THE READING RHEUM: THE DYING EARTH (1950)

 I did a semi-deep dive on the origins of this collection of interlinked stories taking place in the titular world. Apparently author Jack Vance was unable to sell the EARTH stories individually to SF magazines of the 1940s. However, in 1950 Vance convinced small-time paperback publisher Hillman (now remembered today mostly for their 1940s comics, AIRBOY and THE HEAP) to publish this all-original book of stories. I don't have any info on contemporaneous sales, but I theorize that Vance's exotic fantasy-stories grabbed readers in the relatively small SF/fantasy readership and so made possible the writer's long career from the 1950s through the 1980s.     

I have a rough theory that because Vance grew up reading magazines like WEIRD TALES in his youth (as he admitted in interviews), he wanted to do something like the "Big Three" of WT-- H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith-- by crafting fantasy-stories linked to one another. (Influence from the SF mags of the period is a definite possibility too.) In one interview Vance mentioned a probable (though not intentional) stylistic influence on him from Clark Ashton Smith. I don't know that Vance ever admitted that his Dying Earth stories were a reaction to the far-future domain of Smith's ZOTHIQUE. 

I probably read EARTH in the seventies or eighties, but the only story I remember really liking was "Mazirian the Magician." Oddly, Vance wanted to use that story-title as the book's title, which is odd given that Mazirian only appears in one story, while other characters appear in more than one tale-- though no single character appears in all six chapters. I like Thomas Monteleone's term "mosaic" for novels cobbled together from stories not related by a supervening plot. All that said, I didn't get much of a myth-vibe from Vance's stories. Mostly, I remembered that Vance isn't really very good with characterization. I've seen arguments that he's doing an "anti-heroic" type of fantasy opposed to the reigning American influence of Howard. But in these stories at least, Vance is not really any more firmly committed to irony than he is to adventure, so I suppose I would still consider these adventure-stories.      

TURJAN OF MIR-- This story introduces readers to the Dying Earth, a quasi-medieval domain which like Zothique exists millions of years removed from modern Earth, and one where magical entities and disciplines have returned to prominence, though there are still remnants of super-science. The titular Turjan is both sorcerer and scientist, first seen seeking to create artificial, intelligent life. He fails and decides to seek the help of Pandelume, a sorcerer in another dimension. Turjan accesses that dimension and is attacked by a swordswoman. This is T'sain, Pandelume's own failed experiment at creating life, for T'sais is mentally afflicted and views everything beautiful as hateful. T'sais runs off and Turjan solicits Pandelume's help. Pandelume requires Turjan to complete a dangerous errand for him, but once Turjan completes said task, the two wizards somehow have much better luck in creating another adult female, T'sain, the twin of T'sais. At story's end, T'sais meets her twin but cannot kill her despite the desire to do so. "Turjan" doesn't have much of a plot and largely exists to set up two other tales, which might be a big reason why it didn't sell as an independent magazine-story.

MAZIRIAN THE MAGICIAN-- The events here clearly take place after "Turjan," because the young sorcerer has been captured by evil sorcerer Mazirian and T'sain must come to Turjan's rescue. I think I liked the story on first reading because a large part of it contains what I'll term "the maiden's magical flight" trope, wherein a woman flees a male oppressor. In various myths and folktales, the woman either keeps changing shape, only to be matched by the pursuing male, or she throws magical objects into the hunter's path and he's delayed overcoming the obstacles. It's my recollection that I was aware of the myth-parallel when I first read "Mazirian."

T'SAIS-- This is the first emotionally satisfying of the collection, though it's not that deep. T'sais prevails upon Pandelume to send her to Turjan's Earth-like dimension, to see if she can find some way to overcome her alienation. She's able to conceive something like empathy when she meets Etarr, for he's been cursed with a hideous face by his ex-lover, the sorceress Javanne. Better delineation of the characters might have upgraded the story to something more than formula. I'll note that T'sais doesn't have outstanding sword-skills but owns a sword that kills her enemies independently of her will.

LIANE THE WAYFARER-- During the peregrinations of T'sais, she overcomes the brigand Liane but doesn't kill him despite his attempt to rape her. Liane then becomes the viewpoint character of a completely separate narrative. He hears about a beautiful witch named LIth (for "Lilith," no doubt), but when he tries to get cozy with her, she repels him with her magical arts. She swears to become his lover if he fetches for her a special item from the castle of a great wizard, but it's all a setup to make Liane the victim of both magicians. Liane is probably a dry run for Vance's amoral serial character Cugel the Clever, who became the main protagonist when the author executed his second "Dying Earth" story in 1965. 

ULAN DHOR (G)-- This story, whose title is the name of its protagonist, is the only one in the collection that I'd rate as having mythopoeic concrescence. Prince Khandive, who's mentioned in an earlier tale, assigns his nephew Ulan Dhor to travel to Ampridatvir. There, Ulan, who possesses skills in both swords and sorcery, will seek to recover the lost magicks of that city's former ruler, Rogol Domedonfors. Once he reaches the city, Ulan learns that two groups of residents who have been enspelled so that neither can see the other, apparently to prevent their fighting. Unlike a number of Vance protagonists, Ulan has a conscience, and he intervenes to prevent the needless execution of a young local woman named Elai. Togther Ulan and Elai plumb the mystery of the long vanished ruler Rogol, who rears a very ugly head to exterminate Ampridatvir. 

GUYAL OF SFERE-- This story had the most potential of all six, but Vance doesn't realize that potential. Young nobleman Guyal is an original idea in that he annoys his sire and others in the court by asking all sorts of ponderous, unanswerable questions. When Guyal learns of a legendary "curator" who possesses all knowledge, the young man seeks the curator out in order to become his disciple and to answer all questions. However, Guyal gets waylaid by a tribe and is forced to deliver Shierl, a sacrificial maiden, to the curator's door. I guess Shierl gives Guyal someone to talk to on the way, but she proves a distraction from the inventive premise. Similarly, the revelation of the Curator's nature and of his haunted domicile were merely boring standard fantasy-devices.       

None of these short stories are as evocative as the best tales in Smith's ZOTHIQUE. It's true that Vance isn't as obsessed with rotting corpses as Smith was, and that's a plus to those not looking for zombie action. But Smith had a much greater talent for mixing the pageantry of exotic worlds with the perversity of their inhabitants. Vance's style here is colorful, but not as poetic as I've seen in later stories by the author.  

THE READING RHEUM: POSEIDONIS (1973)

 As it happens, the last Ballantine collection of Clark Ashton Smith works I'm reviewing for my blog was also the last one the company published. Of the four, ZOTHIQUE was the only sub-universe for which Smith wrote enough stories to fill a paperback book. Thus, POSEIDONIS, like XICARRPH and HYPERBOREA, includes only a comparative handful of stories/poems set in the titular world. The rest of the three books were perforce filled with a lot of one-off horror and SF stories, that, while interesting, aren't Smith's strength in comparison to the magical fantasy stories.                                                                   

Since I didn't get much more than moderate entertainment from the majority of this collection, I'll get those out of the way first, though I'll pass on commenting on either the verse or prose poems. THE DOUBLE SHADOW-- A narrator from Poseidonis describes the dire fate of his perceptor Avyctes (who's loosely tied to the character Malygris, whose stories are discussed below). A VOYAGE TO SFANOMOE-- Two Atlantean inventors flee their doomed home to take refuge on the planet Venus. And Venus welcomes them with an irresistible embrace. A VINTAGE FROM ATLANTIS-- A group of buccaneers happen across an ancient bottle of Atlantean wine, and quaffing it opens their way into the limbo of its vanished glories. "And only a teetotaler escaped to tell thee." AN OFFERING TO THE MOON-- Two archaeologists investigate the moon-worship of the vanished people of Mu, little realizing that they will be offering up their own lives in their pursuit of knowledge. THE UNCHARTED ISLAND-- A castaway finds himself on an isle not quite deserted, as he encounters an ancient people who seem to be re-enacting, like habit-afflicted ghosts, the actions that led to their collective doom. THE EPIPHANY OF DEATH-- A quasi-Egyptian scholar witnesses the fate of his colleague Tomeron in his family's tomb. Worms are involved. SYMPOSIUM OF THE GORGON-- A modern New Yorker somehow ends up in the palace of Medusa just as she's beheaded. I had hopes for this one since Smith followed the part of the Medusa-myth in which Pegasus is born from the gorgon's blood. Then Pegasus takes the narrator to the place he most desires to visit, and the tale turns into a shaggy-dog story about frustrated cannibals. THE INVISIBLE CITY-- What a surprise! Two explorers in Africa comes across an invisible domain, whose denizens don't want the explorers to leave. But in a departure from the norm, both of the guys escape with their lives and the aliens are either exiled or destroyed. THE ROOT OF AMPOI-- In the best of the "fair-to-poor" stories, a conniver seeks treasure in the Papuan Mountains and finds a tribe where the women have rebelled against their gender's natural shortcomings. All the females eat a special root that makes them grow eight feet tall, thus making matriarchal rule a slam-dunk. To the adventurer's surprise, the queen takes a shine to him (the reader never knows why) and marries him. This gives the man the chance to plunder the secrets of the "tall sex," but he does not profit thereby.                                                                                                         

  Only three stories in POSEIDONIS make my cut for high-mythicity stories, and two of them take place in the titular Atlantean city, examining the doomed career of the sorcerer Malygris. In my review of the XICCARPH collection, I wondered if the sorcerer Maal Dweb, who appeared in two stories, was Smith's only continuing character. But I forgot that he devoted the same number of stories to Malygris, and I found both tales more psychologically astute and ornately written than those about the Xiccarph magician. In THE LAST INCANTATION, Malygris, who's become the world's supreme sorcerer, becomes overtaken with ennui despite his vast knowledge of cabalistic matters. He remembers his former love Nylissa, whom he lost to disease, and whose loss precipitated his pursuit of rare magicks. He gets the idea of bringing her back from the dead, but with true ambivalence, once he's done so his memory has become too distorted to know whether he conjured up the real thing or just a pleasing illusion. In THE DEATH OF MALYGRIS, several of the magician's rivals haven't seen him about for years, and become obsessed with learning whether or not Malygris has been claimed by death at last. Since it's a Smith story, the experienced reader can be pretty sure that even though the wizard is dead, he's still not too dead to take his enemies with him. Not only was the sorcerer and his magicks a correlation for the author and his ability to conjure word pictures, he also more or less marked the end of Smith's only productive writing-period, for after MALYGRIS was written in 1933, editor Lin Carter asserts that the writer only produced a handful of stories in the last 26 years of his life on Earth.                                                                                                           

But of all the stories in POSEIDONIS, the best is one I don't even remember reading the first time, however many years that may have been. Like some of those covered above, THE VENUS OF AZOMBEII is a story of a white explorer finding a lost civilization in Africa-- and though Smith probably coined the place name "Azombeii" in response (conscious or not) to Haitian voodoo's origins in Darkest Africa, nothing remotely like a zombie appears in the tale. But unlike most lost cities full of white or Asian people, Azombeii is a lost city full of Black people. However, these Blacks become appealing to explorer Julius Marsden because their ancestors intermarried with some ancient Roman legion, who bequeathed to all of their descendants "classic" Roman features and a fertility goddess, Wanaos (Venus under a new name).                                   

  However, the true "Venus" of the story is the high priestess Mybaloe, who falls in love with Marsden at first sight. The two seem destined to be united in eternal bliss-- and actually, Smith does strongly suggest that the white American and the dark African with Roman features at least have some ecstatic encounter during a pagan orgy. But there's almost always a worm in every CAS apple, and this time it's an envious high priest, Mergawe, who poisons Marsden with a mystic potion that causes his flesh and bones to contract until he perishes, which is how the story ends, after Marsden has returned to the US and a boon friend reads the backstory of his demise in a memoir. But arguably the real star of the story is Mybaloe. I've not encountered that many distinctive female characters in Smith's stories-- usually just one-dimensional vampires and undead corpses. But Smith really tries to make Mybaloe an "ideal woman," possessed of humor and courage despite her isolated origins. In fact, this story saw print in 1931, long before the rise of jungle-girls in pulps and comic books-- and to demonstrate the resourcefulness of this "Venus," Smith even gives her a "Tarzan moment," where she saves Marsden from crocodiles by stabbing two of the reptiles to death. Obviously, whether from personal taste or in deference to his mostly Caucasian readers, Smith gives Mybaloe European features so that she's not exotic in a displeasing way. But in 1931, it was pretty daring to imagine a pulp story in which a white man and a colored woman were joined in an entirely serious romance, in contrast to the many times white explorers canoodled with high priestesses on the right side of the color line. Despite my earlier statement that Smith's magical fantasy stories played best to the author's greatest strengths, I now regard this 1930s exotic tragedy to rate as one of his top ten short stories.   

THE READING RHEUM: HYPERBOREA (1971)

In the same decades that Clark Ashton Smith wrote several stories about a magical-fantasy realm of the far future in ZOTHIQUE, he also wrote other tales about a realm ostensibly in some ahistorical version of Earth's past, HYPERBOREA. Both collections were set in an approximate historical order by editor Lin Carter and published as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

Though I didn't see much point to establishing a continuity in the ZOTHIQUE tales, Smith did work one historical event into a few of the HYPERBOREA stories. To wit, in the best of the stories, a spectral entity called The White Sibyl prophecies that a particular kingdom will be overwhelmed by an ice-floe-- and some stories post-date the fulfillment of that prophecy. That said, on the whole the Hyperborea stories don't manage to tap into the same mythopoeic depths as the Zothique stories. However, in the Hyperborean tales Smith concocted a deity named Tsathoggua, and H.P. Lovecraft paid Smith a literary compliment by incorporating the creature into the Lovecraft bestiary of unearthly beings. As before, I'll rate each story in terms of mythicity, with G for good, F for fair, and P for poor.

THE SEVEN GEASES (G) -- This is an ironic fable akin to "The Voyage of King Euvoran" in the ZOTHIQUE collection, in that both deal with ignorant noblemen who get caught up in magical matters beyond their ken. While hunting in the mountains, the lordling Ralibar Vooz trespasses on a magician's ritual. The magician, instead of just killing Ralibar, sends him to another mage to see if the latter can make any use of the nobleman. But the second mage can't use Ralibar either, so he sends him on the toad-god Tsathoggua-- and this is repeated over and over, driving home the point that Ralibar is utterly useless to any of these cosmic entities. But in the end, even being useless doesn't save the lord from his doom.

THE WEIRD OF AVOOSL WUTHOQUAN (P) -- The fellow with the unpronouceable name is a treasure-hoarder whose fanatical greed leads him into the belly of a beast.

THE WHITE SYBIL (G) -- The poet Tortha beholds a mysterious woman in his native city, and becomes aware that she's the legendary White Sibyl, who will prophecy the city's doom by ice. Besotted with the phantom, he follows her to her chilly mountain home. For once the foolish hero manages to survive his brush with the supernatural, though at the cost of some of his faculties.

THE TESTAMENT OF ATHAMMAUS (F) -- The character in the title is the head executioner of his city, but he encounters a vexing mystery when one murderous criminal keeps coming back to life after his executions.

THE COMING OF THE WHITE WORM (F) -- Hyperborea's Ice Age results not from inert ice-floes, but from an iceberg under the command of the worm-monster Rlim Shaikorth. A wizard survives the destruction of his city only by agreeing to serve the monster, but he has to reconsider his plans when the "service" involves being the creature's food supply.

UBBO-SATHLA (P) -- This is the only story in the collection which is not a magical fantasy tale, because its main character is a denizen of the 20th century. Paul Tregardis encounters a relic from Hyperborean times, and the relic causes his personality to fuse with that of the relic's original wizard-owner. Neither entity wins the struggle as both are absorbed into the "formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla."

THE DOOR TO SATURN (F)-- The odd inclusion of a real-world place-reference does not break with the dominant magical fantasy continuum. Two Hyperborean priests quarrel over whose god is better, but Eibon-- no doubt the author of Smith's arcane sorcery-tome, the Book of Eibon-- decides to step through a door that takes him into another world. Eibon's enemy Morghi goes through the door as well, but as a result both men are cut off from returning to Hyperborea and must work together to survive in a wholly alien world. Interestingly, Smith gives Eibon's deity the name of "Zothaqquah," suggesting that this may be a later corruption of "Tsathoggua." And though Smith may or may not have realized it, the distorted god-name also sounds a lot like-- "Zothique," which name Smith borrowed from the old Greek term "Sothic."

THE ICE-DEMON (P)-- It's another treasure-hunt story where the seekers pay the ultimate price for their greed, but it's depressingly overlong once one realizes where it's going.

THE TALE OF SATAMPTRA ZEROS (F)-- The titular character, a master thief, commits to his diary the story of what happened when he and his only rival in thievery sought to plunder the temple of Tsathoggua.

THE THEFT OF THIRTY-NINE GIRDLES (F)-- In the second and last story from master burglar Satamptra Zeros-- one of a very small number of repeating Smith characters-- the aging thief relates another one of his adventures, this time with a female accomplice-- one of the few females-with-agency in the Smith cosmos. Not bad, but it's a decided disappointment that none of the girdles are being stolen off the bodies of their feminine owners.

Carter also adds four very short non-Hyperborea tales, which are close to being "prose poems" more than short stories. Though THE ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO has the best title, it doesn't manage to conjure forth any distinct myths, nor do two of the others. But THE PASSING OF APHRODITE-- the only tale in this volume that places a historically known deity within some sketchy fantasy-world called "Illarion"-- succeeds in putting across a good, if brief, myth-vibe, as a poet mourns for the passing of the Goddess of Love and Life. 

THE READING RHEUM: "THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS" (1930/1931)

 

Now this is more like it; cosmic horror the way HPL fans like it!

WHISPERER is one of the first six HPL stories I encountered in a particular collection back in The Day, and as I noted in my previous essay it eschews the dodgy dialect of HPL's immediately previous Mythos-tale DUNWICH HORROR. I'll note briefly that this time the reader also doesn't know the significance of the novella's title until the very end of the story. 

WHISPERER also resembles THE COLOUR OUF OF SPACE because it shows HPL's skill at describing the natural backdrops of the story, which in this case are the desolate woodlands of Vermont. The flooding of a local river causes the local townsfolk to circulate rumors about the corpses of mysterious beings in the waters. Albert Wilmarth, a literature teacher at Miskatonic University in Arkham, launches an amateur investigation of the rumors, writing newspaper articles on the local mythology of the aboriginal Indians. These essays cause a local farmer, Henry Akeley, to contact Wilmarth about his own experiences.

Though most of the exchanges between Wilmarth and Akeley are in the form of letters, this epistolary method of storytelling never sacrifices any tension. Akeley tells Wilmarth that for months his secluded farm has been besieged by mysterious beings which, when glimpsed at all, look like winged, claw-handed humanoids. The two humans eventually learn that these beings, "the Outer Ones," are visitors from the planet Yuggoth (Pluto), and they've set up a clandestine mining-operation in the vicinity of Akeley's farm. Only Akeley's supply of guns and guard-dogs has preserved him from being killed or abducted by these alien intruders. Eventually Wilmarth hears enough to convince him of the farmer's veracity, but by the time he physically arrives at the farm, he encounters what he thinks is Akeley, but is in truth "the whisperer in darkness."

Before I began this review-project, I mentioned here that I wondered if any of HPL's Mythos stories registered as crossovers. After all, the cosmic horror of WHISPERER is enhanced by two major sequences in which the human protagonists are exposed to an overwhelming variety of references to dozens of alien beings, domains, and deities, some original with HPL, some invented by authors with whom the writer was friendly, like Robert E Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith. (Smith had apparently shown HPL his story "The Story of Satamptra Zeros," because that tale, which was the debut of Smith's toadlike god Tsatthoggua, didn't see print until after WHISPERER did.) 

All these arcane references built up HPL's vision of a bizarre universe beyond the ken of human reason-- but references, in my system, count only as "null-crossovers." However, though the main monsters of WHISPERER are the Outer Ones-- who had previously appeared in an HPL poem, "Fungi from Yuggoth"-- they do apparently enlist one of the "Great Old Ones" to deceive Wilmarth. HPL subtly mentions that the "mighty messenger" Nyarlathotep-- who was the narrative focus of a 1920 tale-- "shall put on the semblance of men." And this imposture proves necessary because, unlike the Outer Ones with their wings and claws, Nyarlathotep had already been established as being able to pass for human. So, in addition to THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. WHISPERER is a bonafide crossover story.

THE READING RHEUM: ZOTHIQUE (1970)

 In contrast to my rather so-so experience in reading the Clark Ashton Smith collection XICCARPH, ZOTHIQUE, another of the Lin Carter paperback editions from Ballantine Books, re-acquainted me with all the reasons I liked Smith's wry, mordant stories. Zothique-- possibly named for the Greek idea of the "Sothic Year," sometimes associated with cycles of world annihilation-- is Earth in its final days. But Zothique, unlike most if not all previous future-Earths in fiction, became dominated by ancient magicks, as described in the opening lines of "The Dark Eidolon:"

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 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...

It's a world in which Smith establishes a loose continuity between a few dozen exotic domains and their equally exotic deities, though in a sense none of the stories are literally tied together, even to the extent of the Cthulhu mythos. Oddly, editor Carter arranged the seventeen Zothique stories into what he considered their historical order. I can't claim that I don't pursue intellectual chimera just as elusive, but since there really isn't a "history" as such in Zothique-- which resembles the world of the Arabian Nights seen through the charnel lens of Edgar Allan Poe-- I didn't see the point. Personally, I might have preferred to see the stories-- all written in the early thirties-- to have been ordered according to their time of writing, though I concede that this could have been difficult, given that the author was something of a hermit.

Not all of the seventeen stories in the Ballantine collection meet my criteria for high-mythicity fiction, but as I've done in many other reviews, I'll go down the list, judging each with the symbols "G" (good), "F" (fair), and "P" (poor). 

XEETHRA (G)-- The titular character is a simple goatherd who wanders into a mountain cavern and finds himself in a long-vanished realm. Hungry, he helps himself to some nearby fruit, after which he beholds two huge dark guardians, though they do nothing to impede him. He then begins to have dreams of a separate existence, wherein he was Amero, king of the ancient realm. Xeethra's mind becomes so divided between his two incarnations that he returns to the cavern-world. There he meets the lord of the domain, the demon lord Thasaidon, who offers to restore Xeethra to his earlier glory, but only if the goatherd can keep true to that incarnation. It turns out to be a "grass always greener" situation, but it's interesting that Xeethra's unhappy fate arises from tasting a sort of "forbidden fruit."

NECROMANY IN NAAT (F)-- Prince Yadar goes hither and yon seeking his lost love Dalili. He finds her on the isle of Naat, which is dominated by two necromancers with a small army of zombies. Sadly, Dalili died before coming to Naat, and the sorcerers have made her one of their undead followers. Things don't turn out all that well for Yadar either, but better than they do for the necromancers.

THE EMPIRE OF THE NECROMANCERS (P)-- This tale follows yet two other necromancers who create their own private kingdom of dead people. This one loses points given the presence of a zombie guy who turns on his masters, just because the story needs him to do so.

THE MASTER OF THE CRABS (P)-- A sorcerer and his apprentice go seeking treasure on an island inhabited only by crabs. But another sorcerer seeks the same wealth, and he knows how to turn the local fauna against the other seekers. Not much of anyone to root for.

THE DEATH OF ILALOTHA (F)-- King Thulos, though married to his reigning queen, becomes obsessed with the idea that his dead lover Ilalotha may cheat the Reaper thanks to her skills in witchcraft. He braves the tomb to find out. Things do not go well.

THE WEAVER IN THE VAULT (P)-- This tale suffers from a big buildup and an arbitrary resolution. A king sends three warriors to a dead city to bring back an ancient mummy for purposes of divination. Of course, things end badly for all three men, but Smith earns point in that the titular "weaver" isn't some stock vampire or zombie. However, the alien-seeming creature doesn't lend itself to context of any kind, and so seems rather contrived.

THE WITCHCRAFT OF ULUA (G)-- Smith was at his best when he wasn't so focused on delivering a "gotcha" to the horror fans. Young Amalzain plans to accept a position in a corrupt kingdom full of degenerates, particularly the witch queen Ulua. He visits his anchorite uncle Sabmon, who wants him of the perils and gives him a protective amulet. Sure enough, Ulua attempts to seduce the innocent youth, and when he rejects her, he's haunted day and night by specters of rotting corpses. Amalzain finally flees and escapes back to the protection of his uncle, who shows him the fate he missed, as the entire kingdom is dragged down to the hell of Thasaidon. 

THE CHARNEL GOD (G)-- Poe would have loved this one. While Phariom and his bride Eliath pass through a city dominated by worshippers of the death god Mordiggian, Eliath succumbs to a cataleptic fit that makes her look dead. The priests of Mordiggian ignore the young man's protests and claim the woman to be buried in their sacred tombs. Phariom must brave the sepulchers of the god to prevent his bride from being buried alive. But as it happens, there are worse blasphemies transpiring that night, as a necromancer plans to steal the corpse of a woman he slew, the better to raise her from the dead for his pleasure. Will the worshippers, or even the death god himself, consume both the licit and illicit transgressors?

THE DARK EIDOLON (G)-- The evil king Zotulla commits many nasty acts, but he doesn't even remember driving his chariot over the body of a beggar-boy, Narthos. But Narthos becomes obsessed with gaining revenge for his injuries, and for years he studies sorcery. Years later, under the name Namirrha, the magician shows up in the city where Zotulla still reigns. Slowly Namirrha weaves spells to confuse and disconcert the ruler, like a cat toying with a mouse. But there's a new wrinkle when Namirrha's patron god Thasaidon warns the magician to leave Zotulla alone, since the king provides the demon with lots of evil deeds. Not surprisingly, Namirrha still visits an appropriate equine doom upon the king, but gods are not defied, and the dish of revenge never tastes good cooked by demon-fire.

MORTHYLLA (G)-- In the midst of courtly degeneracy, discontented youth Valzain can't get any satisfaction. But someone at court tells him that there's a lamia who hangs out at the local necropolis, and Valzain is willing to risk death to allay boredom. The lamia Morthylla welcome the young blade, and they make love. He begins to wonder, though, why she spares him her fangs. This leads to a sad story of disillusionment and death, but at least Valzain receives a mild surcease of sorrow in the afterlife.

THE BLACK ABBOT OF PUTHUUM (F)-- Two young warriors are charged with making a trek to a foreign land in order to guide a beautiful woman to her wedding with their king. Hostile creatures force the little band to seek shelter in a temple run by a Black man named Ujuk, even though the warriors think he's got a yen either to hump the young (implicitly White) girl, or to devour her. Smith playing to the worst elements of the pulp magazine audience? Not precisely, because in the catacombs beneath the temple, the two stalwarts meet the spirit of the real Abbot of Puthuum. Formerly a living Black man, the late Abbot belonged to an ascetic cult, but he strayed from his path, had sex with a succubus, and so spawned the only half-human Ujuk. After the two heroes slay the false abbot, they jointly decide that they don't want to waste the young bride on some decrepit king and decide only one of them should take her as the prize. The young woman's response provides one of the few humorous denouements in a Smith story.

THE TOMB-SPAWN (P)-- Two jewel merchants give ear to the story of an ancient kingdom whose king commanded a fell spirit, Nioth Korghai, who may still guard the king's tomb. The two begin their journey back home, but on the way, they're harried by a beast-like people. Unlike the various treasure-hunters in other stories, the innocents end up in a certain tomb, guarded by the very spirit they just learned of. This is easily the weakest story, though Smith does name-check the sorcerer Namirrha from DARK EIDOLON just for an inside reference.

THE LAST HIEROGLYPH (F)-- Nushain the astrologer seeks to avoid the fate decreed for him by the stars. Only the inventive nature of the doom redeems this so-so story.

THE ISLAND OF THE TORTURERS (G)-- I realize this story is basically just one of many "the biter bit" stories, but it's easily the most memorable one in the collection. A virulent plague, the Silver Death, decimates all the people ruled by King Fulbra. He survives the loss of all his people thanks to a magic ring which suspends the effects of the plague with which he too is infected, even keeping him from spreading it to others. He sets sail for a kingdom where he hopes to spend his days in peace, secluded so as to minimize contact with others. But a storm casts the unfortunate king upon the shores of Uccastrog, the island home of a people devoted to coming up with skillful tortures. Fulbra endures the torments of the vile natives without resorting to his one ace in the hole because a woman tells him she plans to help him escape. Then she betrays him, and there's no reason for Fulbra to withhold his hand-- or rather, his ring-- and the doom of the torturers is eminently satisfying.

THE GARDEN OF ADOMPHA (F)-- This too is a "biter bit" tale, but not nearly as interesting as TORTURERS. King Adopha maintains a fantastic garden, and how it grows is with the bodies of his pawns and enemies. The king owes his success to his court wizard Dwerulas, but the rash royal decides the magician's power might threaten him, and so murders Dwerulas. So this time, instead a worm turning the garden, the garden turns the worm.

THE VOYAGE OF KING EUVORAN (G)-- One of the best tales appears as the final offering in the collection. Like most of the idiot monarchs in Zothique, Euvoran fills his days tormenting the subjects who fall under his scrutiny. His rulership is symbolized by his fabulously bejeweled crown, and much of his pride in his kingship is tied up is this hereditary possession. Then a stranger, either a magician or a god, decides to mess with Euvoran's peace of mind. In full sight of the court, the stranger brings to life a stuffed bird, and all watch as the bird flies off with the monarch's crown. Since Euvoran doesn't have the sense to know when he's out of his depth, he launches an expedition to find the bird's nest and recover the crown. Numerous events, both tragic and comic, eliminate all of Euvoran's retainers. Finally, in a great tour de force, the hapless monarch is taken prisoner by a race of intelligent birds, who are naturally offended when he mentions having stuffed one of their kindred. Despite Euvoran's massive stupidity and his indifference to the suffering of others, he's actually spared any of the ghastly dooms Smith metes out to the guilty and innocent alike, though, to say the least, he ends up in comically reduced circumstances.

UP WITH FANTASY, DOWN WITH HORROR

 In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts."  But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts."-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3 (2012).

So in my previous essay I extended my terms of "grotesque and arabesque" to two "super-genres," horror and fantasy. I call them "super-genres" because both subsume so many subgenres that it's difficult to claim that any single genre embraces works as far apart as Poe's HOUSE OF USHER and the Chichester-Johnson JIHAD (for horror) or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS and Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories (for fantasy). I think it's plain enough as to which super-genre is aligned with the grotesque and which is aligned with the arabesque.

It's more challenging, though, to place these super-genres-- which extend their influence far beyond their manifestations in popular fiction-- in the Schopenhaurean categories of authorial will. I've attempted to rename, for my literary project, Schopenhauer's names for his two types of representation, "intuitive" and "abstract," but I'm not going to reference any of my revisions in this essay. I want to get at a very narrow aspect of how audience expectations form patterns within authorial will.

I referenced that aspect-- or two manifestations of that aspect-- in the 2012 HUXLEY, JUNG AND STRANGENESS, where I summarized Thomas Huxley's distinctions between what he termed "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence." 

UPWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind that Huxley doesn't adequate define, though he associates it with "theophanies" and the veneration of a " liberating and transfiguring Spirit."


 DOWNWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind in which the transcendence "is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal."  Huxley's three main venues toward this form of transcendence are "drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication," though he mentions some others as well.

It also should not be difficult to guess which super-genre I'm likely to align with downward transcendence, and which with the upward species. Although the "intuitive representations" that human beings share with lower animals are not inherently "lower" by themselves, they become "lower" in contrast with "abstract representations," which generally suggest principles that supervene the world of base animal existence. Such principles may be metaphysical, as in religion, or empirical, as in science, but both systems depend on abstractions in order to promote the philosophies of their adherents. I may never have reason to further use terminological terms for the two forms of literary transcendence, but for convenience I'll name them after two Greek religious terms: "chthonic" for "earthbound," and "ouranian" for "heaven-bound." 

So what are the "audience expectations" I referenced above? With respect to the super-genres, horror is expected to give audiences "the worst case scenario," and fantasy is expected to give audiences "the best case scenario." There are naturally exceptions, and I named two of them above. 

HOUSE OF USHER is in every way a grim, grotesque look at familial relations, and thus represents the "mainstream" of horror fiction. In contrast, the narrative of JIHAD somewhat transcends many of the gruesome activities of both Cenobites and Nightbreed, and offers to the audience-- if not to the characters-- a metaphysical rapprochement between their respective worlds.

 LORD OF THE RINGS offers a panoramic vision of human courage against overwhelming odds, and of redemption even in the face of near-total degradation (i.e., Gollum, Frodo's "shadow-self.") Thus Tolkien's book represents the mainstream of the fantasy super-genre. In contrast, though Smith's "Zothique" stories take place in an apocalyptic fantasy-verse full of colorful arabesques, many of them have downbeat or diffident endings worthy of Smith's idol Poe. Yet none of these exceptions disprove the rule, the rule being that audiences look to fantasy for the feeling of positive life-affirmation, while they look to horror to feel as though they have met the negativity of all life-denying forces, and still survived. 

I may develop these points further, but that's a decent stopping-place for now.

THE READING RHEUM: XICCARPH (1972)

I started seriously reading prose science fiction in the late 1960s, and aside from horror tales, that was close to being the only form of metaphenomenal fiction around for most of the decade. There were a few exceptions to this tendency-- J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis-- but I didn't happen to read them during that decade.

As I remember, though, I got my first substantial taste for reading prose fantasy in the early 1970s, and Tolkien's best-selling LORD OF THE RINGS was the cause, because it stimulated Ballantine Books to issue a substantial series of fantasy reprints from 1969 to 1974. To be sure, Lancer Paperbacks had already started the ball rolling by issuing new editions of the works of Robert E. Howard, but somehow I didn't encounter these in the early 1970s either. 

It didn't take me long to find out that devotees of early fantasy spoke in reverent tomes of the 1930s pulp magazine WEIRD TALES, and that of all horror-and-fantasy authors who appeared in its pages, Robert E, Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were deemed the top of the heap. Lovecraft's horror-and-fantasy works had seen paperback reprint in the 1960s, but Smith-- who for most of his life was more of a verse poet than a prose-story writer-- had wait for the Ballantine imprint. Editor Lin Carter did a sterling job of selecting some of the choice stories, and though Smith never became as popular as the other two with later generations, these volumes still give one the easiest access to this writer's ouevre.

As I do these days with everything I read or re-read, I wanted to evaluate Smith's work through the lens of myth-criticism. The Carter selections are organized into four reprints, each of which is given the title of one of Smith's fantasy-lands. Not all stories in every volume take place in the titular locale, for Smith tended to toss off new landscapes at the drop of a hat rather than devoting himself to any particular one, as Howard did with Hyboria. My chosen volume, XICCARPH, boasts six subdivisions, all devoted to different locales.

Many of the tales in XICCARPH were just decent reads, but not worth discussing in detail (SPOILER warnings for those I do so discuss). Here are the exceptions:

The entries for "Xiccarph" focus upon what may be Smith's only continuing character, for just two stories. In "The Maze of Maal Dweb," a young man, native to the fantasy-planet Xiccarph, finds out that his beloved has been abducted by the evil wizard Maal Dweb, who rules the world with his magical skills. The youth successfully penetrates the wizard's sanctum, full of bizarre garden-growths and weird automatons, but Maal Dweb has the hero outpaced from the first, so it's an unhappy ending for him. The sorcerer's triumph is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he only steals young women for aesthetic purposes, turning them into beautiful stone statues for his contemplation. Smith must have liked the character, for he then wrote "The Flower-Women," in which Maal Dweb journeys to another world and decides to play hero, liberating a race of delicate flower-women from a cabal of wizards descended from lizards-- lizard-wizards, if one chooses. Smith's depiction of his worlds are highly colorful but not particularly mythic.

Three stories are set on a loose SF-locale, "Aihai," but all of these I found unexceptional. The only point of interest is that one story, "Vulthoom," is named after a Lovecraftian-styled alien god, and that comics-writer Gardner Fox recycled the name, slightly altered to "Volthoom," for a Silver Age JUSTICE LEAGUE continuity.

"The Doom of Antarion," though, presents a more mythically-dense concept. Modern-day Earthman Francis Melchior (note the Biblically inspired name) runs an antiques shop and spends all his free time star-gazing. He holds an enduring fascination with two seemingly contradictory spectacles: those that are "steeped in the mortuary shadows of dead ages," and those that suggest "the transcendent glories of other aeons." Smith incisively notes that these desires are both rooted in Melchior's distaste for "all that is present or near at hand," which might be seen as a comment on the tastes of horror-and-fantasy readers in general. While pursuing his astronomical observances, the protagonist, not unlike that other Melchior, fixates on one heavenly body in particular, "one minute star" that fills the antiquary with "intimations of loveliness and wonder." In due course, Melchior finds his earthbound spirit drawn to the planet Phandion that orbits the distant star, and that spirit merges with the living body of a poet named Antarion. But even though Phandion satisfies all of Melchior/Antarion's desire for exotic beauties-- including Antarion's beloved Thameera-- the world is doomed to perish when its sun dies. Thus "transcendent glories" fall victim to "mortuary shadows," and the antiquary Melchior then returns to his own body, haunted by the memories of the transcendence he so desired. I might observe that Edgar Allan Poe showed a similar passion for both "glories" and "shadows," and that here Smith produced a very Poe-esque take on the psychology of both passions.

Of the other four stories in the collection, only one other, "The Monster of the Prophecy," stands out, and it's interesting in that it reverses the verdict of "Antarion."  On contemporary Earth a poet named Theophilus feels estranged from his fellows by his poetic sensibilities (which may make this character a stand-in for Smith himself). Theophilus considers suicide, but a scientist invites the poet to join him in an experiment. Though the scientist looks like an Earthman, in reality he's a non-humanoid alien-- possessed of five arms, three legs, and three eyes-- from a world called Sabattor. The alien wishes to return home with a specimen of an Earthman, and asks Theophilus to accompany him voluntarily. The poet has no attachments to his Earth-life and he accepts. Though for some time the human finds it fascinating to learn the ways of an alien world, the attractions of being a scientific curiosity pale, and his existence brings him trouble from Sabattor's small-minded priesthood. Oddly, though, Smith gives Theophilus a somewhat happy, if macabre ending, as he ends up living out the rest of his life as the love-mate to one of the non-human alien females, who, like the protagonist, is a poet without an audience on her native world.  The happy ending is not without a certain irony, but here the irony is directed not at the main character but at the world in which he was born.

AN ANTI-CANONICAL CANNONADE

Though I've said earlier that most readers of popular fiction are attracted to that form precisely because it doesn't require them to evaluate it, it's inevitable that a few readers will form their own "canons" for these sort of anti-canonical works.  It's inevitable because no matter how simple or how debased a given popular genre may seem to elitists, some creators will invest considerable passion and imagination into those works.

I once said I'd try to formulate a list of "adult pulp" comic books, but never got around to it.  But of late I've been cogitating on pulp magazines (and some of their contemporaneous fellow travelers).  Since these were the predecessors of comic books, here's my list of some above-average popfic tales from the pages that gave birth to many of America's most lurid and extravagant dreams.

_________________


Edgar Rice Burroughs-- TARZAN OF THE APES and THE RETURN OF TARZAN (Tarzan series), GODS OF MARS and MASTER MIND OF MARS (Mars series)

H.P. Lovecraft-- THE CALL OF CTHULHU and THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

Robert E. Howard-- "Tower of the Elephant" and HOUR OF THE DRAGON (Conan), THE MOON OF SKULLS (Solomon Kane)

A. Merritt-- THE MOON POOL and THE SHIP OF ISHTAR

Clark Ashton Smith-- the "Zothique" cycle and THE HASHISH-EATER

Lester Dent-- THE LAND OF TERROR and THE MUNITIONS MASTER (Doc Savage)

Seabury Quinn-- THE DEVIL'S BRIDE

Sax Rohmer-- THE INSIDIOUS DOCTOR FU MANCHU and BROOD OF THE WITCH-QUEEN

Donald Wandrei-- "The Red Brain"

Norvell Page-- THE RED DEATH RAIN (The Spider)

C.L. Moore-- "Black God's Kiss" and "Jirel Meets Magic" (Jirel of Joiry)

Russell Fearn's "The Golden Amazon Returns"

Robert J. Hogan-- THE BAT STAFFEL (G-8)