Finishing up the Pre-Tolkien FantasyChallenge, I'm going to roll the last 2 reviews into because the stories are quite
short.
Clark
Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was considered one of the Big Three writers
of Weird Tales (the
others being his friends Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft).
Despite outliving either of them, he's fallen into relative
obscurity, despite his contributions to both Lovecraftian Horror and
Sword & Sorcery.
The Abominations of Yondo
was published in April, 1926 in Overland Monthly and Out
West Magazine, a
California-based magazine with publication going back to 1868. It had
published such authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte (who was its Editor
in Chief during its early years), Willa Cather, Jack London and John
Muir. In short, it was respectable.
The nameless
narrator of Abominations finds himself released into the
desolate wasteland of Yondo by the cruel Inquisitors of Ong. Having
been tortured for an unknown blasphemy, he narrates his journeys
through a strange desert and his encounters with weird creatures,
broken ruins, and horrifying monsters until his resolve breaks and he
flees back the way he came.
This is mood piece,
and a strong one at that. We have no idea who the narrator is, nor
what his crime was. Ong is described as a lion-headed god, but that's
all we learn about him or his Inquisition. The occupants of Yondo are
even weirder in this wasteland at the literal edge of the world. Who
they are, what they are, and why they are is all left to the reader's
imagination as the narrator flees through this nightmare world.
There is absolutely
nothing comparable to “standard” Tolkien-derivative fantasy
within it, but the monsters are maddeningly Lovecraftian, while the
cult of Ong would fit right in with Howard's Hyborean Age.
Finding a good cover of this specific issue of Blue Book was not feasible, so here's the Toho movie poster instead.
The Voice in the Night
was published in the November 1907 issue of Blue Book
Magazine (essentially Redbook's
cooler sibling that ceased publication in 1975, and a competitor of
Argosy). Its author,
William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an adventurous figure in his own
right. Sailor, bodybuilder, and photographer, he returned to England
and enlisted during World War I and was killed in action at the
Fourth Battle of Ypres at the age of 40.
Like
many of his short stories, The Voice in the Night
is set at sea, where land-based humans are especially vulnerable. In
it, the crew of a schooner in the North Pacific are hailed by a
rowboat begging for food. When the narrator tries to shine his light
out, the rowboat paddles out of view. Promising to put away the
light, the captain of the schooner sends out a box of foodstuffs. The
mysterious rower returns, and relates his sad story.
He and his fiancee
were abandoned by the crew of their ship and forced to make a raft.
Coming upon an island covered in strange gray fungi, they also find a
derelict ship moored there. The fungus grew on the ship in tall
piles, but they were able to survive on the ships' stores for a
while. Until the fungus started growing on them. Whenever they clean
it off, it grows back. Fleeing to a patch of beach untouched by the
fungus, but overcome by hunger, both eat some of it, and find it
difficult to resist eating it.
Realizing that they
cannot ever return to civilization because of how contagious this
stuff is, they resolve to quietly meet their fate on the island, and
the rower commends the crew of the schooner to God for their
generosity toward him and his fiancee. In the morning light, the
narrator on the schooner catches a glimpse of the rower as a covered
in gray fungal growths and barely recognizable as human.
Addictive gray
fungus with unstoppable growth that ultimately consumes whatever it
grows on is horrifying enough, but there's a deep layer of
Christianity that gives the doomed couple dignity. When approached by
the ship, the man actively avoids coming into contact with them, to
avoid contamination. When the fiancee is infected, she knows they
can't leave the island for the good of humanity. Rescue is
impossible, but the two face their impending deaths with a signature
British stiff upper lip and belief in the ultimate mercy of God.
Just imagine
anything like that getting released through a major traditional
publisher these days.
Curiously enough,
The Voice in the Night would serve as the basis for the 1963
Ishiro “I Created Godzilla” Honda movie Matango.
Liberties... were
taken.
What's been most interesting to me about this exercise has been in how the lines of what is "Fantasy" get blurred the further back in time you go. Weird fiction, horror, ghost stories; those are all integral parts of what Fantasy is. Tolkien certainly knew this when creating Middle-Earth, but he wrote The Lord of the Rings in a conscious effort to create a quintessentially English Epic (in the Beowulf sense). Magic was weird and rare in his works, but the dwarves and elves and hobbits and orcs are, basically, people. They have histories and cultures, songs and art. They're funny-looking humans, in a lot of ways.
That's fine, because Tolkien was a smart guy and knew that what he was doing was the exception, and not the rule. Fantasy itself is a no-limits kind of genre. Everything is possible within it, if its presented convincingly enough.
The problem arises from those who wanted to be the next Tolkien. Ponderous doorstoppers with twenty book series that lie unfinished at their creators' deaths, Dry and dusty histories of the world and long names with gratuitous hyphens and apostrophes chained within them. The elves, and the dwarves, and the orcs, and the
It needs to reclaim horror from the ghetto of jump scares and generic serial killers. Fantasy needs to start telling more ghost stories and unexplained just-so stories. If Fantasy is to grow, it needs to get WEIRD again.
1 comment:
Thanks for the post. I've never read The Voice in the Night but I'll give it a look. I have read the Abominations of Yondo and you're on target when you say it is a strong mood piece.
When it came to atmosphere, CAS was up there with the best and this one is a good example.
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