Smith apparently did not do anything with the story for some time. However, when a new competitor to WT arose in the form of the Clayton Magazine Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror (seven issues were published between September 1931 and January 1933), paid two cents a word upon acceptance as opposed to the one cent or less that WT paid upon publication (sometimes several months after publication), Smith submitted several stories to its editor, Harry Bates. CAS reported that Bates liked “The Epiphany of Death,” but returned it “on account of its brevity” and the acceptance of several other Smith stories, adding that Bates remarked “that he finds it hard to get atmospheric stuff.”4 He then submitted the story to Wright, who also rejected it: “I like [“The Epiphany of Death”], but I fear our readers would find it lacking in plot and left somewhat up in the air.” Smith then donated the story, along with several others that he was unable to sell, to Carl Swanson, a fan from Washburn, North Dakota who planned to bring out a magazine called Galaxy. Swanson never published the story, but Charles D. Hornig did when CAS let him have the some of the same stories for his fanzine The Fantasy Fan, which published the tale in the July 1934 issue. Dorothy McIlwraith accepted the story for twenty dollars, publishing it as “Who Are the Living?” in the September 1942 issue.6 It was included in AY under the original title. The current text generally follows the January 25, 1930 typescript.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (SL 109); “The Epiphany of Death” (ms, JHL).
2. HPL, letter to CAS, February 2, 1930 (ms, JHL).
3. CAS, letter to AWD, November 2, 1930 (SL 131); HPL, “The Outsider” (WT April 1926).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, April 9, 1931 (SL 150).
5. FW, letter to CAS, October 29, 1931 (ms, JHL).
6. Dorothy McIlwraith, letter to CAS, March 2, 1942 (ms, JHL).
A Murder in the Fourth Dimension
Completed on January 30, 1930, “A Murder in the Fourth Dimension” was rejected by Wright, who “thought the first part … was ‘unconvincing’.”1 It was accepted by David Lasser, science fiction editor for Hugo Gernsback’s magazines, who published it in Amazing Detective Stories (October 1930), thus making it the first sale by Smith to the man whom he and Lovecraft would come to refer to as “Hugo the Rat.” It was collected posthumously in OD.
Smith was not an admirer of detective stories, observing that “the true lover of mysteries is not likely to feel any lasting interest in detective stories. Not the least proof of Poe’s genius is that he abandoned this genre of writing as soon as he had mastered it.”2
1. CAS, letter to HPL, April 2, 1930 (SL 111).
2. BB item 167, p. 54.
The Devotee of Evil
Like “The Monster of the Prophecy,” “The Devotee of Evil” presents a somewhat complicated textual history, but in this case the revisions were made by Smith for aesthetic reasons and not to achieve commercial sale, which in fact he never achieved. The earliest mention of the story occurs in a letter to Lovecraft in which he discusses it under an early title as one among several stories that CAS was considering writing: “‘The Satanist’ won’t deal with ordinary devil-worship, but with the evocation of absolute cosmic evil, in the form of a black radiation that leaves the devotee petrified into a sable image of eternal horror.”1 (CAS had earlier used this imagery in his poem “Nyctalops” (WT October 1929),2 and would revisit it in an uncompleted novel, “The Infernal Star,” that he began as a possible serial for WT early in 1933.) A synopsis was found among Smith’s papers using the title “The Manichaean,” which he crossed out and replaced with the final title: “A devotee of absolute cosmic evil, who finally evokes {pure} evil in the form of a black radiation that leaves him petrified into a {…} image of eternal horror and {…}.”3 He completed the story on March 9, 1930, and submitted it to WT along with “The Epiphany of Death” and “A Murder in the Fourth Dimension,” but while Wright liked the story, CAS observed caustically “but not quite well enough”.4 Smith then submitted it to Harold Hersey’s Ghost Stories, but again to no avail. CAS put the story aside for several months before revising it “with a view to ridding it of certain vague verbosities; and I also cut down on the pseudo-scientific element.”5 Unfortunately, Wright rejected the story once more, noting that while “it has its points of excellence… I think it better to follow my usual custom of rejecting when in doubt.”6 CAS then donated the story to Carl Swanson (see “The Epiphany of Death” above), but Swanson of course never published it. He then tried submitting it to Illustrated Detective Magazine, “which is said to favor the psychic and the subtle rather than what is usually known as a detective story,”7 and to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, only meet with rejection yet again.8 CAS finally included the revised version in The Double Shadow, describing it on the advertising flyer which he circulated as “The story of a man who sought to evoke the ultra-cosmic radiation of Evil in its absolute purity—and succeeded.” Several years later, CAS let Donald A. Wollheim publish it in the February 1941 issue of Stirring Science Stories, where it was graced with a fine illustration by Hannes Bok. Unfortunately, like Swanson’s Galaxy, Stirring Science Stories depended upon free stories at first, with payment forthcoming once the magazine was profitable, so it is unlikely that CAS received any payment for this appearance.9
Smith may have been inspired by an actual tragedy that occurred in Auburn in 1904, when Adolph Weber murdered both of his parents, his brother and his sister, and set fire to their home. (Weber was hanged at the nearby Folsom Prison in 1906.)10 The house that he describes was based upon an actual domicile at 153 Sacramento Street (now demolished after being gutted in a fire), which was reputed to be haunted.11
Smith included the story in AY. Our current text follows The Double Shadow, checked against the revised version for errors.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (SL 110).
2. The last stanza reads:
We have seen fair colors
That dwell not in the light—
Intenser gold and iris
Occult and recondite;
We have seen the black suns
Pouring forth the night.
(
The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith
, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002]: 75.)
3. SS 157
4. CAS, letter to HPL, April 2, 1930 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early November 1931 (SL 166).
6. FW, letter to CAS, November 12, 1931 (ms, JHL).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, July 10, 1932 (SL 180).
8. Times-Picayune [New Orleans], letter to CAS, June 20, 1932 (ms, JHL).
9. See Harry Warner Jr., All Our Yesterdays (Chicago, IL: Advent, 1969), pp. 79-80.
10. See M. E. Gilberg, Auburn: A California mining camp comes of age (Newcastle, CA: Gilmar Press, 1986), pp. 84-85.
11. CAS, letter to HPL, March 11, 1930 (LL 8).
The Satyr
The Satyr,” which CAS completed on March 31, 1930, was the second story set in the medieval French province of Averoigne that he introduced in “The End of the Story.” Lovecraft wrote that