Try as you might, you can never really escape the shadow of H.P. Lovecraft when you’re talkin’ about weird fiction. Easily one of the 20th century’s most important figures in horror, science fiction, AND pop culture, his influence looms over basically everything – Borges, Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Fantasy, Joyce Carol Oates, Horror, Stephen King, Video Games, Role Playing Games, Comic books…I mean hell, there’s even a Ghostbusters cartoon with Cthulhu in it! Tentacular horrors from beyond our dimension, cosmic nihilism, insane cultists making dark deals with incomprehensible forces…while these weren’t Lovecraft’s inventions, they were certainly perfected and, I daresay, communicated most effectively in his stories – there are strange gibbering horrors and alien gods and bizarre tales of a hostile inhuman universe before him, but his unique ability to synthesize these influences while developing his own aesthetic makes him kind of unique.

And, of course, he had the pulps, giving his stories an unprecedented audience – Weird Tales had an estimated distribution of 40,000 magazines per issue at its height! Can you imagine 40,000 people reading ANY single short story now? And that’s not counting the well-documented tradition of sharing single issues among multiple people, making that audience number a definite lowball estimate. Hard to even imagine short stories being that huge of a part of popular entertainment!

His popularity means there’s a glut of Lovecraft these days, both in terms of his own stories as well as scholarship on the man. Because of this, I was generally trying to avoid talking too much about him here…but when I did a previous installment on Long’s “Men Who Walk Upon the Air” and saw today’s story on the ToC, I knew I’d have to give in. My only defense is that, like I said in that previous post, I really do think today’s story is both A) extremely good and also B) not as appreciated as ol’ Howie Lovecraft’s other, tentacle-ier writing. So let’s take fifteen, ya’ll go read “The Music of Erich Zann” and, when you’re done, come back here for a little discussion/dissection/discursion on it, okay?

Great title image of the story from good ol’ Andrew Brosnatch there. The viol, the shabby garret, the wide-open window with the dark outside and the curtains billowing and the candle flickering in the wind…it’s great stuff, an atmospheric little illustration of what is, basically, the key element of this story.

“The Music of Erich Zann” was originally published (in ’22) in one of the countless amateur magazines that Lovecraft was a part of. I’ve seen some people describe these as basically the zines of their day, but I think that’s incorrect – while these were printed and put together by hand by individuals as an act of love and artistry, I think they were a lot more similar to the online literary mags we have today. They actively solicited articles, fiction, and prose from their members, and had well established lines of editorial practice and distribution. Lovecraft was a HUGE part of the amateur press scene, and it was only with great hesitation that he got into the pulp market, considering anything you got paid for as being, by definition, not something done for art. That being said, once Lovecraft DID start selling his stories, he was fairly quick to dive into his archives and submit his previously published stuff to Weird Tales.

But let’s get in there, shall we?

For me, that’s one of the great openings in not only Lovecraft, but all of weird fiction. We get right into things and are immediately introduced to the mystery of this missing street and, more fundamentally, the idea that it was there, in the Rue d’Auseil, that this narrator encountered the music of Erich Zann, something that must’ve profoundly affected him. Great, lean, efficient writing!

The narrator goes on to explain that he knows that his time on the Rue d’Auseil was kind of a rough patch for him both physically and mentally, and maybe it had an effect on his memory. Still, he goes on to say, it’s weird that he can’t find the place, because it was SO characteristic and idiosyncratic; it was very close to the University for one thing, but it was a strange, dark neighborhood full of ancient buildings and strange, seemingly very old people. And, interestingly, the river stank in a particularly unique way, something that might help him identify it if he ever smelled it again. This story relies on some kind of unique sensory descriptions to convey weirdness – there’s that smelly river for one thing, but also the central conceit of the story is the strange properties that Erich Zann’s music has. Speaking of which:

Our student of metaphysics does manage to meet Zann one night as the musician is coming home after his shift in the orchestra pit, but it’s an odd meeting. Zann is described as lean and goatish, and there’s a shabby furtiveness to him and, in fact, at first he seems kinda pissed off that this weird college student has been listening in to his music. Still, our narrator perseveres, and eventually the musician brings him up to his room waaaaay at the top of the house and starts playin’ on his viol.

The music is good, stuff that Zann has clearly written himself, but it’s got none of the weird wildness to it that he’d overheard before.

Zann’s freakout it pretty great and unexpected, and his sudden fearfulness of the closed and curtained window when the whistling starts is pretty remarkable. He even goes so far as to try and manhandle the student out of the room, an intolerable boorishness that makes our narrator a little huffy. Mollified, Zann tries a friendlier tact, setting the student down in a chair and writing a note to explain his actions.

A pretty strange note, all in all, and the contorted explanation of being strangely sensitive about his “weirder” music is pretty funny. As is his willingness to get the student to move to another room! Whatever it is about the music, Zann is serious about it! Moved by the old man’s obvious nuttiness, the student agrees, and soon moves to a different and more expensive room on the third floor, leaving Zann alone on the fifth and no one on the fourth.

But it turns out that maybe Zann’s apparent friendliness was a bit of a front – he doesn’t ever invite the student back up, and when the student goes out of his way to invite himself up there, the music is “listless” and kind of dull. And so, to get his weird music fix, our boy starts creeping up there secretly to listen in on Zann:

The building fury of Zann’s playing, and his concomitant physical and mental deterioration, are pretty great images, aren’t they? I mean, imagine it: you sneak up to listen to this crazy music that just keeps getting crazier and crazier, and every day the guy playing it looks rougher and rougher. Extremely evocative, extremely weird!

And then, one night…

Again, good use of aural information here, you can imagine the sound of the window being closed and the sashes drawn before the old man hobbles over to the door to let in our strangely persistent narrator. Zann looks like he’s been going ten rounds with the champ, and he’s preoccupied with that window, listening hard, only finally relaxing a little when he seems satisfied that nothing is happening outside. Then, Zann writes a quick note in his execrable French, imploring the narrator to wait while he writes out a full and detailed account of what has been happening in his native German. Our narrator spends a hour just sitting there in silence while Zann writes furiously, page after page stacking up on the table as he recounts the “marvels and terrors” that he’s been experiencing. Then, suddenly, horribly, there’s a sound from the closed window, and it sends Zann into a frenzy.

Zann’s playing is furious, wild, a kind of mad noisemaking that, the narrator realizes, is inspired by fear alone, fear of something on the other side of the window, something trying to get inside, perhaps? Sweating and contorted with the effort of playing, Zann is desperately sawing at his viol when, steadily, there rises a sound from outside.

A sudden gust catches up Zann manuscript and whirls it towards the window! Oh no!

Absolutely fantastic stuff, top shelf weird writing! Chasing the papers to the open window our narrator sees not Paris, but rather a vast expanse of interstellar space full of motion and music and strange, hostile agency. And it seems like it wants to come into the room, through the window.

The horror of whatever it is that lies beyond the window fills our narrator with terror. He gropes his way in the dark towards where Zann is still madly playing. He’s struck by the bow as Zann keeps sawing, and then feels, horribly, that Zann’s skin is ice cold – he’s been dead for a while, but still he plays on. Mad with terror, our narrator escapes, and the story ends:

What a story, huh? It’s short, but it’s packed with so much fantastic stuff, perhaps the best of which is the lost story within the story that Zann’s manuscript held. There were the answers to all our questions, and they’re just gone! I mean, it’s a perfect bit of metafiction, you know? There, in Zann’s manuscript, was a Weird Tales story, but Lovecraft has written a story around that story, and the loss of it just highlights the great mysterious pleasure of weird fiction.

Unsurprisingly, this was one of Lovecraft’s favorites of his own writing. It’s a really fine piece of work, and was actually anthologized in a Dashiell Hammett edited collection in 1931 titled Creeps by Night. Apparently, this was also the only Lovecraft story that famous snob Robert Aickman liked. There’s a real and legitimate understated quality in it that’s really rare – a lot of weird fiction tries to use that kind of “what’s happening!?” approach, but often they’re only winking at it, right? Like, a character might be confused, but we, the reader, generally have a sense of what’s happening, even if that sense is just “this is a lovecraftian story.” But here there’s really NO hint at what’s happening, is there? A musician is playing crazy music to try and do something related to a window that, apparently, opens up to Another Place. Has his music attracted it, or has he done something else to bring it here? Does his music keep it away? We’ll never know, because the answers flew out the window!

It’s a really unique piece of weird fiction, evocative and strange and a lot of fun packed into a very short little bit or writing. Really one of my favorites, both of Lovecraft’s work and the genre in general! Well worth a read this Halloween eve!

A real Hallowe’en treat for ya’ll today! We’re gonna be talkin’ about a tale by Frank Belknap Long that happens to have, as its main character, the great medieval poet, rakehell, and Master of Arts, François Villon! It’s Long’s short story “Men Who Walk Upon The Air!” Villon is one of my favorite poets, a real (and real interesting!) guy from the middle ages who is just this larger-than-life, enigmatic figure of fascination for me (and a lot of other people), so to have him in a weird tale! Well, it’s pretty fun!

But first, the Cover and ToC of this issue!

That’s a nice adventuresome painting by Andre Brosnatch, a raging sea, full sails and a billowing cloak, excellent imagery that the story it illustrates can’t live up to, I’m sure (I don’t actually remember anything about “Under the N-Ray,” so I can’t be SURE of that, of course, but it doesn’t bode well…). Brosnatch is an interesting and somewhat enigmatic figure – he was a huge part of the early days of Weird Tales, doing a lot of good covers that always struck me as very action-y and dynamic.

Not much is known about him, though – like a lot of the pulp guys, there’s little biographical information about him. What IS clear, though, is that he definitely benefited from the reorganization in the magazine that happened in 1924 and the subsequent editorship of Farnsworth Wright. Before that, under Baird, there hadn’t been much interior art, not even for titles. After Wright came on the scene he got rid of the silly “articles” and “news items” and shit that had been used to fill up space and replaced it with art, often little atmospheric sketches and such, unrelated to the stories but very much “weird.” Things like these:

Little space fillers, but they’re fun! A LOT of these were done by Brosnatch, and would be used long after he’d stopped painting covers for Weird Tales. He was also a big contributor of the Title art at the beginning of the stories too – all in all, there was a lot more art in the magazine after Wright took over, and Brosnatch made a lot of it!

Now, a quick look at the Table o’ Contents for this issue:

Some heavy hitters this month, right? Quinn, La Spina, and ol’ Grandpa himself, H.P. Lovecraft. Actually, we might have to come back to this issue another time – the Lovecraft story this month is one of my favorites, “The Music of Erich Zann.” Nothing of Lovecraft’s can be said to be “obscure,” of course, but I do think that that story in particular is just a real strong example of weird fiction in general and Lovecraft in particular, and its not talked about or anthologized enough. So we’ll see! But we’re here to talk about Frank Belknap Long!

Frank Belknap Long was a major figure in the pulps, although he outlived them and wrote paperbacks, comics, and scripts well in the 1970s. In the Golden Era of the 20s through the 40s he wrote a lot for Weird Tales and Astounding, and he’s an important figure in horror, fantasy, and sci-fi. Undoubtedly though he was most famous as part of the Lovecraft Circle, a loose knit group of writers who, broadly, wrote weird fiction in the Lovecraftian vein. This included guys like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, all big names in weird fiction. Long and Lovecraft actually “met” in the amateur presses when a young Frank wrote a Poe pastiche that Lovecraft liked; they exchanged numerous letters and even met in person a fair amount, in New York when Lovecraft was living there, as well as in Providence and around New England when Lovecraft travelled. As an aside, the image of Lovecraft as a weird friendless loner is mostly bullshit mythologizing from long after he died; he was an avid and dedicated letter writer with a huge number of friends and acquaintances and, importantly, was very generous with praise and encouragement for writing he liked, something Long was always grateful for.

Long’s most famous story has to be his Lovecraftian “The Hounds of Tindalos;” it’s got some good, weird monsters that Lovecraft actually namechecked in his story “The Whisperer in Darkness.” He wrote other things in that cosmic weird fiction style, but he didn’t just ape Lovecraft his entire career; case in point, the story we’re talking about today, a tale of 14th century France that stars the great medieval poet François Villon!

There’s that Brosnatch title art, letting you know right away what exactly the title is referring to!

That’s a good, painterly scene portrayed right there in the first paragraph – yellow in the ditches, yellow in the sky, furtive laden figures hustling along in the evening, everything is desolate and lonely and dark. And then we meet François Villon himself, sadly regarding the gibbetted body of a man softly swinging in the night air.

The real François Villon, poet, criminal, wanderer, was born in Paris either in 1431 or 1432. He was very poor, but was raised by a stepfather who was a professor of canon law which opened doors for him. He received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Paris in 1452. He ran into the first of many major legal troubles in his life in 1455 when he killed a man in a street brawl; he only just escaped punishment through the help of his friends who had to petition the King to save him from the gallows. Then, in 1456, Villon was implicated in the robbery of the chapel of the College de Navarre. He was banished from Paris and spent the next four years as a wanderer and, possibly, a member of a gang of thieves. He’s next heard from in 1461, when he’s in jail for an unknown crime. While imprisoned, he writes his most famous work, “Le Gran Testament.” He’s released, possibly as part of a general amnesty, but again is imprisoned for theft in 1462. Villon somehow scrapes together bail, is released again, but then gets into a street brawl that sees his arrested, tortured, and condemned to be hanged, although this is commuted to banishment in January of 1463, after which he vanishes from history.

He left behind a substantial body of work, which given the time in which he lived would be enough to make him an important historical figure, but the thing is that he was ALSO a truly great poet. His poems are wry and angry and funny and sarcastic and earthy, often skewering the grand themes and pious ideals that dominated the poetry of his age. He wrote about bars and dirtbags and prostitutes and real assholes he hated, and his life and experiences fill his work; a number of his pieces are obviously autobiographical, and are full of jokes and asides and braggadocio. He played with language a lot, and put a bunch of slang and thieves’ cant into his works; he also coined a bunch of new words, which apparently makes translating him quite a challenge. Probably his most famous line is from his “Ballade” (written in jail), where he wrote “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!” which Dante Rossetti translated as “Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear!” coining and popularizing the word “yesteryear” in English. If you’re interested in his works, there’s a fairly recent good translation by Galway Kinnell for the University of New England Press titled, simply enough, “The Poems of François Villon” that’s worth checking out.

So that very real historical figure is who Long choses as his protagonist in this story. A wandering poet is, of course, a very romantic figure, perfect for an imaginative story, but right away Long does something kind of interesting:

This is certainly a figure from a medieval romance, indulging in some very poetical musings upon a hanged man, but this isn’t a young student, or even a lean weather beaten brigand-bard in exile; this is an old man, weary and worn down. He’s toothless, bald, threadbare, a figure of suffering who, perhaps, pities the dead bodies because he knows he’s nearly one himself. We’re meeting François Villon well after he’s vanished from our histories. It’s an interesting and poignant character, more so if you’re familiar with the hard life of the very real Villon.

That’s a great image, isn’t it, the gallows lonely and cold and striding across the countryside seeking warmth and companionship. There’s some very good, vital prose in this story, images and ideas that Long has really invested with a lot of doom-laden portentousness and mythic energy.

But while Villon is regarding the dead man and pitying him for his cold feet, he feels a tug at his clothes. He turns, and stares into a pair of horror-haunted blue eyes. A woman, with tears in her eyes, asks him for a favor. She drags him inexorably across the road and into a little house, where she explains: she is the hanged man’s wife, and she needs someone to climb up the gallows and cut him down. Villon, who has been admiring her beauty, readily agrees:

Villon suddenly realizes that he’s starving, and so he sits down to an insane feast.

He pigs out, making a mess as he devouring everything the woman puts on the table. It’s a strange feast though, isn’t it? I mean, rice and all those spices represent a considerable amount of wealth in the 14th century, and who the hell eats scrambled ostrich eggs, especially in a small house in rural France across from a gibbet? In particular he enjoys the ahistorical and anachronistic champagne a little too much, and becomes quite drunk. So much so that, when he totters to his feet to go and do the job he’s been contracted to do, he starts thinking that he might get another favor out of the bereaved widow.

Old man Villon sweeps her into his arms and takes more than the single kiss he’s been allotted. However, as he’s smooching her up, she suddenly throws him off and hurls herself terrified into the corner, shrieking with fright. You’ve probably guessed it; she points to the window and screams.

Villon thinks she’s nuts, at least until he hears a ghostly voice calling his name from outside the door. Terrified himself, he leaps into the corner with the woman and reminds her that his “intentions were honorable.” Then something starts straining and pushing against the door. Villon, unable to withstand the suspense, leaps up and flings the door open.

Villon stands stock still with fright, covering his eyes, trying to convince himself that the horrible revenant isn’t real. It bushes past him, running into the room and striking the wall and then, blindly begins to search the room for its wife. It’s a pretty good, horrifying scene, a blind undead monster scrabbling in the corners, feeling along the walls, hunting for you solely by touch. Shudersome stuff.

Villon watches it, horribly fascinated and feeling that he’s done nothing to deserve being put in a spot like this. Then, the corpse finds the woman, grips her with its terrible bony fingers, and then starts walking with her towards the door. Villon musters some courage to try and stop it, but gets knocked aside with casual contempt by the revenant. Collapsing with exhaustion and horror, Villon watched the undead thing drag the woman out into the night. The story ends thusly:

The horror might be a little traditional (the hanged man reuniting with his wife, one way or the other) but the weirdness isn’t, at least for me. First off, you’ve got my favorite kind of horror protagonist: some guy. Sure, this guy is François Villon, famous medieval poet, but as far as this story is concerned, he’s just Some Guy who has stumbled onto something he doesn’t understand or have any connection to. That’s a wonderful way to structure a horror story, in my opinion – an almost blank slate thrown into chaos and madness without any preparation or preamble. And Villon is good in this, he’s a tired hungry old man, down on his luck who leaps at the chance for a supper, but still a bit of a popinjay and observer of humanity for all that.

But WHO is this woman? I don’t think you can ignore the weirdness of the sumptuous, ridiculous supper. It smacks of a fairy banquet, or maybe a haunted funeral feast? It’s otherworldly and unnatural, whatever it is. And it’s made weirder by the woman’s behavior. She wants to help her husband, wants him cut down and brought inside for…what, exactly? And did she just take too long, or were Villon’s kisses to blame for making HIM come to HER? If that’s the case, why didn’t the dead husband revenge himself upon Villon? There’s a sense here that Villon is just being shown a play, some kind of shadowy undead drama that needs an audience.

I don’t know – at the end, the story just seems very moody and enigmatical, and I really enjoy it. Long has done a nice bit of weird writing here, taking what could be a pretty straightforward “corpse comes back” story and gilding it with enough mystery and description and personality that it becomes much weirder and much more interesting than you might expect! A masterful example of the weird tale, I think, worth a read this spooky season!

Like the merciless Juggernaut, Halloween season rolls ever onward, smooshing everything in its path beneath its powerful, unyielding spookiness. And so, to do my humble part and remind ya’ll of The Reason for The Season, here’s yet another entry in my continuing series of musings on the spook-em-ups of yesteryear. And it’s an odd one this time, too – Carl Jacobi’s “Mive” from the January 1932 issue of Weird Tales!

But first, as is traditional ’round these here parts, lets take a gander at the cover of this issue! And lucky for us, it’s a C.C. Senf classic!

I think last time I said I wasn’t sure if ol’ Clark Ashton Smith had ever had a cover and, well, by god, here it is! And by Senf, no less, one of my favorites of the early Weird Tales cover artists. Curtis Charles Senf did a pretty good number of the early covers for the magazine, a couple dozen at least, plus a lot of great interior art too. This is one of his last, though – I think he has a few more in 1932, but after that he goes on back to commercial illustration work, which I think you can see he clearly had a talent for. I like his style a lot; expressive faces, flapper haircut, weird-ass monster, trippy space background. It’s good! Wild thing is, it has pretty much nothing to do with the story, which is a very goofy space fantasy tale about a suicidal male poet who travels to an alien world, helps foment a revolution, and then makes it with a five-armed space empress babe. It’s not my favorite Smith, by a longshot, but it does have a lot of implied sex, so there’s that.

Of course, a lot of the covers had fuck all to do with the contents; it was practically a requirement! Still, I think the Senf image illustrates nicely one of the biggest draws that pulps had going for them – the cover art is honestly something, often dynamic and a little lurid, really something that grabs your eye! I harp on about how the pulp era was the golden age of the short story, when people could make a living writing fiction AND when millions of people got their entertainment by reading it, but I bet there’s a similar story in illustration – there were so many more markets for your work, and a huge number of people exposed to it too! A heroic age, never to be seen again, sadly.

Ah well, such is the turning of the wheel, huh? Anyway, here’s the ToC:

Smith, Pendarves, Derleth, Long, Wandrei – it’s a veritable Who’s-Who of Big Names That Few Now Would Recognize! All of them were fairly major Weird Tales authors; G.G. Pendarves in particular was very popular, and it wasn’t until her death in ’38 that Farnsworth Wright revealed in an obituary that her real name had been “Gladys Gordon.” Again – the pulps offered a chance for people who might otherwise have been stopped at the door to slip in and get their writing published and read!

Our author today, Carl Jacobi, was a prolific and long-lived writer of fiction, with a good number of stories in Weird Tales over his career. His style is good, a little florid for us today but nowhere near as elaborate or languorous as Smith or Lovecraft, for instance – in fact, if you compared his work to others at the time, you’d probably say it was rather fast-paced and propulsive! His work has been anthologized a lot over the years; he’s got a good sense of the creepy and the atmospheric, as well as a real imaginative streak, as we’ll see in today’s fairy short story, “Mive.”

That’s right! It’s a Big Bug story!

Bug fiction, of course, has an important place in the history of outre imaginative fiction; there’s Wells and his ants, and Lafcadio Hearn wrote numerous essays on the cultural and folkloric significance of insects in Japan. Within Weird Tales there’s a kind of interesting history, though, so I hope you’ll pardon a brief digression. In 1925, a few short years into Weird Tale‘s existence, they published a story by J.U. Giesy titled “The Wicked Flea.” Now, if you know yer bible, you might recognize that as a punning take on that old chesnut from Proverbs: “The wicked flee where no man pursueth.” Now, that’s bad enough, but take a quick peek at the cover of that issue:

A dog!? being chased!? BY A BIG FLEA!? Why the whole idea is PREPOSTEROUS!? What an amusing reversal!!!!

That’s right: it’s a COMEDY story.

What’s that? You’re asking how the Weird Tales audience received it? Readers, they hated it. Huge number of letters to The Eyrie where they begged Wright to never publish anything like it. A consensus soon built, and basically humor stories of all stripes were banned from the pages of Weird Tales forever. I feel like that actually had a huge effect of the development of the weird tale, too – there’s a deadly seriousness that descended on the genre and never really lifted, so much so that a lot of readers lost their ability to see the often slyly humorous parts of many stories, I think. For instance, when Lovecraft’s “Herbert West – Reanimator” was posthumously published in Weird Tales, a lot of people didn’t recognize that the constant over-the-top joking going on. Oh well!

Anyway, the upswing of it was that, following the furor over the goofy story, Wright kind of summed up the state of the genre in an editorial in The Eyrie in the December 1925 issue, trying to clarify what belonged in Weird Tales and what didn’t. Here’s what he wrote about Big Bug stories:

I dunno, I find this kind of stuff fascinating; the way Wright, in conjunction with an active and participatory fandom, are negotiating and mediating what is and isn’t weird fiction…it’s cool stuff! But on to “Mive!”

A kind of moody meditation on both wilderness and the way people perceive it – it’s a fun way to start a piece of pulp weird fiction, I think. The sublimity of the environment is a rich vein of weirdness that’s not mined often enough, for my tastes. Actually, this whole beginning, nearly a page, reminds me strongly of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” with its preoccupation with human interlopers in a wilderness setting; there’s a similar sense of the strange and inhuman atmosphere of this place, evoked by the description of its riotous plant life, its strange geography, AND by the fact that it’s got these really weird names. “Mive” is an odd one…sounds like one of those old, inexplicable celtic/saxon/welsh hold over names you run across in England, you know what I mean? Like it must have some meaning, but it’s just utterly lost to you, now. Similarly, the oddity of a cypress hammock called “the Flan” is notable…right off the bat there’s a real sense of disorientation produced by Jacobi here, really nicely done bit o’ weird fiction writing!

Quick note: “Rentharpian” is a funny word, but it just refers to Jacobi’s own version of “Lovecraft Country.” He mentions a “University of Rentharp” in another story, so it’s like the Miskatonic Valley and Arkham and all that, a generalized fictional location somewhere in the United States that gently connects his stories together. Absolutely love it, one of the best parts of weird fiction in my opinion!

Most people stay away from the Mive, but our narrator has submitted to his particular imp of the perverse and gone for a walk along a disused road that leads along side of the marsh. He reaches the swampy stretch where, for some reason, he’s drawn to the wilderness and plunges headlong into the green hell.

More excellent environmental writing, partaking of that peculiarly White Euro-American horror at the rampant fecundity of nature. This is something right out of 19th century tropical travel narratives, a kind of revulsion at just how furiously ALIVE a forest or a jungle or a swamp can be. Another noticeable undercurrent exists in both that genre of writing AND in our story here: the alienation an animal experiences in a place dominated by plants. In fact, here, in the Mive, the narrator notices the absence of all the usual swamp critters…until…

A Big Ass Bug! Kind of an uncalled-for burn on proboscises, though – it’s just a curly cue tongue man! What? Your gustatory apparatus is so much prettier and cooler? Jeez.

Operating under a kind of strange compulsion, the narrator grabs for the gigantic butterfly, but he succeeds only in getting a strange, powdery dust from its wings on his hands. Annoyed, he tries to brush it off, but the sweat from his hands has made it sticky and gooey and damn if it don’t smell good too!

Well, he fights it off as long as he can, but then sticks his fingers in his mouth, and is immediately struck by the foul, bitter taste, nothing at all like the sweet alluring scent. He coughs and sputters and is disgusted at himself; then he gets doubly annoyed because he didn’t catch the giant butterfly and so no one is going to believe that it exists. He decides it’s time to head home. But…

A human-sized cocoon, and it’s hatched too! Makes the previous butterfly seem positively rinky-dink in comparison! And, of course, there’s also the perfectly logical deduction that a big fuckin’ butterfly must’ve evolved carnivory and that’s why the swamp has been denuded of vertebrate life! Our narrator grabs a stick and, feeling a little nauseous, starts trudging his way home. A storm builds overhead, black clouds billowing to darken the sky…but IS it a storm?

What the fuck, right!? The clouds solidify into some kind of strange, phantasmagoric scene of a medieval city and an army in full retreat from a horde of the black-winged giant butterflies! The defenders fall and the whole city is swallowed by the roiling swarm. Then, the scene dissolved into more chaos, eventually coalescing into the form of a singularly huge butterfly, its vast wings filling the sky.

He turns and flees, crashing through the underbrush, squelching through the mud, trying to escape the horrendous vision he’s seen. The forest itself becomes monstrous, the reeds and grasses gripping him, slashing at his arms and legs, all of nature turned into a hellish, predatory monster that seeks to devour him. A storm fills the sky, and the waters of the Mive turn black and oily. Then, a giant butterfly descends from the blackness overhead, pursuing him!

He hides in the underbrush and it misses him; in a mad chase he flees the swamp, eventually reaching the road and collapsing with relief as the storm breaks and rain washes over him. What happened!? You’ve probably guessed, but let’s see what our narrator figures out:

Hallucinatory butterfly dust! Of course! What master insect indeed!

That’s the end. It’s short and to the point, a fairly simple series of events overlain by some weird hallucinatory imagery and descriptions. What I like about it is the way Jacobi approaches a world where people and, indeed, vertebrates, are superfluous interlopers. From other stories of his, I know Jacobi had an interest in geology and paleontology, particularly with regards to early Paleozoic stuff, so this vision of a primal swamp with giant insects seems positively Silurian, a vision of the world 420 million years ago. A geological perspective is, I’ve argued before, one of the main scientific ideas behind weird fiction – Deep Time’s dehumanizing and, indeed, de-mammalizing, perspective forces us to confront a universe that is perfectly happy with other orders of being and types of life. For Lovecraft and Howard and them, this is often oceanic or reptilian life, but here Jacobi has latched onto a vision of life that is botanical and insectoid, both truly strange and alien organisms, at least in comparison to our own particular clade.

The strange vision of a medieval cloud city destroyed by butterflies, as well as being just plain weird, also reinforces this idea, I think – the world of humans, with its projects and monuments and struggles, is just one ephemeral version of life on this planet. The contrast between the perceived fragility of a butterfly and the assumed solidity of a vast walled fortress full of mailed warriors is interesting in its juxtaposition, especially since both prove false – the triumph of the strange butterflies over the “superior” humans is of course a classic weird fiction inversion, but it also resonates with how easily our narrator is overcome by the hallucinatory dust. He’s immediately undone by a big ol’ butterfly, and is powerless in the face of this totally unexpected threat!

It might be a little predictable; I think once the wing dust is mentioned, you’re primed for something like this to happen, especially when he fuckin’ eats it. But for all that, I think it rises above the kind of trite “woah, what a trip!” sort of thing it might’ve become. Jacobi is interested in how people and nature intersect, and the ways the assumed roles of big critters like us might be upended totally. A fun story with a decidedly weird point of view!

Indulgence is best enjoyed in huge walloping ladlefuls, so I decided to go big with this one and write about one of the most indulgent weird fiction writers of all time, Clark Ashton Smith, and specifically about one of his best stories, the Averoigne-set, almost-sword-and-sorcery, horror-adventure tale, “The Colossus of Ylourgne.” It’s extremely pulpy, it’s extremely purple, it’s extremely weird, which is just to say, it’s extremely Clark Ashton Smith!

Smith is an interesting character. Today, he’s remembered as one of The Big Three from Weird Tales, right up there with Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. I think this reflects both the quality and quantity of his output; he wrote unique, inventive stuff, and there’s a lot of it, too. Interestingly, he’s also the only one of that triumvirate to die of old age (in 1961), although that’s not to say that his life wasn’t similarly rough – he was crushingly poor for most of it, and even well into his old age had to take gardening jobs from his neighbors to make ends meet. In his own time as a pulp writer he was very popular with the readers, and there’s the suggestion that it was his work that convinced Edwin Baird, the first editor of Weird Tales, to reconsider his ban on verse in the magazine.

I think there are two relevant things about Smith to keep in mind. ONE, he was a serious poet, and an unabashedly Romantic one – early in his life (before Weird Tales) he published collections of his verse to critical acclaim and was well-plugged into the West Coast’s poetry scene through his mentor, George Sterling. However, his extremely traditional style (very much in the vein of Poe or Swinburne) butted up against the changing aesthetics of poetry in the early 20th century; his refusal to change his style caused him to fall out of favor and turn to pulp prose to try and make some money.

The SECOND thing to keep in mind is that Smith was a Californian his whole life, living in the shadow of the Sierras for much of it, and I think that really colors his writing. It’s especially visible in his descriptions of nature and people’s relationship to wilderness. There’s none of the musty, mouldering, decay of Lovecraft’s New England in Smith’s dark forests and mountains; rather, his landscapes always seem vital and rugged to me, weird and full of menace certainly, but as a result of their magnitude and natural power. Anything inimical in them is a result of that out-of-balance scale difference between nature and humanity. For Smith, horror is a human condition; it’s people and their uniquely human failings who bring corruption into the world.

I guess though there’s also a THIRD thing to keep in mind about Smith – he’s much grosser than Lovecraft or Howard. Lot of wormy, dripping corpses in his stories, and there’s a bloodier and, honestly, more sadistic edge to his horror. A lot of his stories have a sardonic cruelty to them, something he took from his extensive reading of the French Decadents, I reckon; Smith taught himself French to translate Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, many excerpts of which appeared in Weird Tales. Anyway, his stuff is just way more sophisticated , if you will, than Lovecraft’s or Howard’s, with a noticeably different (though equally evocative) tone. There’s less scholarship on him than either of the other two, though there is a good Penguin Classics collection of some (but not all) or his stories and poetry (The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, edited by S.T. Joshi). The story I want to talk about today, “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” is NOT in that collection, though, so you gotta follow that link to give it a read in the pages of Weird Tales (courtesy of archive.org!).

First thing first, let’s talk that cover! I don’t know if any of Smith’s stories ever got on the cover for Weird Tales. One of his stories did get a painting over at short-lived rival magazine Strange Tales, with a pretty striking monster from Smith’s story in that issue “The Hunters from Beyond;” I think it got used as a cover for a collection from that magazine published recently, too. BUT, that’s neither here nor there, since this cover is, yes, a Margaret Brundage original, inspired by Jack Williamson’s “Wizard’s Isle.”

Setting aside the unpleasant racism of the Menacing Chinese Wizard, you gotta appreciate the weird ass little lizard-bug devil there, and of course it has that famous Brundage trademark: a scantily-clad woman being menaced! Brundage specialized in those, and the clever writers (like Seabury Quinn and Robert E. Howard) started to include scenes of a woman being menaced by a monster or a ghost or a racist caricature in order to get on the covers. The covers were always considered a little daring, but interestingly it was only AFTER readers learned that “M. Brundage” was a woman that they really started to complain about the “indecent” art. As a brief aside, Brundage is a fascinating character, a Wobbly and a Free-Thinker whose work hugely influenced both genre fiction as well as bondage/fetish erotic art; she’s definitely someone we should spend some time talking about one day. Here’s a cool pic of her I found, from The Internet:

But, Margaret Brundage will have to wait! We’re talking about Clark Ashton Smith now! On to this issue’s ToC:

As mentioned, Jack Williamson (another fascinating guy who played a huge role in the development of sci-fi) gets the cover – the story is fine, one of his extremely competently constructed pieces, though the Orientalism is thick on the ground and kind of rough. The Howard story is only middling – it’s one of his occultic Lovecraft pastiches, and for the most part those are his weakest efforts. For my money, Smith’s story is far and away the best thing here, although I would point out the Weird Story Reprint, which is a translation of a story originally in Spanish, “Maese Perez, the Organist.” These translations are super interesting, and, actually, form the subject of an upcoming book with Paradise Editions that I’ve been working on: Night Fears, a collection of some of the translated fiction that appeared in Weird Tales that I think people are going to really enjoy. I’ll plug it more later this month, So Watch This Space for further details!

Briefly, there’s also a bit of verse by “Grace Stillman” that is pertinent to the story today. Her “The Woods of Averoigne” is a celebration of Clark Ashton Smith’s fictional 13th Century France where he set some of his stories (including “The Colossus of Ylourgne”). It’s good and extremely, some might even say, suspiciously faithful to the description and mood of Smith’s work. Between that, and the fact that Grace Stillman ONLY ever published this one poem in any magazine ever, I suspect this is a nom de plume for ol’ Clark himself, although I’ve got no concrete evidence for that. Still, it’s odd!

But, anyway: Our Story!

First off, that description, huh? That’s an interesting use of the word “robot” isn’t it, one that I think demonstrates the inchoate state of the nascent genre of science fiction. I hate to keep harping on it (no I don’t), but it was in Pulp Magazines that these genres were created, and this is a good example of that work being done. The lexicon hadn’t solidified, the definition of the term “robot” hadn’t been settled yet; only with time and further writing would “robot” come to mean a manufactured mechanical or technological construct, rather than the very specific Thing (no spoilers, yet) being discussed here.

Our story starts with some of the rich, voluptuous language that Clark Ashton Smith is known for…honestly, people give Lovecraft shit for his purple prose, be he’s positively restrained compared to Clark. Smith ratchets it up all the way to eleven; he’s much more sumptuous in his writing, and his word choice is way more obscure and archaic than anything ol’ H.P. ever did. Now, to be fair, it’s not affection, not fully, because Smith received very little formal education and mostly learned by reading books and memorizing the dictionary and stuff, so I think he comes by his1820s style writing honestly. But if that’s not your thing, you’re going to have a hard time with Smith.

Right away we’re introduced to the villain of the piece, Nathaire, a vile sorcerer, and we learn that he, along with his ten pupils, have vanished from his house in Vyones. A long part of this first chapter is used to give us background: Nathaire is a stunted, twisted little thing, the son of a Devil and a Witch, and he travelled widely through Egypt and Persia and other exotic places, where he learned all the secrets of magic and alchemy that made his so feared and powerful. We also learn that he has run afoul of the Church and the Inquisition before, and is lame in one leg from a stoning that he took at the hands of a mob in Vyones. Consequently, Nathaire hates the clergy and the city with equally fiery passions, so everyone is happy to see him vanish, despite the mysterious circumstances. Everyone, that is, except Gaspard du Nord:

Gaspard uses this magical mirror to try and spy on Nathaire, who is certain is up to something vile and dangerous. He catches glimpses of his former master in the glass, a hint of dark ritual and evil magic, but it’s soon obscured by Nathaire’s counterspell. We, along with Gaspard, are left in the dark.

Part 2 is where things start getting weird! In early summer, bodies suddenly start vanishing from the graveyards, and when people investigate, they realize that it’s not graverobbers at work; rather, the dead bodies themselves have clawed their way free from their coffins and tombs and graves! And it just keeps happening!

I mean, that’s pretty good, right? Bodies on their way to being buried leaping up and then running into the night. It’s a good, creepy image, made worse by the suddenness and the sense of urgency in these animated corpses. Something is happening, but no one knows what it is!

Turns out the ruins of Ylourgne (which, wow, just a great weird fiction name, you know?) is right across the valley of a big ol’ monastery, extremely isolated and cut-off from the world. There, the monks are horrified by the sense of something monstrous going on across the way in the old robber-baron ruins, but they don’t feel like confronting it until one of there own, dead in an accident, is summoned to the castle. There’s a good image of the dead monk, his head lolling on his chest from his broken neck, leaping up and running out of the church towards the ruins while the monks look on, horrified.

Most of the monks want nothing to do with it, but a pair of them, full of zeal and righteous fire, get permission to go to Ylourgne to try and exorcise the evil there. They go armed with crosses and holy water and tromp overland, but are unprepared for the devilry they encounter: piles of corpses being rendered into their constituent parts, bones in one pile, meat in the other, boiled and magicked up by devils and the ten pupils of Nathaire, all overseen by the dying, couch-bound wizard himself. The monks leap into action, shouting prayers, brandishing holy water…and are promptly handled by the wizard and his underlings.

Smith, of course, is a member of the Lovecraft Circle, and so there’s no room for the traditional Christian God in his fiction. And even though there’s plenty of mentions of Satan and all kinds of very pop-medieval theology, it’s sort of understood that that is merely the cultural lens of the characters in the story – in other words, the Devil that Nathaire serves is no horned and winged fallen angel, but probably something more akin to the nebulous transdimensional horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. These monks attempt to use the power of Christ to combat inhuman sorcery, and so of course they fail. It’s a pretty stark image, and a step that not everyone at the time was willing to take – August Derleth, for example, really tried to Manichean-ize the mythos, and even Frank Belknap Long introduced the Cross as a modern representation of an even older Power that could combat the evil forces of madness and chaos. None of that for Smith! The strength of the church is in gold and flame alone, a purely secular and vulgar power, and sorcery is simply of another class altogether.

This is hammered home when, brought before Nathaire for a haranguing, the evil wizards says this:

Ialdabaoth or Yaldabaoth is the demiurge, the basely material (and therefore evil) creator of the world in gnostic cosmography. Nathaire is basically calling the god these monks serve a false and lesser power, which, fair enough, since the monks got captured and all. Then Nathaire pumps a couple of corpses full of demons and has these undead bodies chase and beat the monks all the way to their monastery! The scene of the raising is even illustrated by Smith in the story, in his inimitable folk-art style:

Picture like that would be right at home in a 1st Ed Dungeons & Dragon book, wouldn’t it? Very DIY. Anyway, meanwhile, our buddy Gaspard is back in town, still worrying about what ol’ Nathaire is cookin’ up. With the general sense that since the bodies have been heading towards Ylourgne, that’s the place to get answers, Gaspard heads out overland, eventually reaching the mysterious ruins just as the moon is rising. There’s lots of clambering and crag-hopping, all very fun and conveying just how in-over-his-head our scholarly hero is, and then finally Gaspard breaches the walls and discovers the secret of Ylourgne:

Reduce, Reuse, Recylce! Nathaire has been collecting all these corpses to strip em down to their base parts and BUILD a new, huge body. And not only that, but, after Gaspard gets bonked on the head and captured, Nathaire reveals that he is going to leave his dying body and put his soul into this new, gigantic corpse-salvaged corpus! Nathaire, in fine villanous form, rants a bit, explains his plan to use his new body to terrorize Averoigne, and then has Gaspard tossed in an oubliette.

There’s a somewhat overlong dungeon-escape scene, where Gaspard has to scrape away at a drain to make a passage that takes him to another chamber and some stairs, etc etc. It’s good mechanically and serves to express that time enough has passed for the wizards upstairs to have finished making the giant body. And you gotta remember: Smith is poor and he’s getting paid by the word. I mean, if Charles Dickens can get away with it, so can Clark, right? Anyway, he comes across the huge corpse juuuuust as the ritual is underway and, being reasonable, recognizes that there’s not much he can do about it, so he flees. We then cut to the next section, which sees the horror unleashed on the countryside.

So this huge giant, made from the rendered flesh and bones of countless corpses and driven by the mind and soul of an evil wizard, has risen, and damn if it isn’t having a good time. Giant Nathaire really seems to be playing around, flexing his new muscles and enjoying his strength and size; he lobs some rocks at the monastery, kills some of the monks, but mostly just seems to be goofing off. When he turns and leaves, some of the surviving monks (the same ones who ventured into and were chased out of Ylourgne earlier in the story) witness a strange sight:

That’s a hell of a funny image, isn’t it? This big monstrous giant, all naked and gross, with like a baby carrier on his back full of his students, along for the ride! It’s a very funny, very strange detail, extremely Smithian in its absurdity. Anyway, the rest of this section is just The Giant wrecking shit all over Averoigne. There’s lots of violence and murder; at one point he covers a church full of people with a huge pile of shit he’s gathered from surrounding farms. It’s alternatingly funny and then, suddenly, very brutal and cruel:

And how about that last part, huh? “…worse things, not to be named…” yikes!

While all this has been going on, Gaspard has been making his way back to the city, which is now packed with refugees fleeing the horrors of the Giant. Back in his meager rooms, Gaspard throws caution to the winds and makes use of the evil sorcery he learned from Nathaire to concoct a sorcerous powder that is used to send undead bodies back to their graves. There’re scenes of violence and horror, Nathaire kills a bunch of soldiers and breaks into the city, but is confronted by Gaspard atop one of the towers, who calls to his former master. Nathaire approaches, intending to smash Gaspard to bits, when the scholar blows the strange powder into the Giant’s nostrils, and…

I mean, that’s great, isn’t it? This huge corpse suddenly turns and starts wandering the countryside, going to the graves and tombs from which its bits and pieces were taken before finally just digging its own giant grave and laying down to die. The bit with the voices is fun, as is the payoff with the pupils in the baby bjorn; imagine them just, like, helplessly swinging there the whole time before getting crushed to death in the new grave. I mean, it’s great stuff!

There’s a brief coda where we learn that the stinking giant corpse ended up causing all kinds of health problems, but also that Gaspard was the only sorcery in the country to never have had any subsequent trouble with the inquisition, so, for the most part, it’s a happy ending! Yay!

I really like this one. Smith’s Averiogne is a fun setting, a wooly Dark Ages France full of weird wizards and cruel aristocrats – there’s honestly a very Warhammer Fantasy feeling there, and it must’ve been a big influence on all that stuff. “The Colossus of Ylourgne” is a good weird tale, very inventive and, in places, very surprising – the complete repudiation of Christianity, the dark humor, the violence, it’s all well done and, for the most part, it’s a fairly propulsive story.

Now, if you’re familiar with Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (pub’d in Weird Tales in 1929), I think you can see what an inspiration that was for Smith; he’s basically doing a medieval retelling of that story, down to the magical dust at the end even! But he’s changed enough stuff and made it his own that it’s not a problem in my opinion, and he’s clearly having fun writing it. I think there’s also some Robert E. Howard in here too – Conan had appeared in the pages of Weird Tales in 1932, and that kind of rip-roaring sword-and-sorcery clearly influenced Smith, particularly in his wizard characters.

All in all, it’s a good creepy tale in a well-expressed secondary fantasy world, and even if the ending is a little abrupt and overly just-so, the denouement of the big corpse burying itself makes up for it, I think. There’s an inventiveness in Smith’s stuff that makes him worth reading, I think, a real adherence to a style and a vision that was his own while, at the same time, was also a part of the larger Weird Tales movement. He’s not as well as known as ol’ HPL or REH, and I don’t think there’re any comics or movies or video games with his stuff (although his creations bleed into the HPL and REH adaptations), but Smith is a very important influence on both horror and fantasy, and I think there’s a lot to appreciate in his work!