Beyond the Ken of Sublunar Spirits

Cover by Bruce Pennington. Panther Books, 1974.

"The Beast of Averoigne," by Clark Ashton Smith.

After time spent reading stories in Weird Tales that took too many pages to begin and too many words to say what a single noun or verb could have managed, I went back to this old favourite, first read in 1974, and found it as effective now as it was back then.

Smith's training in verse had taught him the value of compression. Not even C. L. Moore, Smith's Weird Tales rival in concepts and imagery, could match the density of his prose.

Too many stories are written as if the primary unit of information were the paragraph, but traditional poetic forms require a tighter focus, not only on the sentence, not only on the clause, but on the word. Smith understood this, and was willing to let a bare statement do all the work of implication that he needed:

"So, on the forenoon of that same day, Theophile, together with Gerome and six others chosen for their hardihood, sallied forth and made search of the forest for miles around. They entered with torches and lifted crosses the deep caves to which they came, but found no fiercer thing than wolf or badger. Also, they searched the crumbling vaults of the deserted castle of Faussesflammes, which was said to be haunted by vampires. But nowhere could they trace the monster or find any sign of its lairing."

This method allowed him to put the reader into a scene without needless elaboration:

"On the night following the desecration of the graves, two charcoal-burners who plied their trade in the forest not far from Perigon, were slain in their hut. Other charcoal-burners, dwelling near by, heard the shrill screams that fell to sudden silence; and peering fearfully through the chinks of their bolted doors, they saw anon in the starlight the departure of a black, obscenely glowing shape that issued from the hut."

"Peering fearfully through the chinks of their bolted doors" is just enough physical detail to give the scene a sense of place. Smith provides the detail, and then moves on.

His trust in the magic of words allowed him to state briefly what others might feel compelled to spell out in detail:

"Vainly I consulted the stars and made use of geomancy and necromancy; and the familiars whom I interrogated professed themselves ignorant, saying that the Beast was altogether alien and beyond the ken of sublunar spirits."

Always, the descriptions are brief, and conveyed in motion:

"Passing among the ancient trees that towered thickly behind Perigon, he thought that he discerned a light from the windows, and was much cheered thereby. But, going on, he saw that the light was near at hand, beneath a lowering bough. It moved as with the flitting of a fen-fire, and was of changeable color, being pale as a corposant, or ruddy as new-spilled blood, or green as the poisonous distillation that surrounds the moon."

As a result, the story moves rapidly at a steady pace.

This version published in Weird Tales is leaner and swifter than the original, and for that reason I prefer it. (It also has an effective use of a Chekhov's Gun in its gem-imprisoned demon, which adds to its appeal for me.)

I can understand that many readers might find compressed writing difficult to process, that they might prefer a slower pace and less density of information. But I have my own tastes, and the aesthetic qualities that drew me to Clark Ashton Smith decades ago still hold me in their spell.