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.