#zothique

(Part I)

Clark Ashton Smith stories I've read, ranked

1.) The Charnel God. 10/10. Beautiful and tense and enchanting from start to finish. My favorite type of horror AKA horror that melts into another genre (here, high fantasy) so completely they're nigh-indistinguishable. Dark fantasy at it's finest. A nobleman flees the downfall of his house, and he and his betrothed seek refuge in a tavern in a foreign city. When his betrothed lapses into a mild coma, she's whisked away to the temple of a mysterious god who devours the dead. Breaking ancient and sacred laws, he descends into the maze of subterranean tombs to steal her back. Side plot with pervy necromancers. Shithead innkeeper cameo. Flawless ending. I love this setting, I am OBSESSED with this god, I just--GOD, please read the Charnel God.

2.) Moving on from that fit of personality I was having there, we have The Demon of the Flower! Is it high fantasy? Science fantasy? Science fiction? Horror-Science-Fantasy? Who knows! What I do know is that, on a distant world, evil, sapient flowers with strange abilities rule over a broken and terrified human slave caste who are forced to worship the flowers and offer human sacrifices. One king-priest seeks to slay the flower that has demanded his fiancee as a sacrifice. I love this setting. I love this plot. I love this everything. Also 10/10, plus, it gets a bonus prize for best title.

3.) The Isle of the Torturers. FUN FUN FUN. This is PURE, whumpy, make that man SUFFER fun, and I wanna write a whole fucking book about it. Straight grimdark fantasy. A young king flees his country after a magical plague wipes out nearly everyone else. A storm wrecks his ship on the shores of an island who's inhabitants love to torture people. That's. That's IT. They torture everyone who shows up there! It is. Amazing. This stupid racist bat looked me dead in the eye and went "yo Rex, what if an entire county was just violent sexual sadists?" and it fucking rules. 9/10.

This question might surprise you, and yet it should be asked.

Today when people speak of Lovecraft's work or Lovecraftian horror, they mostly think of the type of fiction popularized by games like "Arkham Horror" or the Call of Cthulhu RPG. People of the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s USA, mostly the East Coast, mostly New-England, fighting eldritch monsters, alien abominations and other multi-eyed blobs while investigating creepy cults, ancient witchraft (well... ancient usually means "Salems' trial) and other star-alignments. Not very fairytale-y.

And yet, Lovecraft wasn't just all this. Lovecraft is usually considered one of the early fantasy authors, and he has an entire set of works not taking place in our world, but rather in fictional cities, otherwordly civilizations, alien planets - and all being... well pure fantasy of gods, sorcerers, strange monsters and fictional wanderers in a world of ghosts, magic and curses. They are still famous to this day, and they are an essential part of his "mythos" and yet people seem to completely forget about them. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath, The Quest of Iranon, The Other Gods, The White Ship, The Doom that Came to Sarnath, The Cats of Ulthar... Much more dark fantasy than what people associate Lovecraft with today.

In this "fantasy" side of his (that fans of the mythos sometimes classify as the "Dreamlands"), we see the HUGE influence of Lord Dunsany, that Lovecraft admired and tried to imitate, but also the influence of... The One Thousand and One Nights. One of the main reasons Lovecraft had such an "Orientalist" obsession was because he was a huge fan of The Arabian Nights, and tried to recreate them in his own work. This Orientalist obsession was also caused in him by Beckford's Vathek, the unique "Oriental Gothic" novel that marked literature (Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, John Keats, they all paid homage to Vathek) - but we fall back on our fairytale topic, because Vathek itself was meant to be a Gothic horror version of the One Thousand and One Nights (and quite fittingly it was published in the 1780s, aka the end of the "fairytale era" in France, the time when literary fairytales only existed in parodies, deconstructions or subversions).

Due to this huge influence, the question should be asked: Should Lovecrfantasy works, his Ulthar, Sarnath, Iranon, Kaddath, be considered part of a fairytale-verse?

Well my answer is no. No, Lovecraft doesn't write fairytale-like things and I never saw fairytale vibes in his work.

But then why am I making a whole damn post? Because of Clark Ashton Smith.

There's a lot of things people ignore or go wrong with when it comes to Lovecraftian fiction or the "Cthulhu mythos". This is because The Cthulhu mythos was built out of many rewrites, derivative works, adaptations and pop-culture vibes. People forget the mythos was originally called "Yog-Sothoth mythos". People forget Cthulhu wasn't the focus of the mythos. People forget water was supposed to be Cthulhu's main bane and enemy, as it was the sea that trapped him and prevented his powers from working - so making him a sort of sea-god is the opposite of what Lovecraft intended. Lot of stuff like that.

But what people forget the most is that the "Cthulhu mythos" we know today wasn't created just by Lovecraft himself - but by the "Lovecraftian circle". Yes, Lovecraft invented it all first, created and oversaw the whole thing - but he encouraged and asked his friends and pen-pals to include in their writings elements and characters of his fictional worlds so as to "expand" the mythos, and in return said friends and pen-pals created their own dark gods and evil sorcerers and cursed tomes that Lovecraft included in his own works, to form a full circle. The Lovecraftian circle.

For example, it might surprise people to learn that Conan the Barbarian is part of the Cthulhu mythos. And yet he is! Robert E. Howard was one of the most prominent members of the Lovecraftian circle, inventing several important parts of the mythos as we know it today - and his most famous heroes, like Conan the Barbarian or Solomon Kane, all had to face a part of the "Lovecraftian mythos" at one point or another. Today we don't associate the prototype of heroic fantasy with "eldritch horror", and yet it was - but Robert E. Howard had a quite different take on the monstrous gods of Lovecraft, who were much more physical and... let's say killable Xp In fact that's one of the things with the Lovecraftian circle: each author had its own take and vibes on the eldritch deities of Lovecraft's pantheons. Sometimes the emphasis was put on them being alien beings and physical monsters, sometimes they were more like the classical gods of Antiquity (just uglier), other times yet they were more abstract ideas and concepts...

And the third important author of the circle, outside of Lovecraft and Howard, was Clark Ashton Smith, who was REALLY much more of a fantasy author than the other two. And he also was VERY much into fairytales - a lot of the same Arabian Nights as Lovecraft (heck, Smith even wrote a sequel to Vathek!), but he also was a big fan of Andersen and madame d'Aulnoy fairytales as a kid. And, if you ask me, you can feel a lot the "dark Arabian Nights" vibe into his Zothique work.

As I am writing these lines, I am reading compiled works of Smith. Smith was very prolific and created several "cycles" covering various alternate periods of Earth. There's the Hyperborean cycle, set on the fictional Hyperborea country of legends, and in the Prehistoric era before the Ice Age - this is where many of the "classics" gods of the Cthulhu mythos comes from, like Atlach-Nacha, Abhoth or Tsathoggua. There's the Poseidonis setting, an island meant to be the last remaining part of Atlantis after its sinking. There's the Averoigne cycle, which I am looking forward to explore because Averoigne is a fictional region of medieval Southern France infested with witches of all sorts. But the compiled volume I am reading currently is his Zothique collection - set in the continent of Zothique. It is supposed to be the last remaining continent of Earth, a new Pangea that reformed itself at the end of the planet's history, and where all the "ancient gods, old demons and primal magics" resurfaced after being forgotten and ignored for many civilizations. And despite being located in a far-far future, Zothique is heavily Arabian Nights inspired - as Smith intended the Zothique continent to be what remained in the future of "Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia, India" plus North and Eastern Africa.