The triple-decker Fantasy novels of the 20th Century, most cast in the semblance of J. R. R. Tolkien’s masterworks, bear little fruit for me. When I read Fantasy I want to experience worlds that are so different from our own. Ursula K. Le Guin summed this up nicely in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”(Pendragon Press, 1973). Fantasy must be more than just a modern scenario in funny costumes. Le Guin sites Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni saga as an example. I don’t know if I agree with Le Guin on that as I have never read these books despite Lin Carter promoting them in the Ballantine Fantasy series.
Now an author I can talk about is Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961). “The Keats of the Pacific” is not to everybody’s taste. He is harder to read than Ms. Kurtz I imagine but that is because he saw himself as a poet first. Whatever your taste, CAS could pack into a short prose-poem more fantastica than a stack of David Eddings and his ilk. A good example of this is“The Abominations of Yondo” by Clark Ashton Smith published in Overland Monthly V84 #4, (Apr 1926) and then by Arkham House in 1960. This short tale has no real plot, just a poor soul wandering the desert of Yondo and encountering weird things, but it evokes (for me) way more fantastic wonder.
(Let’s pause here for one second, just so you don’t think I am unaware of reality. This piece by CAS was not a sellable story. It never appeared in Weird Tales (where Farnsworth Wright would probably have rejected it for the lack of story). I mention David Eddings, not out of spite but because of his success, for his trilogy of trilogies of trilogies. Eddings certainly knows what is marketable. The requirements to be a follower of Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara bestsellerdom are different than writing a truly evocative work of Fantasy. Let’s not confuse art with business.)
The narrator is thrust into the desert of Yondo as a kind of torturous exile. If he returns to his home the Inquisitors of Ong will perform horrible things on him. Now Smith peoples his weird landscape of Yondo with its“…ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns” with strange monsters. These terrifying beings remind me of another master of the dark fantasy, William Hope Hodgson and his The Night Land (1912), another walk through a weird and tortured landscape. (Of course, H. P. Lovecraft comes to immediately to mind as well. This is a Cthulhu Mythos style Fantasy akin to The Dreamlands stories.)
The first we encounter is the Chuckler.
“The chuckle grew louder, but for awhile I could see nothing. At last I caught a whitish glimmer in the darkness; then, with all the rapidity of nightmare, a monstrous Thing emerged. It had a pale, hairless, egg-shaped body, large as that of a gravid she-goat; and this body was mounted on nine long wavering legs with many flanges, like the legs of some enormous spider. The creature ran past me to the water’s edge; and I saw that there were no eyes in its oddly sloping face; but two knife-like ears rose high above its head, and a thin, wrinkled snout hung down across its mouth, whose flabby lips, parted in that eternal chuckle, revealed rows of bats’ teeth. It drank acidly of the bitter lake then, with thirst satisfied, it turned and seemed to sense my presence, for the wrinkled snout rose and pointed toward me, sniffing audibly…”
It is unknown if the Chuckler is aggressive or not because the narrator wisely avoids it. It should be clear here that our storyteller is no Conan the Barbarian to face evil with a good broadsword in his hand.
Next he encounters the Venus:
“More startling even than that diabolic chuckle was the scream that rose at my very elbow from the salt-compounded sand — the scream of a woman possessed by some atrocious agony, or helpless in the grip of devils. Turning, I beheld a veritable Venus, naked in a white perfection that could fear no scrutiny, but immersed to her navel in the sand. Her terror-widened eyes implored me and her lotus hands reached out with beseeching gesture. I sprang to her side — and touched a marble statue, whose carven lids were drooped in some enigmatic dream of dead cycles, and whose hands were buried with the lost loveliness of hips and thighs…”
The Venus lures its victims to their death with her beauty. She reminds me of the Luring Plant of Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”. Since the poem was published in 1926 we can say Weinbaum had not influence.
Next we encounter the Shadow:
“I fled as a man flies from dream to baleful dream of some cacodemoniacal night. At whiles there was a cold whisper in my ear, which did not come from the wind of my flight; and looking back as I reached one of the upper terraces, I perceived a singular shadow that ran pace by pace with my own. This shadow was not the shadow of man nor ape nor any known beast; the head was too grotesquely elongated, the squat body too gibbous ; and I was unable to determine whether the shadow possessed five legs, or whether what appeared to be the fifth was merely a tail…”
The Shadow can not be harmed or out-raced in any way. Only by entering holy ground can it be driven off. The encounters are gaining in peril as the narrator stumbles about the desert.
Next he comes across The Soldier of Yondo:
“Then, out of the north, where shadows mustered, there came a curious figure — a tall man fully caparisoned in chain-mail — or, rather, what I assumed to be a man. As the figure approached me, clanking dismally at each step on the sharded ground, I saw that its armor was of brass mottled with verdigris; and a casque of the same metal furnished with coiling horns and a serrate comb, rose high above its head. I say its head, for the sunset was darkening, and I could not see clearly at any distance; but when the apparition came abreast, I perceived that there was no face beneath the brows of the bizarre helmet whose empty edges were outlined for a moment against the smouldering light. Then the figure passed on, still clanking dismally and vanished…”
It is not known if the Soldier of Yondo is a spirit inhabiting a suit of armor or a living carapace. Again, if Robert E. Howard were at the helm, there would have been a great fight scene here. As it is, Smith is not interested in fights, but moody observation of a weird and terrifying place.
The final encounter brings the Mummy-King:
“But on its heels ere the sunset faded, there came a second apparition, striding with incredible strides and halting when it loomed almost upon me in the red twilight — the monstrous mummy of some ancient king still crowned with untarnished gold but turning to my gaze a visage that more than time or the worm had wasted. Broken swathings flapped about the skeleton legs, and above the crown that was set with sapphires and orange rubies, a black something swayed and nodded horribly; but, for an instant, I did not dream what it was. Then, in its middle, two oblique and scarlet eyes opened and glowed like hellish coals, and two ophidian fangs glittered in an ape-like mouth. A squat, furless, shapeless head on a neck of disproportionate extent leaned unspeakably down and whispered in the mummy ‘s ear. Then, with one stride, the titanic lich took half the distance between us, and from out the folds of the tattered sere-cloth a gaunt arm arose, and fleshless, taloned fingers laden with glowering gems, reached out and fumbled for my throat …”
The narrator can take no more. He flees back to his persecutors, preferring the tortures of Ong to dwelling in such an awful place. We can only assume he dies horribly but pleased to be rid of the memories of Yondo.
