Crom Your Enthusiasm (8)

By: Gabriel Chad Boyer
August 10, 2015

One of 25 installments in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite fantasy novels from the Thirties (1934–1943). Enjoy!

ZOTHIQUE | CLARK ASHTON SMITH | 1932–38

In his Zothique stories, Clark Ashton Smith presents the after-story of humanity in a far-future world of sparkling sands and evil islands, sadistic kings and the even more sadistic necromancers who love to hate them. This is science fiction, but also fantasy. The sun is dying, and Zothique — the last inhabited continent of Earth — is full of wastelands and shattered tombs where creeping lights wait for unsuspecting visitors, where things from outer space can spawn after death, where evil is punished by greater evil.

A friend of H.P. Lovecraft’s (his idiosyncratic take on the Lovecraft mythos has been dubbed the Clark Ashton Smythos), Smith wrote in a variety of fantastical modes. But with the Zothique stories, which are marked by weird and occult language, he achieved new poetic heights. “Long had the wasting summer pastured its suns,” we read in the opening line of the 1934 Weird Tales story “Xeethra,” ”like fiery red stallions, on the dun hills that crouched before the Mykrasian Mountains in wild easternmost Cincor.” This reads like T.S. Eliot morphing into Michael Moorcock, and I mean that in the best possible sense.

In perhaps my favorite Zothique story, “The Dark Eidelon” (Weird Tales, 1935), the necromancer Namirrha returns to the city of his birth, to exact a terrifying revenge. There is one image in particular that I can’t get out of my mind: Having climbed a domed tower, Namirrha perches upside-down, peering through a window in the dome. “Then, lying prone on the interior of the dome, with his face over the abyss, and his long beard trailing stiffly into space, he whispered a pre-human rune, and held speech with certain entities who belonged neither to Hell nor the mundane elements […] and rime gathered palely on his sable beard from the cold that was wrought by their breathing as they leaned earthward.” The story’s final scene has the more solid mass of a horrific psychological truth; I can hear the mad laughter of Queen Obexah as she lies dying.

The weirdness of the Zothique stories hits a pitch that is wildly unique. You find yourself mesmerized — like a tomb-raider watching the tendrils of light fill the tomb, and waiting for his own end to come.

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CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2015): Erik Davis on Jack Williamson’s DARKER THAN YOU THINK | Sara Ryan on T.H. White’s THE SWORD IN THE STONE | Mark Kingwell on C.S. Lewis’s OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET | David Smay on Fritz Leiber’s THIEVES’ HOUSE | Natalie Zutter on Robert E. Howard’s QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST | James Parker on J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT | Adrienne Crew on Dion Fortune’s THE SEA PRIESTESS | Gabriel Boyer on Clark Ashton Smith’s ZOTHIQUE stories | John Hilgart on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD | Barbara Bogaev on William Sloane’s TO WALK THE NIGHT | Rob Wringham on Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN | Dan Fox on Hergé’s THE SEVEN CRYSTAL BALLS | Flourish Klink on C.S. Lewis’s PERELANDRA | Tor Aarestad on L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s THE ROARING TRUMPET | Anthony Miller on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH | Suzanne Fischer on E.R. Eddison’s MISTRESS OF MISTRESSES | Molly Sauter on Herbert Read’s THE GREEN CHILD | Diana Leto on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s TARZAN AND THE LION MAN | Joshua Glenn on Robert E. Howard’s THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON | Andrew Hultkrans on H.P. Lovecraft’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS | Lynn Peril on Fritz Leiber’s CONJURE WIFE | Gordon Dahlquist on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME | Adam McGovern on C.L. Moore’s JIREL OF JOIRY stories | Tom Nealon on Fritz Leiber’s TWO SOUGHT ADVENTURE | John Holbo on Robert E. Howard’s CONAN MYTHOS.

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Crom Your Enthusiasm (8)

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