Smith's Most Well-Known Creation

Artwork by Clark Ashton Smith

I've already touched on the fact that, compared to his contemporaries, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the overt influence of Clark Ashton Smith on later writers is minimal and I stand by that assessment. I would, however, like to point out an obvious exception to this: the deity Tsathoggua. Unlike nearly everything else CAS created in his weird tales, Tsathoggua not only reappeared multiple times within his own story cycles but was also used by some of his colleagues in theirs. Indeed, the first time the name Tsathoggua appears in print is not in one of Smith's stories but in Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness."

In that story, Tsathoggua is mentioned three times, mostly in passing, as part of a litany of other ancient beings, like Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath. However, one of these mentions not only describes him but associates him with CAS:

It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came – you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.

Klarkash-Ton is, obviously, Smith and "the Commoriom myth-cycle" is then-unpublished "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros," which had been written in 1929 but not published until a few months after "The Whisperer in Darkness." We must remember that the writers in the Weird Tales circle regularly discussed and shared drafts of their work with one another, which is how HPL beat Smith to the punch when it came to introducing his own creation.

When "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" was published, Smith talks a bit more about Tsathoggua by reference to one of his idols:

He was very squat and pot-bellied, his head was more like a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with an imitation of short fur, giving somehow a vague sensation of both the bat and the sloth. His sleepy lids were half-lowered over his globular eyes; the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth.

Smith would go on mention Tsathoggua several more times in his Hyperborean stories, as well as in his Averoigne stories, where the god appears under the variant name Sodagui. From these other stories, we learn that Tsathoggua – also known as Zhothaqquah – once dwelled on the planet Cykranosh, which we call Saturn, where "some of [his] relatives were still resident ... and were worshipped by its peoples." His relatives include his "uncle," having the unpronounceable name of Hziulquoigmnzhah, about which I'll have a little more to say in an upcoming post.

From "The Seven Geases," we find out that, after having from Saturn "in years immediately foIlowing the Earth's creation," Tsathoggua slept in a secret cave beneath Mount Voormithadreth. That story describes him as having "great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad." This particular story is interesting, because Tsathoggua not only appears in the flesh but actually speaks, carrying on a brief conversation with its unfortunate protagonist, Ralibar Vooz. We also learn that the god enjoys blood sacrifices offered to him by his worshipers.

I can't help but wonder why it was that Tsathoggua, of all of Smith's creations, should be the one that Lovecraft (and, apparently, Robert E. Howard, though the story in question was never completed during his lifetime) should find compelling enough to include in his own stories, if only by reference. I don't really have any theories to offer, since, as fond as I am of Tsathoggua, he's nothing truly notable about him. Perhaps Lovecraft and others simply liked the sound of his name. Whatever the reason, I think it's unquestionably the case that Tsathoggua is Smith's most well-known creation. 

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Isle of the Torturers

Clark Ashton Smith’s cycle of stories set on Earth’s last continent, Zothique, has long been a personal favorite of mine. For that reason, I assumed I had already written a Pulp Fantasy Library post about each of its tales. I was mistaken. An obvious omission was “The Isle of the Torturers,” first published in the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales. This lapse strikes me as particularly odd, since the story is among the most memorable in the cycle, rich with images and ideas that recur throughout Smith’s work. It is, in fact, a minor masterpiece of decadent irony, a grim parable about the impossibility of escape in a dying world.

Like the other Zothique stories, “The Isle of the Torturers” gives voice to Smith’s cosmic pessimism. Written during his most fertile period as a prose writer, it captures the moment when his poetic sensibility fused seamlessly with the demands of pulp fantasy. As with “The End of the Story,” which I discussed last week, it is less a conventional adventure than a dark moral fable, concerned not with triumph but with a protagonist trapped between two equally terminal forms of damnation.

The tale opens with a cataclysm known as the Silver Death, a plague foretold by astrologers to descend from the star Achernar and perhaps inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” This scourge does not merely kill; it transforms its victims into rigid, gleaming corpses, their flesh sealed in a “bright, metallic pallor.” Young King Fulbra of Yoros survives only because his sorcerer, Vemdeez, fashions a magical ring of black-jeweled stone that repels the contagion. Fulbra’s subsequent flight from his silent, silvered kingdom is no journey toward renewal or safety. It is a panicked retreat into the wider, equally doomed world of Zothique.

Cast ashore on the island of Uccastrog, Fulbra discovers that he has exchanged the indifference of Nature for the calculated cruelty of Man. Uccastrog is ruled by King Ildrac, whose people have elevated torture into a supreme esthetic discipline, giving the island both its infamous sobriquet and the story its title. Here, pain has become the last meaningful sensation in a world where extinction looms ever closer. Torture is not merely punitive or sadistic; it is treated as a refined art, one of the few remaining assertions of human will in the face of cosmic decay.

Smith’s treatment of torture is distinctive. He does not linger on visceral realism but instead cloaks suffering in an ornate, almost ceremonial elegance. The torments prepared for Fulbra, such as the constricting coils of hair-covered, ell-long serpents or the psychological horror of a glass-walled dungeon, are described with the same meticulous care Smith might apply to exotic landscapes or jeweled relics. The effect is unsettling. The reader is drawn in by the beauty of the language even as the subject matter repels, reinforcing the story’s theme of estheticized despair.

At the heart of the tale’s irony stands Ilvaa, a woman of Uccastrog who appears to take pity on Fulbra. She offers him hope, whispering of a hidden vessel and an escape from Ildrac’s dungeons. Smith deliberately plays upon the reader’s expectations here, invoking the familiar “rescuer” trope only to subvert it with shocking cruelty. Ilvaa is not Fulbra’s savior but a living instrument of torture. Her role is to weaponize hope itself, intensifying Fulbra’s suffering when she finally reveals that there is, in truth, no escape. Psychological torment proves as refined and devastating as any physical agony.

The story’s climax delivers a form of poetic justice characteristic of Smith at his most mordant. King Ildrac, covetous of Fulbra’s protective ring, forcibly removes it, unleashing the Silver Death that had been suppressed but patiently “waiting” within Fulbra’s flesh. The very plague Fulbra crossed the sea to escape becomes, paradoxically, his sole means of release from the torturers of Uccastrog.

As the silver crust spreads over Ildrac and Fulbra alike, Smith closes the tale with a line of chilling finality:

“And oblivion claimed the isle of Uccastrog; and the torturers were one with the tortured.”

“The Isle of the Torturers” captures the elegant hopelessness of Zothique with exceptional clarity. It mourns the erosion of human agency in a universe governed by entropy, while refusing to offer the consolation of heroic resistance or moral victory. Instead, Smith gives us a king who finds his only peace in becoming a statue. The story ultimately suggests that we are all fugitives from a fate that cannot be outrun, a fate that will, sooner or later, claim us, regardless of how desperately we attempt to flee.

The Glittering Lure

I could not permit the 120th anniversary of the birth of Robert Ervin Howard to pass without a comment, however brief. The problem is that, after all these years, what more could I possibly say about him, his work, and his legacy that others have not already said before and said better?

Even so, Howard persists, not as a relic of the pulp era and not merely as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, but as a writer whose vision still exerts a mighty gravitational pull. His stories refuse to stay put in their historical moment. They feel immediate, urgent, volatile, and alive. That is no accident. Howard did not write as an antiquarian or as a stylist; he wrote as someone possessed by an idea. Civilization, in his view, is a fragile veneer stretched over something older, darker, and more honest. His fiction presents this truth again and again, not as theory but as lived experience.

In a 1926 letter to his friend, Tevis Clyde Smith, Howard enclosed a short poem:

I am the spur 

That rides men's souls,

The glittering lure

That leads around the world.

It is tempting to read this as youthful bravado, but it also functions as a manifesto of sorts. Howard understood the power of story as provocation, as something that drives people rather than comforts them. His tales are spurs: they prod, unsettle, and awaken half-buried instincts. They lure readers not toward safety or progress but toward forgotten ages of blood, fire, and iron. I think this is the crux of his appeal. Howard does not reassure us about who we are; he reminds us of what we once were and what, perhaps, we still are.

Conan is the most famous expression of this vision, but he is far from its only vehicle. Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, each embodies a different response to the same underlying tension. Barbarism and civilization are locked in an endless cycle and neither emerges morally unscathed. Howard’s heroes stand between these worlds, belonging fully to neither. They are not noble savages or enlightened rulers. They are survivors. Their virtues are physical, instinctual, hard-won. Through them, Howard staged his ongoing argument with modernity itself.

What makes this compelling is its sincerity. Howard believed what he wrote. The loneliness, the defiance, the brooding fatalism – these are not literary poses. They are emotional truths drawn from a young man struggling with isolation, economic anxiety, and a deep sense of historical displacement. Even when his plots verge on melodrama, the conviction behind them carries everything forward. His stories do not feel manufactured; they feel lived in.

This is why Howard’s legacy extends far beyond sword-and-sorcery. Undoubtedly, he helped shape that genre, but, more importantly, he articulated a worldview that continues to resonate. Tabletop roleplaying games, modern fantasy, movies, TV shows, comics, and more carry his imprint. Yet he remains oddly marginal in literary discussions. He's admired and cited, but rarely examined with the seriousness he deserves. That is slowly changing and rightly so.

Consequently, anniversaries like this matter not because they allow us to say something new about him and his work, but because they give us the opportunity to say something again. To reread “Beyond the Black River.” To rediscover an overlooked poem. To remember that a young man from Cross Plains, Texas reshaped modern fantasy not through polish or prestige, but through raw imaginative force.

Howard died young, but his stories endure as spurs still digging into the soul, glittering lures drawing us back to lost ages of steel and shadow. On this 120th anniversary of his birth, that seems reason enough to pause, tip one’s hat, and acknowledge the truth of his own words: he still leads his readers around the world.

Lost in the Maze

Lost in the Maze by James Maliszewski

Doing Labyrinths Right

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Retrospective: Trail of Tsathogghua

I continue in my Quixotic quest to find RPG products that show the influence, explicit or otherwise, of Clark Ashton Smith. As I wrote last week, this has proven a surprisingly difficult endeavor, so I hope I can be forgiven for grasping at whatever straws I can find, which is why, this week, I'm taking a look at Trail of Tsathogghua, a scenario pack for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, first published in 1984. 

Now, as I've mentioned many times before, the Dungeons & Dragons module, Castle Amber, is probably – probably – what first introduced me to Clark Ashton Smith. I can't say that for certain, especially after forty-five years, in part because Call of Cthulhu was released the very same year, 1981, and it includes a number of references to Smith and his creations, most notably Tsathoggua. Having been a devoted CoC fan since its initial appearance, it's just possible that it was this game rather than Castle Amber that turned me on to CAS, but I think that unlikely.

Speaking of Tsathoggua, perceptive readers will no doubt have noticed that I spell the name of the Hyperborean bat-toad god differently than does the title of this scenario pack. For reasons unknown to me, author Keith Herber inserted an "h" into the deity's name, an addition not attested in Smith's own work nor, for that matter, in Call of Cthulhu itself, whose entry on him spells it as I do. Given that CAS includes a mangled spelling of the name (Zothaqquah) in his Averoigne stories, this isn't a particularly unusual variant, but I nevertheless can't help but wonder why it was used here.

Trail of Tsathoggua is a 64-page book, featuring a terrific cover by Steve Purcell, an artist who, in his later career, would work for LucasArts, Nelvana, and Pixar. The book consists of three adventures, the first two of which are loosely connected to one another, while the third stands on its own and is, by far, the best of the trio – and indeed widely regarded as one of the best Call of Cthulhu scenarios of its early years. 

The first adventure shares its title with the book itself, albeit with the definite article added, "The Trail of Tsathogghua." It concerns an Miskatonic University archeological expedition to Greenland, where a massive stone slab carved with a giant bas-relief and odd hieroglyphs has recently been discovered. As it turns out, the slab is an artifact of ancient Hyperborea, as described by Clark Ashton Smith, providing information not just about the prehistory of the region but also about the location of a temple to Tsathoggua that is strongly implied to be the same one Satampra Zeiros attempted to plunder untold millennia ago.

The second adventure, "The Curse of Tsathogghua," moves to Canada, British Columbia specifically, as characters investigate rumors of the Sasquatch and a connection to the Greenland expedition from the first adventure. Like the first scenario, this one has a connection to Smith's work, albeit a more tangential one, since the Sasquatch are depicted as present-day descendants of the furry Voormis of Hyperborea. The adventure also includes the possibility that, if successful, the investigators might draw the attention and patronage of the Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King (incorrectly called simply William Lyon McKenzie [sic] in the text), who, in real life, was secret Spiritualist with a keen interest in the occult. 

The third and final adventure, "The Haunted House," a title it shares with the classic adventure found at the back of the Call of Cthulhu rulebook, takes place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has little to do with the other two. Instead, it focuses on the Van Laaden Mansion, which is plagued by all manner of unusual and possibly supernatural events. The explanation for this is a clever and genuinely spooky one: centuries ago, a druid merged his consciousness into a tree that was later felled and shipped to America as some of the lumber used to build the Van Laaden Mansion. Now, his spirit possesses the place and wreaks havoc.

Taken as a whole, Trail of Tsathogghua is a mixed bag, but there are enough good ideas here to make it useful to almost any Keeper running a Call of Cthulhu campaign. As a fan of Clark Ashton Smith, it's nice to see ideas from his Hyperborea cycle incorporated into the game, even if the incorporation doesn't have a huge overall impact. Too few RPGs look to CAS at all, so I suppose I'm naturally inclined to give bonus points to products like this one that make even a small effort to do so.

The Original "Dungeon" Delver

Today marks the birthday of Abraham Merritt, an early twentieth-century writer whose work I have long championed on this blog. That advocacy sometimes feels quixotic, since Merritt is far less read today than many of his contemporaries. That’s a shame, because his distinctive contribution to fantasy deserves wider recognition. Merritt helped popularize the idea that the greatest adventures are not across oceans or among the stars, but beneath our feet.

Again and again, Merritt sends his characters downward into hidden worlds. The Moon Pool is perhaps the clearest example. What begins as a scientific expedition soon becomes a descent into a sealed subterranean realm, complete with alien rulers, strange technologies, and layered environments that must be navigated step by step. The story almost reads like a traditional dungeon expedition, with each new chamber revealing fresh dangers and deeper mysteries.

Merritt returned to this idea repeatedly. Dwellers in the Mirage takes explorers beneath the Arctic ice into a buried world populated by ancient races and quasi-divine beings. Even The Metal Monster, though set in a remote valley rather than underground, follows the same logic of a sealed environment ruled by an inhuman intelligence, structured for exploration rather than mere sightseeing. In all of these stories, Merritt treats space itself as the engine of narrative.

Of course, Merritt didn’t invent the idea of subterranean worlds, but he transformed it. Earlier writers often treated hidden realms as philosophical curiosities or lost utopias. Merritt turned them into adventure locales – layered, dangerous, and ruled by inhuman powers. Most importantly, his characters didn’t simply arrive in these places. They descended. Depth meant danger, and discovery always came at a cost.

That model proved enormously influential. You can see echoes of Merritt in later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and even Richard Shaver. More importantly, for the purposes of this blog, you can see it in Gary Gygax. In Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax placed Merritt alongside Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt as among “the most immediate influences upon AD&D.”

Why would he do that? I can’t say for certain and it’s quite possible Gygax explained his reasoning elsewhere (if so, I’d love to know where). But I can’t help suspect it has something to do with Merritt’s portrayal of underground expeditions. After all, the gameplay of classic Dungeons & Dragons looks something like this:

• Enter a ruin
• Descend level by level
• Encounter strange monsters and factions
• Recover dangerous artifacts
• Retreat to safety

That’s more or less The Moon Pool with dice.

Merritt’s real gift wasn’t tone or character, but structure. He showed how to make a location the driver of adventure. His hidden worlds are layered, ancient, and repurposed, exactly like a good dungeon. They feel inhabited, dangerous, and full of history.

Every time a referee designs a buried city, a sealed vault, or an underground empire, he's working in a tradition Merritt helped popularize. He taught readers (and later gamers) that every cave mouth might be a gateway and every descent a story waiting to happen. Even if almost no one remembers him today, that doesn’t diminish his contribution. Merritt helped shape how we imagine adventure itself. That’s a legacy worth celebrating, especially today, on the 142nd anniversary of his birth.

The Big Brothers of Man

The Big Brothers of Man by James Maliszewski

More About the Gargantuas

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"Foul Vampire! Accursed Lamia!"

Most stories that appeared in Weird Tales received accompanying artwork, usually on the title page. Clark Ashton Smith's "The End of the Story" is no different, featuring this illustration, which depicts the confrontation between Hilaire, abbot of Périgon, and the lamia, Nycea. I can't quite make out the signature of the artist at the bottom right, so I'm unable to identify him with certainty. I think the initials are "HR," which, if so, suggests the artist is Hugh Rankin, who illustrated several of H.P. Lovecraft's during the same time period.

Regardless, it's a very odd illustration. From the text of the story itself, I assume it depicts the abbot brandishing his aspergillum, which Smith calls (incorrectly) an aspergillus – the world's tiniest aspergillum, it would seem! 

Pulp Fantasy Library: The End of the Story

When I was writing my three-part series on the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, I realized that I had somehow never written a Pulp Fantasy Library post about “The End of the Story,” the very first tale of the Averoigne cycle, appearing in the May 1930 issue of Weird Tales. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. “The End of the Story” is frequently overlooked, probably because, unlike most other entries in the cycle, it is set not in the Middle Ages but in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution. [Note: The text linked above gives the date as 1798, which I believe is simply a typographical error. —JDM]

Even so, I feel a little sheepish about this, as it's an excellent story, both within the Averoigne cycle and within Smith's larger body of work. It's also one of his earliest fiction works, written just a few years after "The Abominations of Yondo." Though still a relative amateur at prose, the story nevertheless presents a clear expression of Smith’s decadent sympathies and his esthetic rebellion against conventional morality. Consequently, it is less a horror story than a parable of temptation and the lingering bitterness that follows salvation.

The story is framed as a manuscript discovered after the mysterious disappearance of a young law student, Christophe Morand. The manuscript contains his confession, written at his father’s estate near Moulins in the province of Averoigne. What Morand recounts there is not a description of an ordeal escaped, but of a paradise glimpsed and lost.

Caught in a violent storm while riding through the forest, Christophe stumbles upon the abbey of Périgon, where he is warmly received by its abbot, Hilaire. The abbot is no ascetic but rather a cultivated Epicurean. He is well-fed, well-read, proud of his wine cellar, and even prouder of his astonishing library. The abbot’s library is a treasure trove of lost antiquities, holding lost fragments of Sappho, an unknown dialog of Plato, and many other unique literary and philosophical curiosities. 

Also present is a hidden volume that the abbot fears – an anonymous text written in archaic French, which he claims is cursed. Hilaire's warning is melodramatic, full of signs of the Cross and invocations of Satan. Unfortunately, it's precisely for this reason that Christophe is so tempted by it. Smith handles the temptation represented by the forbidden text beautifully. It is not lust, ambition, or even greed that drives Christophe, but pure esthetic curiosity. It is the scholar’s hunger for forbidden beauty.

When Christophe eventually does read the manuscript, he finds that it tells of Gérard de Venteillon, a medieval knight who, on the eve of his wedding, encounters a satyr in the forest. The creature whispers a secret so powerful that Gérard abandons his faith, his fiancée, and the world itself. He then follows a hidden path to the ruins of Château des Faussesflammes, presses a triangular stone, and descends into the earth, never to return.

The satyr says that

The power of Christ has prevailed like a black frost on all the woods, the fields, the rivers, the mountains, where abode in their felicity the glad, immortal goddesses and nymphs of yore. But still, in cryptic caverns of the earth, in places far underground, like the hell your priests have fabled, there dwells pagan loveliness, there cry the pagan ecstasies."

Though the words are those of a satyr, it seems clear to me that they're also the words of Smith himself, who had little use for formal religion of any kind, least of all medieval Christianity.

Later, from his window at the abbey, Christophe recognizes nearby ruins. Like Gérard before him, he feels irresistibly drawn to them. Ignoring every warning, he slips away, finds the triangular stone, and descends into the vaults beneath Faussesflammes. Instead of the horror he was promised, Christophe discovers a radiant pastoral world – a classical paradise of laurel groves, flowing rivers, marble palaces, satyrs, and nymphs. This is no hellscape but Arcadia restored, the world Christianity erased.

At the heart of this paradise waits Nycea. She is one of Smith’s most memorable creations: a lamia, an ancient vampire-serpent whom Christophe perceives only as a goddess of beauty. Their meeting is neither violent nor coercive. It is, in fact, strangely tender, luxurious, and, above all, intoxicating. Yet Christophe’s response goes beyond simple lust, just as his desire for the forbidden manuscript in the abbey was more than mere curiosity. Nycea represents recognition, the sense that he has always loved her without knowing it. Smith presents their union not as corruption but as fulfillment. The reader is meant to understand why Christophe would risk damnation for her.

It is at this point that Hilaire bursts in, brandishing holy water. Nycea flees, and the paradise Christophe has discovered collapses into dust. The vision vanishes, and he comes to his senses amid the rubble of the vaults beneath Faussesflammes. Hilaire explains that Nycea is an ancient demon who lures men to their doom, drains them, and devours them. The manuscript was her bait, her carefully laid trap. Gérard and countless others met their deaths this way, and Christophe, the abbot insists, is fortunate to have escaped the same fate.

Christophe feels no gratitude. He feels only rage. He does not believe he has been rescued; he believes he has been robbed.

Unheedful whether or not he had rescued me from dire physical and spiritual perils, I lamented the beautiful dream of which he had deprived me. The kisses of Nycea burned softly in my memory, and I knew that whatever she was, woman or demon or serpent, there was no one in all the world who could ever arouse in me the same love and the same delight.

The true end of the story comes when Christophe vows to return. He swears that he will seek out the ruins of Faussesflammes again and descend once more into the vaults below. He has chosen to risk death and damnation, because he cannot unsee paradise and cannot accept a world without it.

“The End of the Story” is among Smith’s finest tales. Though it differs in many respects from later Averoigne stories, I have always found it especially compelling. Those later entries lean more overtly into the grotesque, but this one is strangely moving and elegiac. It mourns not only the loss of one man’s vision of paradise but also the passing of an older, pagan world – a realm of beauty, sensuality, and wonder erased by the march of Christianity and history.

In the end, Smith does not ask us to decide whether Christophe is a fool or a tragic hero. Instead, he leaves us with something far more unsettling: the suggestion that some illusions are worth dying for and that paradise, once glimpsed, can never truly be forgotten.

The Voice of Clark Ashton Smith

Even though he lived until 1961, there is not, so far as I am aware, any film footage of Clark Ashton Smith. There is, however, a recording of his voice, made in the 1950s, reciting some of his poetry. It's well worth a listen, if you have the time.