1. CAS, letter to DAW, January 24, 1930 (ms, MHS).
2. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (SL 110).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, March 11, 1930 (ms, JHL); CAS, letter to HPL, April 23, 1930 (SL 113).
4. HPL, letter to CAS, postmarked August 6, 1930 (ms, JHL).
5. David Lasser, letter to CAS, August 22, 1930 (ms, JHL).
6. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-September 1930 (SL 121). CAS actually received $87.50 for “Marooned” (see Lasser, letter to CAS, September 10, 1930 [ms, JHL]).
7. David Lasser, introduction to “Marooned in Andromeda.” Wonder Stories (October 1930): 391.
The Root of Ampoi
First entitled “Jim Knox and the Giantess,” and then “Food of the Giantesses,” this story was completed on May 28, 1930. It was rejected by WT on June 12, 1930, with FW explaining that it lacked “the thrill of ‘The Venus of Azombeii’ and the eery fascination of ‘The Uncharted Isle’” (although he did add that “The readers like your stories. Have you any more weird poetry on hand?”)1 CAS referred to the story as “a dud” that would “have to be given a brand-new wind-up if it is ever to sell.” However, one cannot read too much into this disparagement, as he added “The same applies to … ‘The Letter from Mohaun Los’.”2 Smith was unable to sell the story until years later, when August Derleth solicited a story for the Arkham Sampler, a quarterly magazine he published in the late 1940s. He accepted this story, but thought the title was awkward and asked that Smith supply a new one.3 CAS agreed that “Food of the Giantesses” was a “punk title,”4 and suggested “Ampoi’s Root.”5 By a freak coincidence, Derleth had been preparing an announcement for the story and “in the absence of the new title for your story I called it ‘The Root Of Ampoi.’ Since that is as close to ‘Ampoi’s Root’ as it is possible to get, we can let it stand.”6 “The Root of Ampoi” was first published in the Spring 1949 issue of the Arkham Sampler. It was reprinted in Fantastic Stories of Imagination’s August 1961 issue, which appeared shortly before Smith’s death on August 14, 1961. It was included in TSS.
1. FW, letter to CAS, June 12, 1930 (ms, JHL).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, August 18, 1931 (SL 160).
3. AWD, letter to CAS, November 10, 1948 (ms, JHL).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, November 16, 1948 (SL 355 [misdated “November 6, 1948”]).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, December 18, 1948 (Arkham House archives).
6. AWD, letter to CAS, December 22, 1948 (ms, JHL).
The Necromantic Tale
“The Necromantic Tale” was completed on June 23, 1930, and was quickly accepted by Farnsworth Wright for WT (with Smith receiving forty-four dollars when it was published in the January 1931 issue).1 Shortly thereafter, Lovecraft read the story and made the following comments to Smith: “The atmosphere is very well sustained, & there is a genuine convincingness to the style. I wonder how it would have been to have the ancient wizard disappear at the stake, before the eyes of all spectators, just as the flames flare up?”2 Smith, who as has been noted by Behrends was generally quite responsive to suggestions,3 enthusiastically embraced this idea:
Thanks for your suggestion about “The Necromantic Tale”! I think so highly of it that I am re-typing a page of the story with an additional sentence or two about the mysterious footnote at the very end of the old record, saying that they saw Sir Roderick disappear when the flames leaped high; and that this, “if true, was the moste damnable proof of hys compact and hys commerce with the Evill One.” This emendation I shall submit to Wright, who has already accepted the tale. Wright ought to approve—the change almost “makes” the story.4
Amusingly enough, the surviving carbons of the story have the relevant portion handwritten in the margins. “The Necromantic Tale” was collected posthumously in OD.
1. FW, letter to CAS, July 3, 1930 (ms, JHL).
2. HPL, letter to CAS, July 18, 1930, quoted in Roy A. Squires’ Catalog no. 19 (1985), p. 25.
3. See Steve Behrends, “CAS and Divers Hands,” Crypt of Cthulhu no. 26 (Hallowmas1984): 30-31.
4. CAS, letter to HPL, July 30, 1930 (SL 115).
The Immeasurable Horror
Completed on July 13, 1930, Smith originally intended to market “The Immeasurable Horror” to the “scientifiction magazines,”1 but after rejections by Amazing Stories and presumably Astounding Stories as well as the Gernsback publications,2 it was accepted by WT. Wright did point out
some flaws… that need fixing up. When your hero returns in the coaster to the Purple Mountains, your story speaks continually of “we”; but after he comes back he seems to be alone, and no further
mention is made of Markheim or Rocher. From the context the reader gathers that the other members of the party had to wait for the hero to regain consciousness before they found out what had happened? What of Rocher and Markheim? It may not need more than a line or two, but these two characters cannot be permitted to slide out of the story without any explanation at all.3
Smith accordingly made the required alterations,4 and the tale appeared in the September 1931 issue. It was collected in OD.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, July 30, 1930 (SL 116).
2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-September 1930 (SL 120).
3. FW, letter to CAS, October 4, 1930 (ms, JHL).
4. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early October 1930 (LL 13).
A Voyage to Sfanomoë
Completed between July 13-17, 1930, “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” was snapped up by Wright, who offered CAS thirty dollars for the story.1 It was published in the August 1931 WT. Smith originally included it among the prospective contents of his first Arkham House collection, OST, but it was not collected in hardcover until LW.2
Apropos of the story, Smith made the following comments to Lovecraft in a discussion regarding their relative needs for emotional attachments to their surroundings:
I think we are probably more alike than some of my remarks on a desire to voyage in space and time may have led you to infer. This desire, in all likelihood, is mainly cerebral on my part, and I am not so sure that I would care to be “a permanent colonist” in some alien universe—no matter how bored or disgusted I may seem to be at times with my environment. And I have had reason to discover, at past times—particularly in times of nervous disturbance—how dependent I really am on familiar things—even on certain features of my surroundings which might not seem very attractive to others. If I am upset, or “under the weather”, an unfamiliar milieu tends to take on an aspect of the most distressing and confusing unreality—similar, no doubt, to what you experienced in Brooklyn. So, in all probability, I will do well to content myself with dream projections… But doubtless your geographical sense is far more clearly and consciously developed than mine.3
1. FW, letter to CAS, July 22,1930.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (SL 333).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (LL 20). Lovecraft’s comments appear in his letter to CAS dated November 7, 1930 (Selected Letters III, pp. 214-215).
APPENDIX TWO:
“THE SATYR”: ALTERNATE CONCLUSION
The following is the version of the story published in La Paree Stories for July 1931, and subsequently reprinted in Genius Loci and Other Tales. It replaces the last four paragraphs that follow the sentence “. He kissed her … and they both forgot the vision of the satyr… .”
They were lying on a patch of golden moss, where the sunrays fell through a single cleft in the high foliage, when Raoul found them. They did not see or hear him, as he paused and stood with drawn rapier before the vision of their unlawful happiness.
He was about to fling himself upon them and impale the two with a single thrust where they lay, when an unlooked-for and scarce conceivable thing occurred. With swiftness veritably supernatural, a brown hairy creature, a being that was not wholly man, not wholly animal, but some hellish mixture of both, sprang from amid the alder branches and snatched Adèle from Olivier’s embrace. Olivier and Raoul saw
it only in one fleeting glimpse, and neither could have described it clearly afterwards. But the face was that which had leered upon the lovers from the foliage; and the shaggy legs and body were those of a creature of antique legend. It disappeared as incredibly as it had come, bearing the woman in its arms; and her shrieks of terror were surmounted by the pealing of its mad, diabolical laughter.
The shrieks and laughter died away at some distant remove in the green silence of the forest, and were not followed by any other sound. Raoul and Olivier could only stare at each other in complete stupefaction.
APPENDIX THREE:
FROM THE CRYPTS OF MEMORY
Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvellous worlds have crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose course, decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close.
Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star—how stranger than any dream of dreamers in the spheres of today, or than any vision that hath soared upon visionaries, in their retrospection of the sidereal past! There, through cycles of a history whose piled and bronze-writ records were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living like the prodigious metropoli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic heavens—a dome of infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended like a sole, enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its fires from the face of the irresolvable ether, threw a baffled and despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and shrouded vistas illimitable of the visionary land.
We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people—we who dwelt beneath that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and obelisks of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night of time; and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and
darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.
Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams—the dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces of fretted copper, and streets that ran between lines of carven golden obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and iron-builded fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which the simulacra of century-forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed a necromantic perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and spectral dreams of the past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, we sought the rare and mystic immortelles, with sombre leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed beneath willows of wan and veil-like foliage: or wept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew by the flowing silence of Acherontic waters.
And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.
APPENDIX FOUR:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“To the Daemon.” Acolyte 2, no. 1 (Fall 1943): 3. In PP.
“The Abominations of Yondo.” Overland Monthly 84, no. 4 (April 1926): 100-101, 114, 126. Celephais 1, no. 1 (March 1944): 4-7. In AY.
“Sadastor.” WT 16, no. 1 (July 1930): 133-35. In OST.
“The Ninth Skeleton.” WT 12, no. 3 (September 1928): 363-66. In GL.
“The Last Incantation.” WT 15, no. 6 (June 1930): 783-86. In LW, RA.
“The End of the Story.” WT 15, no. 5 (May 1930): 637-48. In OST, RA.
“The Phantoms of the Fire.” WT 16, no. 3 (September 1930): 363-66. In GL.
“A Night in Malnéant.” Original version: in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (Auburn Journal Press, 1933). Revised version: in WT 34, no. 3 (September 1939): 102-5. In OST.
“The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake.” WT 18, no. 3 (October 1931): 387-90. In OD.
“Thirteen Phantasms.” Fantasy Magazine 6, no. 2 (March 1936): 37-41, 68. In OD.
“The Venus of Azombeii.” WT 17, no. 4 (June-July 1931): 496-514. In OD.
“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.” WT 18, no. 4 (November 1931): 491-99. In LW, RA.
“The Monster of the Prophecy.” WT 19, no. 1 (January 1932): 8-31, 143-44. In OST.
“The Metamorphosis of the World.” (as “The Metamorphosis of Earth:”) WT 43, no. 6 (September 1951): 62-79. In OD. Reprinted in Beachheads in Space: Stories on a Theme in Science Fiction. Edited by August Derleth (NY: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1952; London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1954). Reprinted in From Other Worlds. Edited by August Derleth (London: Four Square, 1964).
“The Epiphany of Death.” Fantasy Fan 1, no. 11 (July 1934): 165-168. WT
36, no. 7 (September 1942): 71-74 (as “Who Are the Living?”) In AY.
“A Murder in the Fourth Dimension.” Amazing Detective Tales 1, no. 10 (October 1930): 908-37. In OD.
“The Devotee of Evil.” Original version: in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (Auburn Journal Press, 1933). Revised version: Stirring Science Stories 1, no. 1 (February 1941): 109-17. In AY.
“The Satyr.” La Paree Stories (July 1931). In GL.
“The Planet of the Dead.” WT 19, no. 3 (March 1932): 364-72. In OST, RA. Reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader no. 4. Edited by Donald A. Wollheim (NY: Avon, 1947).
“The Uncharted Isle.” WT 16, no. 5 (November 1930): 605-8, 710-14. In OST, RA. Reprinted in My Best Science Fiction Story As Selected By 25 Outstanding Authors. Edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend (NY: Merlin Press, 1949).
“Marooned in Andromeda.” WS 2, no. 5 (October 1930): 390-401, 465. In OD, RW.
“The Root of Ampoi.” Arkham Sampler 2, no. 2 (Spring 1949): 3-16. Fantastic Stories of Imagination 10, no, 8 (August 1961): 31-46. In TSS.
“The Necromantic Tale.” WT 17, no. 1 (January 1931): 54-61. In OD.
“The Immeasurable Horror.” WT 18, no. 2 (September 1931): 233-42. Tales of Wonder no. 8 (Autumn 1939): 92-101 (as “World of Horror”). In OD. Reprinted in Avon Science Fiction Reader no. 1. Edited by Donald A. Wollheim (NY: Avon, 1951).
‘A Voyage to Sfanomoë.” WT 18, no. 1 (August 1931): 111-15. In LW, RA. Reprinted in Beyond Time and Space. A Compendium of Science-Fiction Through the Ages. Edited by August Derleth (NY: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1950; Toronto: George J .McLeod, Ltd., 1950; NY: Berkley, 1950).
“From the Crypts of Memory.” Bohemia 2, no. 3 (April 1917): 27. Fantasy Sampler no. 4 (June 1956): 12-13. In Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (Auburn Journal Press, 1922), OST, PP.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Scott Connors received his B. A. degree in English and History from Washington and Jefferson College and has also studied at the University of Salzburg.. In addition to numerous articles for such publications as Lovecraft Studies, Wormwood, The Barbaric Triumph, and Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, he has edited the Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith and The Freedom of Fantastic Things, the latter a collection of criticism on Smith. He also write regularly reviews books for Publisher’s Weekly and Weird Tales. He is currently working on a biography of Smith.
Ron Hilger is a noted Smith scholar who has co-edited the Smith volumes Red World of Polaris and Star
Changes. A native of Northern California, Ron has worked to preserve Smith’s legacy by organizing such events as the CAS Centennial Conference in 1993 and the CAS Plaque Dedication in 2003.
Table of Contents
Introduction
A Note on the Texts
To the Daemon
The Abominations of Yondo
Sadastor
The Ninth Skeleton
The Last Incantation
The End of the Story
The Phantoms of the Fire
A Night in Malnéant
The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake
Thirteen Phantasms
The Venus of Azombeii
The Tale of Satampra Zeiros
The Monster of the Prophecy
The Metamorphosis of the World
The Epiphany of Death
A Murder in the Fourth Dimension
The Devotee of Evil
The Satyr
The Planet of the Dead
The Uncharted Isle
Marooned in Andromeda
The Root of Ampoi
The Necromantic Tale
The Immeasurable Horror
A Voyage To Sfanomoë
Appendix One: Story Notes
Appendix Two: “The Satyr”: Alternate Conclusion
Appendix Three: From the Crypts of Memory
The End of the Story Page 40
