Lin Carter wrote eight Clark Ashton Smith Collabs over fifteen years. Each couplet appeared in its own distinct 
publication. The first two were sold to Leo Marguiles Weird Tales revival known as the California Issues. The second pair went to Ted White’s Fantastic. The third set appeared in Lin’s own Weird Tales revival in paperback. The last two were published in Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu small press magazine. Carter also reprinted several in his Years’ Best Fantasy collections. All of them were finally collected by Price in The Book of Eibon (2002).
Like the posthumous collaborations Lin and his buddy, L. Sprague de Camp did with the Robert E. Howard scraps, these tales were written from unfinished pieces left by Smith. Like Mark Twain’s definition of a dinosaur: “One bone and a thousand pounds of plaster of Paris!” these tales are I suspected mostly Carter’s writing with a small amount of Smith. Carter describes the collabs this way:
Like his friend Robert E. Howard, the late Clark Ashton Smith also left among his papers the manuscripts of unpublished or unfinished stories, notes and titles and outlines for many tales which he did not live to write. I have obtained permission from his Estate to complete several of these, and to turn some of Smith’s notes and outlines into finished tales, crafted in what I earnestly hope to be a reasonable facsimile of his ornate and lapidary prose…. (Years’ Best Fantasy, 1975)
Now whether you feel these collabs are “a reasonable facsimile of his ornate and lapidary prose” is certainly a matter of opinion. Smith’s style was not to everyone’s taste. (I usually find the effort worth the time.) I think we can assume that where the stories fail must be Carter’s fault as Smith himself never sanctioned any of these pieces. Personally I find some entertaining enough while others suffer for being mere lists of H. P. Lovecraft’s ideas and poor fare for the reader who wants a story.
The California Issues
“The Double Tower” (Weird Tales, Winter 1973) features the Serpent Man sorcerer, Zloigm. This great sorcerer wants to wrench arcane secrets from a slime creature called Crxyxll. He uses forbidden magic that turns Zloigm into a slime creature as well. He knows the spell that will turn himself back but as a slime monster he has no mouth with which to voice it.
“The Utmost Abomination” (Weird Tales, Fall 1973) is a tale of Eibon, Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean wizard. In his youth, Eibon is apprenticed to the mighty Zylac, famous for his yellow eyes. At first things are good, but when Zylac finds the metal spell book of Zloigm he begins to change. In the end, Eibon breaks into his master’s private chamber to find the man has become a gigantic cobra with yellow eyes.
Ted White’s Fantastic
“The Scroll of Morloc” (Fantastic, October 1975) has a Voormis shaman, Yhemog, throw off his beliefs and plans revenge on his people. He will steal the Scroll of Morloc from the temple of Tsathoggua. He drugs the swordsmen that guard the altar. As an affront to the god he no longer believes in, he reads the scroll that was written by the hairy and cannibalistic Gnophkeh. Yhemog transforms into a Gnophkeh that the waking guards kill horribly in an undescribed way.
“The Stairs in the Crypt” (Fantastic, August 1976) has a powerful sorcerer, Avalzaunt, preserved and laid in a tomb. His acolytes scrimp on the sealing ceremony. When Avalzaunt awakens as a lich, he calls the ghouls to him as his servants. The sorcerer had a secret stair built into his tomb while he was still alive. Avalzaunt craves hot, human blood. His ghouls bring him his former students for nourishment. Having eaten all of them, he moves onto the monks of Camorba. When he attacks a monk named Thirlain, the priests stabs him with a silver knife, mostly by accident. All the blood and gore, Avalzaunt ate explodes all over the poor man. The lich is destroyed but Thirlain runs off and in penance joins a cult of flagellants.
Lin Carter’s Weird Tales
“The Light From the Pole” (Weird Tales #1, December 1980) (Read CAS’s original fragment here) is a sequel to Smith’s “The Coming of the White Worm”. The sorcerer Pharazyn can feel evil is coming his way. This proves to be a ray of light shining from a mountain at the very pole. The first night the beam freezes his garden, his servants and all his familiars run off. The second night the freezing goes all the way up to his topmost window. Pharazyn knows the third night he will not be able to stop the beam from taking him and turning him into a cold-blooded slave like Evagh before him. When the freezing powers take over his tower, they find Pharazyn has escaped the only way possible. He has slit his own throat.
“The Descent Into the Abyss” (Weird Tales #2, Spring 1981) is a tale about the famous wizard, Haon-Dor. The man wants the original arcane books that have been placed in in the Pit of Y’qaa, a hole in which Ubbo-Sathla dwells. Once in the pit, Haon-Dor encounters an encyclopedia of monsters including Zulchequon, Lord of Darkness, Quumyagga, the first Shantak-bird, Nug, grandfather of Ghouls and many others (using material from Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long). There is one last guardian, K’thugguol, the original shoggoth. This terror, like the others, steps aside and allows Haon-Dor access. Finally at the pit, he finds the tablets that were cast into the pit. He reads the first symbol only then flees. The sheer terror of that one symbol fills his mind with the horribleness of true reality. And he can not forget it for even a second! He runs screaming into a deep hole and never returns. The influence of Arthur Machen is evident here. Like Dr. Raymond at the beginning of “The Great God Pan”, Haon-Dor peels back the fake world we live in to see true madness.
Robert Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu
“The Feaster From the Stars” (Crypt of Cthulhu #26, Hallowmas 1984) is the tale of Lord Vooth Raluorn, a powerful sorcerer who becomes cursed when he smashes an idol of Zvilpogghua, the child of Tsathoggua. To find a cure he ventures into the dangerous Eiglophian Mountains to find the last surviving worshiper of the demon-spawn, a man named Yzduggor. From Yzduggor, Rauorn learns how to summon the Great Old One. He buys elements from his impoverished nephew, Nungis Avargomon. Unfortunately, the crushed opals he buys are fake and Nungis inherits all his wealth when Zvilpogghua devours the sorcerer.
The notes to this tale tell much about how much Carter created and how much was Smith. The basic plot is described by Smith in a paragraph in his Black Book. All the proper nouns except for one were created by Smith. The split looks like a good fifty-fifty on this tale. If the others are similar, then there is far more Smith present than I first thought.
“Papyrus of the Dark Wisdom” (Crypt of Cthulhu #54, Eastertide 1988) is not really a story like the others before it. It was originally a segment of an ancient text that Clark Ashton Smith included in his story “Ubbo-Sathla”. Carter chooses to lengthen this scrap into an entire chapter. The piece follows the timeline from Ubbo-Sathla to the Great Race of Yith to the Coming of Cthulhu. These deities are, of course, property of H. P. Lovecraft except for Ubbo-Sathla.
Conclusion
The Clark Ashton Smith Collabs as a whole are pretty entertaining if you can handle the verbose style. Too many at one time, and you will go screaming back like Haon-Dor to your Perry Mason novels. The list of all the evil beings in “The Descent Into the Abyss” thrilled my Call of Cthulhu gaming little heart back in the 1980s. Now, it seems repetitive and self-indulgent. (Henry Kuttner does a little of the same thing in the Elak story “Beyond the Phoenix” (Weird Tales, October 1938) but he doesn’t do it for pages and pages.)
I think Carter is quite aware of who his audience is in all of these publications. The California stories feel more like horror tales. The Fantastic ones have more of an epic feel. The Paperback stories are crammed with references that a later HPL/CAS/REH fan would love. And the final ones for Robert Price are fully annotated for the more scholarly fan.
Like the Grail Undwin stories that Lin was writing around the same time, these collabs allowed him to explore the works of authors (the Cthulhu Mythos crowd) he enjoyed. Unlike those stories, he didn’t have to create a personae for the authorship since the name Clark Ashton Smith is magic all on its own. Purists may not care for these stories and can always seek the fragments themselves at websites like Eldritch Dark.
