A Really, Really Big Frankenstein's Monster

 

cover art by Margaret Brundage

Recently, I posted the above image (concept art by stop-motion pioneer Willis O'Brien) on Facebook. It's about a proposed sequel to the original King Kong. In this story, Kong would have survived the fall from the Empire State Building and eventually get into a fight with a giant monster made by Dr. Frankenstein's grandson.  I like Son of Kong and I'm not convinced that having Kong survive wouldn't irreparably hurt the emotional impact of the original film's ending. But, all the same, it's too bad we never got to see this story brought to live by O'Brien's genius.

Anyway, someone mentioned that this reminded him of the Clark Ashton Smith story "The Colossus of Ylourgne," originally published in the June 1934 issue of Weird Tales. 

This one is set in the make-believe medieval province of Averoigne, the setting for about a dozen of Smith's tale. A evil sorcerer named Nathaire has vanished from the city of Vyones. Soon after, dead men start digging their way out of graves or walking out of their own funerals, all traveling to the same creepy castle (known as Ylourgne). A former disciple of Nathaire, named Gerard, investigates.

Gerard discovers that Nathaire is using the corpses to build a colossus--a giant constructed from the bones and flesh of the dead men. Nathaire is dying, so he intends to transfer his soul into the colossus and rampage across Averoigne, destroying the city of Vyones and taking revenge upon them for former persecutions. 

Gerard ends up a prisoner in a pitch-dark dungeon, but manages to escape. By now the colossus is going full-on Kaiju against the province, but Gerard--with his own magical knowledge--thinks he might be able to stop it.

It's a great story--hitting an appropriately creepy vibe from start to finish, enlivined by Smith's great prose and his obvious enjoyment of dropping in obscure words. (Seriously, don't read a Smith story without a dictionary handy.)

Clark Ashton Smith must have been  influenced by Frankenstein when he wrote this one. Such is the influence of Mary Shelley that it's impossible to do a story about reanimating the dead without thinking about her novel. But Smith takes the idea in a different direction. It's interesting that Willis O'Brien was thinking about a similar take on the Frankenstein story just a year or so before "The Colossus of Ylourgne." I don't think O'Brien's idea was known to the public (though perhaps it was mentioned in a movie magazine at the time), so Clark was almost certainly thinking up a giant Frankenstein's monster independently. Great minds think alike, I guess.

A comment on my original Facebook post suggested a movie version of "Colossus" made in the 1930s could have starred Ernest Thesiger as Nathaire and Colin Clive as Gerard. I can see Thesiger as the main bad guy with no problem. I don't know if Clive is right for Gerard, who has a few action hero moments throughout the story that doesn't give me a Clive vibe. I think that a young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. would have been good in the part. With O'Brien animating the Colossus as it rampages acrosss medieval France, this would have been an awesome movie.

Thieves, Protoplasmic Monsters and Hounds from Before Time

Last week, we looked at H.P. Lovecraft's novella "The Whisperer in Darkness" and mentioned that Lovecraft included a couple of shout-outs to the horror stories of other writers, effectively making those stories a part of the Cthulhu mythos.

This led me to read both those stories, because it would have been literally impossible for me not to read them.

Frank Belknap Long's short story "The Hounds of Tandalos" appeared in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales and is impressive in how effectively it generates an atmosphere of horror in such a relatively short story.

The first-person narrator is asked by a guy named Chalmers (who has "the soul of a medieval ascetic") to participate in an experiment. The narrator is reluctant to do so, because he thinks the idea is insane--Chalmers wants to take a mind-expanding drug while concentrating on complex Einsteinian mathematics. This, he thinks, will allow his mind to travel back through time. He wants the narrator to write down whatever Chalmers observers.

Well, the experiment works--or perhaps Chalmers is just vividly hallucinating: "All the billions of lives that preceded me on this planet are before me at this moment. I see men of all ages, all races and colors. They are fighting, killing, building, dancing, singing. they are sitting about rude fires on lonely gray deserts, and flying through the air on monoplanes." Real or not, Chalmers provides us with some awesome imagery.

But then he goes back before life existed--only to discover that some sort of perverse life is there at the beginning of time: "All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment; I cannot be certain. But I heard them breathe. Indescribably for a moment I felt their breath on my face. They turned towards me and I fled screaming."

These were the Hounds of Tandalos--the source of all that is evil in our universe. Chalmers is terrified that they might follow him into the present and enter our world. The narrator at this point, deciding that Chalmers is now completely off the deep end, leaves in disgust. But later events may just prove that Chalmers had reason to be scared...

You can read the story HERE.

Clark Ahston Smith's creation--the evil god Tsathoggua--also gets a mention in Lovecraft's story. "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" was published after "The Whisperer in Darkness," appearing in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. But Lovecraft and Smith were regular correspondents. Lovecraft got to read the story before it was published and loved it.

There's a lot to love. Despite being a very effective and creepy horror story, Clark's story has a lot of humor in it. The story is set in Smith's Hyperborean cycle--a time before recorded history similar to the Hyborian Age that Robert E. Howard would create for Conan.

The title character is also the narrator, who claims that he and his partner are the best thieves in the world. One of the fun things about the story is that you can debate just how good these guys actually are at their chosen profession. Zeiros recounts some details of several amazing jobs they pulled off in the past, but at the moment they are broke. They spend their last few pennies on wine instead of bread because getting drunk will supposedly give them inspiration for their next job. So are they great thieves temporarily down on their luck, or are they mediocre thieves with delusions of grandeur?

In either case, they decide their next job will be to loot a city that was abandoned centuries ago and reputed to be a place of evil. Since the city was abandoned in a hurry after a prophesy warned the population to flee, the thieves figure there's likely to be a lot of valuables left behind.  They don't stop to wonder why no one had ever looted the supposedly empty city in the past.

The monster they inevitably meet is a protoplasmic creature that grows out of a basin full of thick liquid and pursues them relentless through the jungle surrounding the city and then back into the city once again. There is simply no escaping this thing and getting away with one's life will not be an easy task.

Like Lovecraft, Clark had a infallible skill at choosing just the right words and sentence structures to make his stories beg to be read aloud. The drawback to this, of course, is that you pretty much have no idea how to pronounce any of the names. And, no matter how smart and well-read you are, you will have to stop to look up word meanings at least a half-dozen times. None of this distracts from the fun of reading his stories, though. In fact, it enhances that fun.

"The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" is, like Long's story, very short but still very effective in generating the proper atmosphere. Where Long went for pure horror, Clark accomplished even more in that he inserted humor without lessening the horror. I have read a lot of Clark's stuff over the years, but this is one of my favorites.

You can read this story HERE.

"And the Evil of the Stars is not as the Evil of Earth."

Clark Ashton Smith is often spoken of in the same breath as H.P. Lovecraft. That's because the two were friends--they exchanged letters regularly for 15 years, though I can't for the life of me remember if they ever met in person. They both wrote horror stories often published in Weird Tales, often borrowing place names and and names of hideous Elder Gods from one another. Both presented a world in their fiction that was made frightening by the implication that there are powerful and inhuman beings flitting about the universe and occasionally stopping by Earth to sow a little bit of death and madness. In their worlds, there's a lot of stuff out there we're literally better off not knowing about.

In fact, it's really not hard at all to assume that Smith's and Lovecraft's stories take place in the same universe.Smith's "The Beast of Averoigne," for instance, was published in the May 1933 issue of Weird Tales.  Set in 14th Century France, it involves a creature that first appears on the night a red comet first appears in the sky. The horror "rises to the height of a tall man, and it moved with swaying of a great serpent, and it's members undulated as if boneless." It proves to have a taste for human bone marrow and feeds on a monk at an abbey and a couple of nearby villagers.

Smith, like Lovecraft, is a master of word choice and sentence construction--his Wikipedia entry accurately refers to his vocabulary as "wide and ornate."  There's an archaic feel to his prose--a style that fits his subject matter perfectly.

Smith's unique voice is what makes stories like "The Beast of

Averoigne"--which is essentially a pretty straightforward monster story--so much scary fun to read; the prose draws you back in time and sets you down in a different time and place. This time, we're transported to the side of a sorcerer who is recruited to destroy the beast. Using an ancient ring that contains a demon inside, he discovers that the beast "belonged to a race of stellar devils that had not visited the Earth since the foundering of Atlantis."  He also discovers a way of destroying it, but the act of doing so reveals something even more horrible about its existence here on Earth than was previously suspected.

It is, in fact, almost impossible not to assume the story is set in the same universe as Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" or "The Shadow of Innsmouth." Heck, the Beast could have been of the same race as Cthulhu or other Elder Things--maybe a toddler only a few million years old.

Gee whiz, now the toddlers I care for in my church's nursery don't seem so ill-behaved after all.