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.

Fourth of the six Clark Ashton Smith stories we decided to do in our podcast, and the third choice from my friend Germano, The Dark Eidolon is another Zothique tale – because as mentioned before, Zothique is probably the best and most consistent of CAS’ story cycles. The story was originally published in the January 1935 issue of Weird Tales (an issue sporting one of WT’s most iconic covers ever).

The Dark Eidolon is particularly interesting (among other things) as it explicitly sets up a Clark Ashton Smith Continuum – the different settings of his stories are actually different ages of our world. The opening also introduces us to the basics of Zothique., explaining how in its final years Earth has regressed to a fantastical, magical state, peopled with demons and strange supernatural creatures and occurrences.

On Zothique, the last continent on Earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood. New stars without number had declared themselves in the heavens, and the shadows of the infinite had fallen closer. And out of the shadows, the older gods had returned to man: the gods forgotten since Hyperborea, since Mu and Poseidonis, bearing other names but the same attributes. And the elder demons had also returned, battening on the fumes of evil sacrifice, and fostering again the primordial sorceries.

Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon

The story is rather long, and the plot suitably convoluted – just as in The Colossus of Ylourgne, we are dealing with the revenge of a necromancer, with a mysterious palace, and a colossal artifact. But the tone and the structure are different – and while the Averoigne story is presented as a collection of episodes, almost as a collection of legends, rumors and witness accounts, the Zothique story has a more straightforward narration, somewhat following the modes of an Oriental fantasy.

Namirrah is apowerful sorcerer, a servant of the demon lord Thasaidon (that apparently is pronounced very closely to “The Satan”), but in his youth he was a beggar and he was trampled by the horse on which prince Zotulla rode. He is not letting Zotulla go unpunished, despite his demon-master’s different opinion. Because, once grown up, Zotulla is the sort of decadent, debauched, corrupt ruler that actually does a lot of work for a demon like Thasaidon.
But Namirrah will not relent.
He builds a magical palace by the side of king Zotulla’s palace, and has the surrounding city trampled and destroyed by invisible demon horses. And then he invites Zotulla over, and will not take no for an answer.
In the end, Namirrah’s gruesome revenge comes to fruition, but Thasaidon, a master that will not be denied, has the last word in the whole affair.

Once again, the story is built on a succession of vivid, unexpected images, and hits the reader with a sensory (and linguistic) overload. The humor displayed by CAS in many of his stories is here much more subdued and macabre, and the finale is decidedly no laughing matter.
In the decadent, doomed venue of Zothique Smith has found his ideal setting for stories in which there seem to be no good guys. The world is doomed, the sun is going to die and take what’s left of humanity with itself, and nobody seems to have any plan, dream or aspiration, but have as much pleasure as possible.
And, in some cases, set old scores before it’s too late.

Some find Smith’s style, that is heavy on the telling and light on the showing, hard to swallow.
According to the rules somebody decided should be applied to all narrative, Smith’s stories should not work. We should reject them. They are not “cinematic”, they are not “hyper-kinetic”, they are not “immersive”.
Only they are, and work perfectly at immersing the reader in an opium dream of strangeness, horror and hard-to-forget legends.

And in case you’d rather listen to the story than read it, here you are…

With my first story selection, we move away from Averoigne and land in Zothique, the last continent of a dying Earth basking under the red sun and waiting for an imminent end. What science there was in the past has been forgotten, and magic is back, courtesy of the Theosophical readings of Clark Ashton Smith, and his long standing passion for the Arabian Nights and (I think) William Beckford’s Vathek.

I love the Zothique stories, that were my first introduction to CAS’ work in the old – and today rather precious – Italian edition of the collection originally edited by Lin Carter. For my money, the Zothique tales represent the best in Smith’s production. And I really connected with the setting and the writer when I read The Empire of the Necromancers, originally published in Weird Tales in September 1932.

The story is short and sweet (OK, maybe sweet is not the right word), and tells us of Mmatmuor and Sodosma, two necromancers exiled from their own country, who create an empire for themselves by chancing upon a dead city in the desert, and bringing back the dead inhabitants to be their subjects and their slaves. But a handful of reanimated members of the royal family progressively gain a sort of awareness, and decide to free and avenge themselves.

The story is rich of color and vivid imagery, and is told in the tones of legend and ancient history.
But what’s truly memorable is the strong element of macabre humor that runs through the tale.
Mmatmuor and Sodosma are a couple of losers, that soon succumb to hedonistic and necrophiliac pleasures – they are evil and twisted, but also pathetic and useless for all of their power. Theirs is no great darkness – they are just freeloaders that happen to have a great (if limited) power.
One can almost hear the evil chuckling of the narrator as the necromancers’ debauchery is presented to us in all its ridiculous futility.

Thus did the outcast necromancers find for themselves an empire and a subject people in the desolate, barren land where the men of Tinarath had driven them forth to perish. Reignhg supreme over all the dead of Cincor, by virtue of their malign magic, they exercised a baleful despotism. Tribute was borne to them by fleshless porters from outlying realms; and plague-eaten corpses, and tall mummies scented with mortuary balsams, went to and fro upon their errands in Yethlyreom, or heaped before their greedy eyes, from inexhaustible vaults, the cobweb-blackened gold and dusty gems of antique time.
Dead laborers made their palace-gardens to bloom with long-perished flowers; liches and skeletons toiled for them in the mines, or reared superb, fantastic towers to the dying sun. Chamberlains and princes of old time were their cupbearers, and stringed instruments were plucked for their delight by the slim hands of empresses with golden hair that had come forth untarnished from the night of the tomb. Those that were fairest, whom the plague and the worm had not ravaged overmuch, they took for their lemans and made to serve their necrophilic lust.

C.A. Smith, The Empire of the Necromancers

The story is short and as sharp as a knife – it can be read in a single sitting, and with its gruesome vistas of dead cities and rich courts in which the dead carouse, it will stay long with the reader. This is a perfect introduction both to the world of Zothique and to CAS’ dark humor and style.

And for those that do not want to read it (the links above lead to the full text and to a digital copy of the September ’32 issue of Weird Tales) here is an audiobook version…