Unfortunately, such a project never came to fruition; Wright instead used the resources of the Popular Fiction Publishing Company to subsidize The Magic Carpet and Oriental Stories, unprofitable companion magazines to WT, as well as an edition of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream (part of a never-realized “Wright Shakespeare Library”).
Clark submitted the story next to The Golden Book, “which has published some mildly fantastic material of late,” but in mentioning this he gave more evidence of his growing disdain for the entire publication machine: “of course, I am thoroughly cynical about the chances of acceptance. I know too much about the gutless emmets and pismires who edit magazines—particularly of the ‘quality(?)’ type.”13
By the end of 1933, CAS had decided that “Zulkaïs” was not likely ever to sell. If it were ever to achieve the dignity of print, it would be in the humbler venue of the science fiction and fantasy fanzine. He approached R. H. Barlow to print the tale.14 Barlow, an intelligent and gifted, if socially awkward, teenager who was an earnest student and collector of weird fiction, owned a printing press with which he would later publish two issues of an amateur magazine called The Dragon-Fly as well as a poetry collection by Frank Belknap Long and a special edition of HPL’s “The Cats of Ulthar” as a Christmas card. He was a logical contender for this task, since none of the other fan publishers could consider printing the tale’s combined 17,000 words. (Barlow was also planning on issuing a new collection of Smith’s poetry, to be called Incantations.) Unfortunately, various personal disasters and permanent relocations prevented Barlow from publishing “Zulkaïs” until 1937, when it led off the first issue of a mimeographed fanzine called Leaves.
Smith had wanted to include “Zulkaïs” in his third Arkham collection of short fiction, Genius Loci and Other Tales, but because of space limitations it was included instead in The Abominations of Yondo, a book that did not appear until the year before CAS died. Our text is based upon the original typescript that was sent to Barlow for Leaves, which later came into the possession of August Derleth and was used in the preparation of AY; it is now in a private collection.
1. See CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1953 (SL 371).
2. See Peter Cannon, “The Influence of Vathek on H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980) 153-157.
3. HPL, letter to CAS, August 27, 1932 (ms, Northern Illinois University Library Special Collections)
4. CAS, letter to AWD, September 11, 1932 (SL 188-189).
5. Postage for the typescript cost thirty-six cents each way (cf. CAS, letter to AWD, October 8, 1932 [SL 194]).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, September 11, 1932 (SL 188-189).
7. CAS, letter to HPL, c. September 15, 1932 (SL 189).
8. CAS, letter to Lester Anderson, September 7, 1932 (ms, private collection).
9. HPL wrote to Barlow (letter, December 10, 1932) that the story was submitted for WT’s companion magazine Magic Carpet, which specialized in non-fantastic adventures in the East (O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R. H. Barlow, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [University of Tampa Press, 2007]), p. 44).
10. CAS, letter to AWD, February 1, 1933 (SL 199).
11. FW, letter to CAS, September 29, 1933 (ms, JHL).
12. FW, letter to CAS, April 25, 1934 (ms, JHL).
13. CAS, letter to HPL, c. March 1, 1933 (SL 203-204).
14. CAS, letter to RHB, November 16, 1933 (ms, JHL).
Genius Loci
Smith announced to August Derleth that he had “round[ed] out my third year of professional fictioneering” by writing a new story that he called “rather an experiment for me—and I hardly know what to do with it.” This story, “Genius Loci,” was completed on September 2, 1932. It dealt with
a landscape with an evil and vampiric personality, which both terrifies and allures people and finally “gets” them in some intangible, mysterious way. An old rustic, who owned the place, is found dead there, apparently of heart-failure. Years later, a landscape painter senses the quality of the place, starts doing pictures of it, and undergoes a repellent change of temperament under the influence. His host, who tells the story, calls in the painter’s fiancé to counteract this influence, but the girl is too weak, too much under the domination of her lover, to help. Finally, one night, the narrator finds the pair drowned in a swimming pool that is part of the evil meadow-bottom. The indications are, that the artist has committed suicide, and has dragged the girl with him against her will. Coincidentally with this shocking discovery, the narrator sees a strange emanation that surrounds all the features of the place like a sort of mist, forming a phantom and “hungrily wavering” projection of the whole vampirish scene. From certain curdlings in this restless, ghostly exhalation, the faces of the old man,—the first victim—and of the newly dead painter and girl—emerge as if “spewed forth by that lethal deadfall,” and are decomposed and reabsorbed. There is a hint in the tale that the painter had previously been very much frightened by something that came out of the place at night; and the presence of the old man, as an elusive figure of the scene, was also suggested. At the end, there is a hint that the narrator may eventually make a fourth victim. It was all damnably hard to do, and I am not certain of my success. I am even less certain of being able to sell it to any editor—it will be too subtle for the pulps, and the highbrows won’t like the supernatural element. Oh, hell….1
Despite Smith’s doubts as to the salability of the tale, he “was agreeably surprised to have [Wright] accept it almost by return mail.”2 Wright had bought so many of CAS’s stories by this time that “Genius Loci” had to wait until the June 1933 issue to see print. Smith had mistakenly calculated the length of the tale as 6300 words, whereas it actually ran 6500. As a result, he cheated himself out of five dollars and received only sixty instead.3
Shortly before its publication, Clark wrote to Derleth that he “hope[s] you will like Genius Loci, which differs from most of my tales in having a local setting. Most of the action is mental, so it’s a wonder that Wright took the tale.” 4 He was no doubt gratified by the reaction of H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote to congratulate him “on the dark fascination of ‘Genius Loci’… you have succeeded in capturing that vague, geographical horror after which I have so often striven….” HPL added that “it interested me greatly to hear of the actual folklore background of this lethal phantasy—Montague Summers (of whose work I have read only the Vampire volume) must be full of data rich in fictional suggestions.”5 While the Smith letter to HPL does not appear to have survived, we know from elsewhere that Smith considered his copy of Summer’s The Vampire: His Kith and Kin to be one of his most prized possessions.6 Therein we find the following discussion:
In [China] wills-o’-the-wisp are thought to be an unmistakenable sign of a place where much blood has been shed… and all mists and gaseous marsh-lights are connected with the belief in vampires and specters which convey disease. Since the effluvia, the vapour and haze from a swamp or quaggy ground are notoriously unhealthy and malarial fevers result in delirium and anaemia it may be that in some legends the disease has been personified as a ghastly creature who rides on the infected air and sucks the life from his victims.7
Earlier Summers also speculates that if a sensitive person who is “fatigued and languid so as to offer little or no resistance, a vampirish entity may temporarily utilize his vitality to attempt a partial materialization.”8 Another possible source may be traced to Smith’s readings of Algernon Blackwood the previous month.9 “Genius Loci” is reminiscent of Blackwood’s story “The Transfer” (first published in Pan’s Garden, 1912), which also deals with a plot of ground that exercises a sort of psychic vampirism on the vitality of those who come across it.
“Genius Loci” was selected by Smith as the title story for his third collection of fiction from Arkham House, which was published in 1948. It was a
lso included in RA. The present text is based upon a carbon of the typescript among the Smith Papers at the John Hay Library.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, September 28, 1932 (SL 192).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, October 8, 1932 (SL 193).
3. CAS, letter to AWD, May 23, 1933 (SL 206).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, May 2, 1933 (ms, SHSW).
5. HPL, letter to CAS, June 14, 1933 (ms, JHL).
6. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, May 23, 1933 (SL 207).
7. Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928; rpt. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960), p. 198.
8. Summers, p. 197.
9. See CAS, letter to Genevieve K. Sully, August 5, 1932 (SL 184-185).
The Secret of the Cairn
Plotted in the autumn of 1931 at around the same time as “The Eternal World,” but not written until a year after, was “The Secret of the Cairn,” a title that was changed by Wonder Stories to “The Light from Beyond” without consultation with Smith (although he mentioned in a letter that he had no objection to the new title). Under its original title, “The Cairn,” Smith developed this plot synopsis:
Certain strange phenomena noted by a lonely artist, who sees one night a brilliant display of light, followed by a weird sub-auditory music and a spicy perfume. The next day, on the end of the hill above his cabin, he finds a new-built cairn of boulders, crowned by a queer three-pointed lucent star of unknown material. Starting forward to examine the cairn, he discovers that he cannot approach it—the ground seems to move forward beneath his feet like a treadmill at every step; he tries it from other sides, with the same result; and growing giddy and sick from his sensations, at length he desists, realizing that the space about the cairn is possessed of some unfamiliar property. He is immensely thrilled and excited, insomuch as he has long desired to find something supernatural or supernormal—something that would transcend the established laws of nature. He returns again and again to the location of the cairn, and notices about it a lingering trace of the same spicy perfume he had hitherto perceived, together with certain odd changes of the vegetation inside the circle of uncrossable space. The ground becomes covered with asphodel-like blossoms such as he has never beheld before; and a juniper tree near the cairn puts out great fiery crimson globes in lieu of its small bluish berries.
A fortnight later, there is a repetition of the strange lights and music that had first aroused his attention; and emerging from his cabin, he sees that the light is located in the vicinity of the cairn. Hastening thither, he sees through veils of blinding radiance a bizarre barge-like vessel and living figures that exhume a shrouded object from beneath the cairn and carry it aboard the vessel, which then disappears, soaring upward in a great flash and seeming to vanish into some alien dimension of space.
At dawn he visits the place, and finds that he can now approach the scattered remnants of the cairn, from among which the lucent triangular stone is gone. In a deep pit he finds a piece of glowing fabric, which may have formed an outer cerement; and touching it, he experiences some peculiar sensations. Beneath the cloth there is a seal-like object, formed of odd jewels that seem to have been wrought into cryptic characters. He is about to pick it up, when, in a blaze of intolerable light, the vessel returns. He loses consciousness, after seeming to fall through interminable gulfs and labyrinths of arcanic spaces and splendors. Amid this, he has the queer sense of being touched on the forehead by some{one}.
When he recovers, the vessel is gone, and the strange seal has likewise vanished, together with the glowing fabric. His fingers have turned blue where he touched the object, and are subject henceforward to certain queer disorders of sensation, one of which is an extension of tactility. There is a queer mark on his forehead, like a burn, but displaying intricately patterned crispations like some ultra-human fingerprint. He is seldom entirely sane afterwards, and is troubled by repetitions of the falling sensation, and by disorders of vision, such as chronic repetition of the bright light, and a recurrent vision of gulfs at his feet, together with the haunting perfume.1
Shortly after writing the above, Smith decided that the ending could be improved in the following manner:
The teller of the tale presses so close to the strange vessel, in irresistible attraction, that he is drawn into some sort of trans-dimensional vortex created by its departure, and seems to fall into the sky, losing consciousness. He comes to himself with the sensations of a person recovering from terrible frost-bite, and finds that he is being immersed in a river of rosy flame, flowing through a strange city of semi-crystalline buildings, by people such as he had seen in the vessel. He is in a new world, and his equilibrium, when he is taken out of the river, is so thoroughly upset that he seems to see everything upside-down. In spite of the ministrations of his hosts, he becomes violently ill, and again loses consciousness, to find on recovering that he has returned to the neighborhood of the cairn.2
The reader may notice that this is not dissimilar to the reaction of Lemuel Sarkis in “A Star-Change.”
Smith completed “The Secret of the Cairn” on Halloween 1932, just over a month from the completion of “Genius Loci.” He had not been idle during this period, using the time to revise two previously rejected science fiction stories, “The Invisible City” and “The Letter to Mohaun Los.”3 Neither of these was a favorite of his, so just as “The Empire of the Necromancers” followed “The Immortals of Mercury” and the first version of “The Invisible City,” so perhaps did this tale represent a literary “cleansing of the palate,” an expression of something much closer to what Smith wanted to write, as opposed to what he had to write if he wanted to expand his markets beyond Weird Tales. He frequently referred to the story in letters as being “first rate.”4
The story was first submitted to Harry Bates and Astounding Stories, but it was returned when the magazine folded as part of the collapse of the Clayton magazine chain.5 It next went, by default, to Gernsback and Lasser, who published it in Wonder Stories for April 1933. It was collected (as “The Light from Beyond”) in Lost Worlds. The current text is based upon the carbon of the typescript submitted to WS.
Like “The City of the Singing Flame,” “The Secret of the Cairn” is essentially a weird tale describing an unexplained phenomenon, and with its allusions to the Grail is highly reminiscent of Arthur Machen’s “The Great Return.” The description of the unusual “tread-mill property in space”6 may have been inspired by Smith’s reading of the works of Charles Fort around this time, while the descriptions of the magnificent vistas of his native Sierra Nevada mountains adds immensely to the sublimity of his descriptions.
1. SS 168-169.
2. SS 170.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, February 10, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
4. CAS, letters to AWD, February 10, 1932 and April 16, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, November 15, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
6. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early August 1931 (SL 159-160).
The Charnel God
This is the third story that Smith set in Zothique. The plot germ for “The Charnel God” appears in the Black Book under the same title:
The city of Zoul-Bha-Sair in Zothique, where the terrible eater of the dead, the great ghoul Mordiggial, is worshipped as a god in a fane of purple-black marble, and is served by a necrophagous priesthood, who wear masks to hide the fact that they are only half-human. All those who die in Zoul-Bha-Sair, even outlanders, are claimed by the priests of Mordiggial.1
He finished writing the story on November 15, 1932, and Wright snatched it up “promptly and without cavil. This gives him a round dozen of my tales—and I wish to God he’d hurry up with the printing.”2 Wright also commissioned Smith to draw an illustration for the story. At one point it looked as if Wright might give it the prestigious cover spot (which elicited from Smith the wish that “he’d let me do a cover for W.T. some time. I work better in colour than in black-and-white”3), but it finally lost out to Hugh B. Cave for “The Black
Gargoyle.”
One appreciative reader of the story was Robert E. Howard, who wrote to Smith that “I was glad to see your illustration of your really magnificent ‘Charnel God’. That story is really a tremendously powerful thing, sinister figures moving mysteriously against a black background of subtle horror. I don’t know when I’ve read anything I admired more.”4 Lovecraft wrote to the young Robert Bloch that the tale had “some exceedingly powerful moments,” and offered the following criticism of CAS’ drawing: “curiously impressive despite a certain stiffness in the human figure. The cyclopean columned hall, & the two nameless corpse-bearers, form a rather unforgettable combination.”5
“The Charnel God” was collected in GL and in RA. The text is based upon the carbon copy that Smith kept, which is now among his papers at Brown University.
1. BB item 7.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
3. CAS, letter to AWD, November 17, 1933 (ms, SHSW).
4. Robert E. Howard, letter to CAS, c. March 1934 (Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, ed. Rob Roehm, vol. 3 [Robert E. Howard Foundation, 2008], p. 197.)
5. HPL, letter to Robert Bloch, c. late March 1934 (H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Robert Bloch Supplement, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi [West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1993], p.8).
The Dark Eidolon
Of all the stories in this book that required restoration, the editors most regret not being able to accomplish this with “The Dark Eidolon,” which is widely regarded as one of, if not the, best stories written by Clark Ashton Smith. As he wrote in the Black Book, the story would concern
The Maze of the Enchanter Page 44
