Dr Hermes Reviews - HORROR
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CLARK ASHTON SMITH

"The Beast of Averoigne"
"The Colossus of Ylourgne"
"The Dark Eidolon"
"The Double Shadow"
"A Prophecy of Monsters"
"Ubbo-Sathla"

"The Beast of Averoigne" (Aug 31, 2005) Lately, I've been rediscovering Clark Ashton Smith. The problem was that when I first started reading his stories, I was too young and got the mistaken idea they were all just huge impenetrable blocks of unfamiliar words and that nothing much was really happening beyond the pretty language. Well, you live and (hopefully) learn. Since then, I've been recently realizing what a wonderfully creative and ironic writer he really was. This also means that I can now look forward to checking out a hundred stories or so by him. "The Beast of Averoigne" (from the May 1933 issue of WEIRD TALES) is a very neatly done tale combining science-fiction and the supernatural without seeming strained at all. (Lovecraft of course was famous for this, but not too many writers could blend the two genres well. Stories about vampires on spaceships and so forth always seemed a bit forced to me.) "Indeed, it were well that none should believe the story: for thin is the veil between man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies." Great stuff, as evocative as Lovecraft's famous, "We live on a placid isle of ignorance" passage. This is a tale from 14th Century France, written down for us by its protagonist, the astrologer and sorcerer Luc de Chaudronnier. During the summer of 1369, a red comet appeared in the skies and was visible every night over Averoigne. Well, this seems to be one time that the old folk lore about comets being bad omens was right on the money, because the Beast immediately started turning up. This brute is a black horror with a reddish glow around it, sort of like a seven-foot serpent with flexible tentacle-limbs, a snake-like head with glowing eyes and plenty of teeth you could shave with. The monster has a unique diet, too, as it limits itself to ripping out the spines of beasts and humans, and devouring the marrow. (Sort of a specialized diet, like the koala or panda.) As the weeks go by and the list of victims starts getting longer, the countryside is understandably in a panic. Figuring that the monster is some sort of devil literally from Hell (connected somehow with that terrifying red comet in the sky each night), the abbot of Perigon vows to track it down. So, taking a group of Brothers with plenty of both faith and courage, they set out and search the countryside each night with torches. No luck. The darn thing even gets bold enough to start picking off the monks themselves and all the prayers, crosses and holy water don't seem to even slow it down. Slightly desperate, the clergy resort to asking Luc de Chaudronnier for help. They're not wild about dealing with a sorcerer but they have to admit their traditional exorcisms just aren't working. De Chaudronnier agrees to track down the Beast and refuses their offer of reward. Luckily for the countryside, de Chaudronnier is not just a misunderstood pioneer scientist, experimenting ahead of his time in chemistry and astronomy. No, sir -- he's a genuine necromancer and practitioner of black magic. Most intriguingly, he possesses a ring passed down to him from his fathers, wizards before him. "The ring had come down from ancient Hyperborea, and it had once been the property of the sorcerer Eibon.... In the gem an antique demon was held captive, a spirit from prehuman worlds, which would answer the interrogation of sorcerers." It turns out that the dread Beast is in fact coming down from the comet every night, and its natural form is both invisible and intangible... in order to make its kills, it has to taken on physical form through possession of a living thing. Even then, there is only one way it can possibly be destroyed. Yikes. Nevertheless, de Chaudronnier sets out to confront the horror that night, accompanied by two burly men-at-arms, mounted and armored and carrying swords and halberds. The sorcerer leads them, but all he takes with him is a small hammer. (Hmm. that's strange, what is he up to?) Smith's Averoigne stories are actually the most accessible and traditional of his various cycles. The ones he set in ancient Hyperborea or in Zothique, when the sun is dying and the world is coming to its end, are packed with names I would hate to try to pronounce (my poor Spellchecker is going to hate me) and his admittedly impressive vocabulary skids out of all control. Still, they are very much worth the effort to read; once you settle into his rhythms and sly humor, the stories are very enjoyable. In his day, he was one of WEIRD TALES' elite trinity of authors. While Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft have certainly gotten their share of renewed popularity and critical evaluation, Smith is way due for the same.

"The Colossus of Ylourgne" (Dec 26, 2005) From the June 1934 issue of WEIRD TALES, this is one of Clark Ashton Smith's longer tales. "The Colossus of Ylourgne" is a Monster On the Loose epic that is hard to beat for sheer gruesomeness. It's 1281 in the province of Averoigne, and the sorcerer Nathaire is near to dying. This triple threat warlock (alchemist, astrologer and necromancer) is twisted in every sense of the word. A particularly wicked and malicious villain, he is also a deformed dwarf, lame because of a cobble thrown at him by a mob. Like the similarly aggrieved Narthos in "The Black Eidolon", Nathaire is not one to quickly forgive and he has long nursed a bitter hatred for the town of Vyones. With his ten apprentices, Nathaire abruptly drops from sight but is soon spotted in the ruins of the castle of Ylourgne. You'd have to be a deranged little sorcerer to consider taking up residence in this haunted rubble, "built by a line of evil and marauding barons now extinct". A mile away on the opposite side of the valley, the brothers of Cistercian monastery can't help but notice strange lights and suspicious noises coming from the ruins at night. Even for Averoigne, which has quite a long history of assorted monsters and demons, things get out of hand as corpses start digging their way up out of the graves and rushing through the countryside toward the castle. Only freshly deceased men in good condition are summoned this way, and (as you might imagine) the morale of the population is not improved by experiencing weeks of migratory stiffs leaving their resting places to run off eagerly for some unknown reason. What exactly is Nathaire up to? Why has he smashed out the interior walls of the old castle to make one immense chamber? Why are his disciples hacking up the newly arrived cadavers into chunks of flesh and separate bones? What the hell, dude? When two monks rather bravely enter the ruins, they find their crosses and holy water and prayers don't work worth a dime. Nathaire humiliates them and sends them back with the suggestive warning, "They that came here as many shall go forth as one." Gasard du Nord is a former student of Nathaire's, who dropped out of the classes when he saw they were going to be a bit TOO unholy and vile for him to take. He's as close to a traditional hero as Smith seemed to get; even then, he's a sorcerer himself who believes only black magic can fight black magic. Gaspard suspects his former teacher is planning some tomfoolery that no one in the countryside is likely to survive; he goes to investigate but ends up thrown in a slimy pit. Now it seems like this might be the final Averoigne story, as Nathaire's Colossus rears his ugly pale head up one hundred feet above the ground and sets out. The Colossus is not your mere Japanese kaiju lumbering about and causing destruction without noticing it, nor is he a sympathetic ape searching for the waif who won his heart. Nope, this atrocity is actively evil. He stomps all over the landscape, "leaving behind him, as a reaper his swath, an ever-lengthening zone of havoc, of rapine and carnage." Even worse, he deliberately defiles and abuses his victims in ways we'd be better off not knowing about. The Colossus doesn't even bother to pluck arrows and spears from his carcass as he cheerfully makes Nathaire's darkest wishes come true. You get used to Smith's esoteric vocabulary quickly enough. Even when a word is so obscure it's almost unfair to use it, the context helps. So there are no places where you are baffled enough to lose track of what's going on. Smith also has a skill at choosing exactly the right phrase to give a medieval atmosphere, provide a strong visual and add to the grisly nightmarish quality of the story -- all at the same time. In fact, Smith's wordcraft is so polished and precise that I was jarred when he repeated himself. "Like a death-drunken Cyclops" and "like a maniacal Cyclops" appear a few pages apart, and there are very few pulp writers who I would notice using similar phrases like that. (In fact, most pulpsters repeated themselves so much that certain tags and descriptions became almost like comforting slogans.) You might notice too that organized religion is in for some abuse in Smith's tales. Sorcery, necromancy, black magic and that sort of mischief work just fine. But holy symbols and prayers are repeatedly shown to be quite useless. The monks who assail the castle of Nathaire have their large heavy crosses taken away and are then beaten with them. Adding insult to injury, I calls that. It's understandable that Nathaire is out specifically to smoosh cathedrals and monasteries under the Colossus' unattractive feet; he was forced to flee his abode because of the threat of the Inquisition.But there's a certain glee in the way the Colossus degrades his clerical victims, which makes me wonder about Smith's religious views and whether he had some philosophical grudge. I'd like to see G.K. Chesterton read a few of the Averoigne stories while hooked up to a blood pressure monitor. The final fate of the Colossus is quietly haunting and rather macabre, but frankly, it's a bit of an anticlimax after the monster's rampage. I was expecting a more dramatic finale, but the final image sticks in the memory. There's a temptation to go on a binge of Clark Ashton Smith stories, but I think he's a writer better taken in doses spaced out so the experience lasts longer.

"The Dark Eidolon" (Nov 2, 2005) Having spent most of my life reading, I have a reasonably adequate vocabulary but a story by Clark Ashton Smith is a real test of how many obscure words you can recognize. "Eidolon" itself is right in the title, and the pages are crammed with speed bumps like odalisques, cachinnation, porphyry, nacarat, hautboys, saltant, aludels... *yike*. Ease up there, Clark. However, the meanings of most of these jokers can be guessed at from the context and are not essential to following the story. You can always look them up later and they may come in handy someday while doing a particularly uncooperative crossword puzzle. And I don't think Smith was being pretentious or showing off merely for its own sake. A self-educated poet, this seems to have just been the way his mind worked. His use of language produces a dazzling effect as one bizarre image or figure of speech follows another. It's rather like watching a fireworks display with your pupils still dilated from a session at the ophthalmologist. In fact, it is the densely detailed descriptions of the various ghoulish shenanigans which make this story memorable. The plot itself of "The Dark Eidolon" is not particularly complicated or inventive. A little beggar boy named Narthos is trampled beneath the hooves of the prince Zotulla's palfrey (see, I told you; a palfrey is a light saddle-horse). Barely surviving, bearing forever the mark of one hoofprint on his body, Narthos becomes an apprentice to a wizard out in the desert, mastering all kinds of sinister forbidden arts so that he may one day get his revenge on the arrogant prince. Now known and dreaded as Namrriha, he erects overnight a huge palace next to Zotulla's. As the king frets and worries over what the infamous sorcerer intends, his nerves are shredded further by what happens each night. The sound of heavy hooves thundering through the streets with no horses visible to make them, and leaving deep hoofprints burned right into marble that get closer to Zotulla each time until finally they are driven right into the door of his bedchamber. Then King Zotulla receives an invitation from Namirrha to attend a feast. The horrifying goings-on at this banquet are difficult to describe short of quoting huge chunks of the story. In fact, there are so many mummies and zombies and unholy hybrid creatures that it starts to become funny in a sick way. If the various monsters and casual cruelties are enough to make the reader uneasy, Zotulla is fairly close to cardiac arrest (he is attended by the rotting corpse of the father he himself murdered with an adder to get the throne) before Namirrh finally begins to explain just why he is doing all this. It's actually worse than you imagined at first, and things go terribly wrong even for Namirrha. The fatalistic ending is downbeat indeed. "The Dark Eidolon" first appeared in the January 1935 issue of WEIRD TALES, part of Smith's "Zothique" cycle of stories. We are deep into the distant future, when "the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as with a vapor of blood. New stars without number had declared themselves in the heavens, and the shadows of the infinite had fallen closer." Zothique is the sole remaining continent; in its cities and villages, science has been forgotten and black magic reared up again with a vengeance. (By the way, Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH is set on a similar premise, and is a real gem of interlocking short stories.) The people of this era are all so decadent and jaded and over-sophisticated that they make our aristocratic European jetset look like giggling Campfire Girls. The ancient gods have returned, again demanding worship and human sacrifice in exchange for secrets of sorcery. (I particularly like the way the darkest and grimmest god is named Thasaidon; the obvious echoes of "Poseidon" hint that this is the same immortal spirit finally returned in a slightly different guise.) Thasaidon is represented by a statue of an armored warrior with a huge mace in one uplifted mitt; the gods speaks to Namirrha from this "dark eidolon" and frankly, things would have gone better for the crazed warlock if he had listened to Thasaidon's counsel." As packed with gruesome details as this story is, one or two aspects stand out. Trampled as a child by a horse, Namirrha plots his vengeance with a horse theme. There are the unseen ghostly steeds which thunder back and forth all night to terrorize Zotulla and there are the very impressive "macrocosmic stallions of Thamogorgos" which overrun an entire city, crushing its towers beneath their hooves. These things are the scariest horses I've met in pulp fiction. "...Looking up, the emperor saw their eyes halfway between earth and zenith, like baleful suns that glare down from soaring cumuli." What stuck in my mind most when first reading this story at an impressionable age is the moment when Namirrha finds himself in a body in which "the legs had turned suddenly to the hind legs of a black stallion, with hooves that glowed redly as if heated by infernal fires." Leaving smoking hoofprints on the marble floor, the monster strides over to a terrified girl and "raised one glowing hoof and set the hoof on her naked bosom..." as the helpless Zotulla watches. The scene has stuck in my mind all these years, and reading it now, it still gives me the willies. I don't think I can take too much Clark Ashton Smith at one time.

"The Double Shadow" (Sep 20, 2006) Clark Ashton Smith himself picked this as one of his favorites. In 1933, he self-published THE DOUBLE SHADOW AND OTHER FANTASIES, a collection of six short stories in a limited edition of 1000 copies (in which he personally corrected typos). His choices are revealing. "The Voyage of King Euvoran" is a goofy tall tale about what amounts to be the grandest wild goose chase in history, and "The Willow Landscape" is a gentle charmer that actually has a sort of happy ending (almost unique in Smith's output). Some real surprises here. Most of his stories are cynical little gems of evil and irony, but every now and then, he wrote something quite different. (THE DOUBLE SHADOW was reprinted a few years ago by our friends at Wildside Press.) Now, Clark Ashton Smith was primarily a poet by inclination, so his fantasy stories have a certain enticing cadence when read out loud. I took Smith's esoteric vocabulary as a personal challenge when first encountering his stuff at around eleven or twelve years old and kept a dictionary at hand. It seemed clear that he wasn't flinging obscurities around just to impress people but was carefully choosing them for precise meaning and effect. (Still, I seldom find a conversation in daily life where I can work in empery, volutes, thuribles, infrangible or deliquescent -- and that's just from this one story!) "The Double Shadow" itself appeared in the February 1939 issue of WEIRD TALES. We're back in Poseidonis, the last surviving isle left when Atlantis foundered, and a wizard's acolyte named Pharpetron is writing about how he must set down this warning and cast it into the sea before he transforms into something that would destroy the manuscript. So right in the opening sentences, we can tell that things have gone very wrong and naturally we're curious to see how and why. (Smith was fond of opening with a paragraph that hinted at some awful fate to the narrator and then slowly teasing us by revealing the facts.) It seems that Pharpetron is studying under a sorcerer named Avyctes, himself the only surviving student of the dreaded Malgyris "who lay dead for years while men believed him living; who, lying thus, still uttered potent spells and dire oracles with decaying lips." (Malgyris appears in other stories in Smith's Poseidonis cycle.) The two men reside in a stark white mansion atop cliffs overlooking the sea, and they have for years been digging deeper and deeper into forbidden arts. Just as a hint of the sort of lives they lead, Pharpetron and Avyctes are guarded by statues and mummies, and their meals are served by liches and phantoms. (Well, you can get used to anything I suppose, but zombies in the kitchen...? Must be some mess. I hope they wear gloves.) Avyctes is getting pretty adept at summoning demons from the fifth and seventh planets (that's wisdom from ancient Thule), gaining knowledge of the far future (a trick brought over from Mu), and even traveling "the road between the atoms" (that was an art saved from their lost homeland Atlantis). But the elderly warlock is not content. He wants ever darker and deeper secrets, going beyond what even the most notorious magicians have learned and (sure enough) he eventually pushes his luck too far. After a terrible storm, a strange metal tablet is found on the beach, and nothing even in Avyctes' extensive library can help decipher the unknown signs etched into one side of the object. Thinking he's on to the great find he's always dreamed of, the sorcerer and his student summon up the ghost of a magician from a long-gone prehistoric era. This vague insubstantial shade tells them that "the letters on the tablet were those of the serpent-men, whose primal continent had sunk eons before the lifting of Hyperborea from the ooze. But the ghost could tell us naught of their significance; for, even in his time, the serpent-people had become a dubious legend; and their deep, antehuman lore and sorcery were things irretrievable by man." Really worked up by now, Avyctes sends the ghost back through time countless ages to the era of the serpent-men themselves. When the spirit returns almost dissipated, it lasts long enough to inform them how to translate the inscription. The sorcerer and his student then act out the conjuration with the help of their huge walking mummy, summoning something they know not the name or nature of from a non-human race long extinct. You know, does this sound like a good idea to you...? For a while, it seems nothing at all happens. Evidently, the spell was past its expiration date. Pharpetron is greatly relieved at this apparent anticlimax,until he notices that his master now has a second shadow attached to him. This new shadow is of a weird unnatural color and its shape is not quite right. ("...Its form was altogether monstrous, seeming to move as if cast by one who trod erect, but having the squat head and long, undulant body of things that should creep rather than walk.") Much to his alarm, Ayvctes finds none of his magic has any effect on his new tagalong and he resigns himself to whatever its intentions might be. Although Pharpetron attempts to make a break for it, he cannot leave the estate. The space between the genuine shadow and this newcomer narrows ominously, and both men fret over what will happen when the shadows merge.... The mention of the long-gone serpent-men may ring a faint bell in the memory of fantasy fans; in Robert E Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom" from 1929, the Atlantean barbarian Kull tangles with the ultimate sinister conspiracy when he tries to free his kingdom from the nonhuman creatures. In Howard's story, the serpent-men have heads just like those of a big snake but they conceal this behind an illusion that fades when they are slain. These monsters have been walking among us since the beginning of our species, impersonating humans they had killed, and causing all sorts of horrors with their scheming. Quite a concept*. Howard's serpent-men may well be the same critters which Smith described here and in "Ubbo-Sathla" as inhabited the very first continent. Smith had them dying out before true men appeared, but we could take it that some still survived in their stealthy concealment among the humans they manipulated. Lovecraft, Howard and Smith often dropped names from each others' stories into their own, and if the details sometimes didn't quite matchup, no harm done. Their own internal mythologies and chronologies were not developed all that rigorously either. It was the emotional effect these references produced in readers that was important. _________ *I have a vague memory of having read decades ago that some group (religious or political) actually did believe in literal "snake men" who were descended from Eve and the Serpent in the Garden. Well, I suppose it's no weirder than some of the other things people have believed in through the ages. Maybe it's in Madame Blavatsky's works, which have given great plot springboards to writers from Talbot Mundy to Edgar Rice Burroughs.

"A Prophecy of Monsters" (June 27, 2003) From the October 1954 issue of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, this is an unexpected treat. "Clark Ashton Smith?" I muttered, "I guess I know what that means. It'll be a lot of 'Ilthanoquahr the necromancer gazed out on the opalescent dawn of moribund Averoigne and let the irridescent tourmalines, all verdant and ebon, clink between his mauve gauntleted fingers.' Better get the dictionary ready." No such thing, This is a compact, streamlined tale told in a clear style. In just three pages, Smith sets up his premise, lays out just enough hints and foreshadowings and then closes with a neat punch line. I definitely have got to track down more of his work that wasn't written in a Dunsany stupor. We open on a moonlit country lane with a classic werewolf transformation, the hellbeast struggling to get out of his human clothing before the changing body rips them apart. There's some interesting trivia about the touch of silver bothers him so much even as a person that he can't use cutlery in restaurants and refuses to accept coins when making purchases. "Steel, too, was a substance unfriendly to beings like him, and the time came when he could abide it little more than silver." As our lycanthrope finds a likely spot on his quiet backroad to ambush a passerby, he reflects that he's not the only monster in the world. "The vampire still survived, subtler and deadler, protected by man's incredulity... moreover, there were monsters unknown as yet to myth and superstition." That's suggestive. "But in no sense was he kin to those monsters beyond nature, the spawn of a newer and blacker magic, who killed without hunger and without malevolence." Then a tall, powerfully built figure comes striding confidently through the night and the werewolf pounces. Instantly, he's flung back in shock and pain, reverting to human. "As the change began, he spat out several lupine fangs; and then he was spitting human teeth." Showing no pain or any fear, the seemingly unhurt stranger moves menacingly toward him. This would have made a terrific five minute skit on the old NIGHT GALLERY show. Certainly, it's too slight to either be developed into a half hour episode of an anthology series, but it might make a basis for an interesting little direct to video feature.

"Ubbo-Sathla" (July 9, 2006) I am sure that, somewhere along the line, Clark Ashton Smith wrote a story so packed with esoteric words and sly allusions that I will not be able to figure it out at all (most likely I will take it for one of those spam pieces you get which are completely incoherent). This isn't that story, though. "Ubbo-Sathla" shows Smith doing a fine Lovecraft impression and his vocabulary remains within reasonable limits. Unfortunately, it also means that the droll sense of humor which marks Smith at his best only rises once or twice to smirk at us from the page. From the July 1933 issue of WEIRD TALES, "Ubbo-Sathla" is (on the surface, at least), Smith making his own contribution to the "Cthulhu Mythos" which Lovecraft started and which he playfully encouraged his colleagues to embellish. Lovecraft and Smith together must have annoyed proofreaders considerably, what with their bizarre words and names. I know my spellchecker overheats and makes stuttering noises when I tap in stuff like "Ph'nglul mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"; to pronounce that rightly, you are supposed to have your jaw broken in several places and speak before the pieces heal together. In this story, Smith not only introduces the sorcerer Zon Mezzamalech of ancient Hyperborea, but he brings up Lovecraft's beasties again with variant spellings, Yok-Sothoth and Kthulhut, just in case the editor was getting complacent. And he tosses his own Tsathoggua in as well, this time as Zhothaqquah. Be that as it may, "Ubbo-Sathla" is a rather slight and inconsequential story, but interesting in its existential way. An antiquarian named Paul Tregardis is loitering in a London curio shop, where he finds something interesting amid the fossil eggs, Aztec idols, ornate daggers and old black & white copies of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. This is a small crystal orb, slightly flattened at the ends, which seems to contain a pulsing light within it. The stone reportedly was found in Greenland under the glacial ice. The shopkeeper thinks it might have belonged to "some sorcerer of primeval Thule. Greenland was a warm, fertile region beneath the sun of Miocene times." (Whoa, is he telling us there were human civilizations twenty million years ago or did he just get his terms mixed up? Maybe Pliocene, but even that's stretching it.) Buying the crystal and hurrying home, Tregardis shows us that he is no mere dilettante but a serious student of Forbidden Knowledge. He gets out his own copy of THE BOOK OF EIBON, which he obtained with great difficulty. This is the medieval French translation of a work "which is supposed to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea." THE BOOK OF EIBON is thus much much older and more blasphemous and mind-blowing than even the NECRONOMICON itself (so there, you Mad Arab you!). Tregardis takes to gazing into the gem, drifting back in spirit through the ages until he becomes one with the wizard Zon Mezzamalech. (I'm not clear if Zon was an earlier incarnation of Tregardis or if they just have crystal-ogling in common, and maybe it doesn't matter.) Tregardis finds it increasingly harder to snap out of the reveries and get back to 1933 London in time for tea, and eventually he yields altogether. Actually, the same thing is happening to Zon Mezzamalech too; twenty million years earlier, he is fading back to delve into the very source of all living things. Yep, it's Ubbo-Sathla his own self. Now, the various gods or aliens or what-have-you we meet in these stories tend not to make a good first impression. But this being is remarkably unattractive even by Cthulhian standards. "There, in the gray beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life." Hmm. Well, it's not quite how scientists think life evolved the way I last heard but if a theory (with good reasoning behind it) was put forth that the first living cells formed a large mass from which smaller organisms broke off, I suppose I could tentatively accept it. It certainly wouldn't fill me with shuddering horror and give me nightmares from which I woke up sweating. (I rather enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould's WONDERFUL LIFE, for example.) But then I am not one of the 1933 readers that Clark Ashton Smith was mischievously trying to shock and apall. If you believe in a literal interpretation of the book of GENESIS or simply that we were directly crafted and shaped by a Creator, then Ubbo-Sathla is a blasphemous thought; and if you found evidence that Ubbo-Sathla really existed, I think it might shake you up a bit. Come to think of it, as disturbing as Lovecraft's concepts are even in these morally flexible times, they must have been really unsettling to the more conservative audiences of their first presentations. There are a couple of other points worth noting in the story, such as the mention of "the lost serpentmen who reared their cities of black gneiss and fought their venomous wars in the world's first continent." I take this as a reference to the Kull story "The Shadow KIngdom " by fellow WEIRD TALES contributor Robert E. Howard. And there is Smith's concept of premundane "gods who died before the Earth was born. They had passed to the lightless void, leaving their lore inscribed upon tablets of ultrastellar stone..." Quite a concept. I think Clark Ashton Smith deserves to have his work thoroughly annotated the way Lovecraft and Howard have been.