothique, the last continent. Only a magic ring, created by his father’s court wizard, keeps the contagion at bay. Leaving his dead country behind, Fulbra travels the world, and his ship sinks on the coast of Uccastrog, the island of the torturers, whose people follow a degenerate and sadistic cult whose primary focus is causing pain to others. Captured, Fulbra is subjected to a selection of particularly gruesome tortures, and al that keeps him hanging to his life and sanity is the promise of freedom that a young woman brings to him. She’s sick of the Uccastrog way, and hopes to flee the island with Fulbra.
It will end very badly.

Smith’s language is as rich and colorful as usual, but the storytelling is more economical, the story is tighter, and while the author clearly has a lot of fun inventing and describing unspeakable ways to cause pain and suffering, the story remains compact, and hits hard.
Smith’s signature tongue-in-cheek macabre humor is here, but it does not come to the forefront – Isle of the Torturers is a tragic, dark story, and a great piece of fantasy fiction.
The finale is predictable, but Smith hits us with so many horrors, that he manages to slip the ending under our radars while we are distracted.
The payoff is highly satisfactory.

This is one of the stories that hooked me on Zothique.
Also, way back in the days, I read ther Zothique collection right after finishing the classic Elric stories by Michael Moorcock, and I always thought Uccastrog would fit nicely in the Young Kingdoms, maybe just off the shores of Pan Tang. But that’s just me.