3
As if to confirm Derleth’s assessment, Smith politely thanked him for his suggested revisions, adding “good; but I’m none too fond of the story, and shan’t feel like reworking any of it if I can sell it anywhere as it stands. I have other ideas that interest me more.”4
By this time Smith was submitting those stories that he thought had a chance to Ghost Stories because of their higher rate of payment, and by mid-June he was still waiting to hear back from its editor Daniel Wheeler. Its rejection may be inferred from the fact that he next submitted it to Wright, who also rejected the story on grounds that “it lacks the convincingness of most of your stories. It is not nearly as convincing or thrilling, for instance, as Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model’—to mention a story of similar theme.”5 (This may have stung a little, since Smith acknowledged that story as the inspiration for his own.)6 Smith also mentions that Harry Bates returned the manuscript “ostensibly for lack of print space.”7
Some weeks after Wright’s rejection Smith made some changes to the story, “leaving it more in doubt as to what is actually going on in the studio up to the last moment, and adding at the end, for contrast to the mindless girl who is beyond ‘even the memory of horror,’a last vision of the ghoul-infested gulf, ‘the ravening faces, the hunger contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultra-dimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge’.”8
At first Smith was still not satisfied with “The Hunters from Beyond:” “The tale doesn’t please me very well—the integral mood seems a little second-rate, probably because the treatment of modern atmosphere is rather uncongenial for me.”9 Not long after writing this, less than ten days, Smith began to change his opinion: “‘The Hunters’ looked pretty good when I read it over the other day, and I think I prefer it to the Helman Carnby thing now, though I didn’t at first.”10 He elaborated upon this later , explaining that “my preference for ‘The Hunters from Beyond’ is based on its style, too. I agree that Carnby has a more original plot; but it seems to need some additional atmospheric development.”11 However, the reevaluation or reassessment seems to have been rather short-lived, since when Bates bought the revised version Smith called it “the least original of my recent yarns.”12 When it appeared in the October 1932 issue of ST, where it received the cover illustration that Smith rather liked, he told Derleth “‘The Hunters’ is no great favorite of mine either; but it seems to shine by comparison with the other tales.”13 He later selected it for inclusion in LW. Our text is based upon the typescript dated August 11, 1931 at JHL.
The story may have been inspired by an actual experience that occurred while the young Smith was suffering from an attack of tuberculosis. Writing in the November 1934 issue of Charles D. Hornig’s fanzine The Fantasy Fan, CAS described in “The Demonian Face” how
About 1918 I was in ill health and, during a short visit to San Francisco, was sitting one day in the Bohemian Club, to which I had been given a guest’s card of admission. Happening to look up, I saw a frightful demonian face with twisted rootlike eyebrows and oblique fiery-slitted eyes, which seemed to emerge momentarily from the air about nine feet above me and lean toward my seat. The thing disappeared as it approached me, but left an ineffaceable impression of malignity, horror, and loathsomeness. If an hallucination, it was certainly seen amid appropriate surroundings; if an actual entity, it was no doubt the kind that would be likely to haunt a club in one of our modern Gomorrahs.
14
1. CAS, letter to AWD, May 1, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, May 8, 1931 (SL 153).
3. AWD, letter to CAS, May 12, 1931 (ms, JHL).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, May 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
5. FW, letter to CAS, June 30, 1931 (ms, JHL).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, May 8, 1931 (SL 153).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, July 11, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
8. CAS, letter to AWD, August 18, 1931 (SL 160-161).
9. CAS, letter to AWD, August 28, 1931 (SL 161).
10. CAS, letter to AWD, September 6, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
11. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
12. CAS, letter to DAW, November 21, 1931 (ms, MHS).
13. CAS, letter to AWD, July 19, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
14. PD 40.
APPENDIX TWO:
ALTERNATE ENDING TO
“THE RETURN OF THE SORCERER”
Begins immediately after the paragraph “It was not my own violition…”
I seemed to know with a loathly prescience the sight that awaited me beyond the sill. But the reality would have put to shame the foulest enormities of the nether pits. Carnby—or what remained of him—was lying on the floor; and above him stooped an unbelievable thing—the nude, headless body of a man, already blue with incipient putrefaction, and marked with earth-stains. At wrist and elbow and shoulder, at knee and ankle and hip, there were red sutures where the sundered limbs had been knit together in some hellish fashion, by the power of a will that was more than mortal. The Thing was holding a bloody surgeon’s saw in its right hand; and I saw that its work had been completed….
Surely, it would seem, I was viewing the climax of all conceivable horror. But even as the Thing knelt with its ghastly tool suspended above the remains of its victim, there came a violent crash from the cupboard, as if something had been hurled against the door. The lock must have been defective; for the door burst open, and a human head emerged and bounded to the floor. It rolled over, and lay facing the medley of human fragments, that had been John Carnby. It was in the same condition of decay as the body; but I swear that the eyes were alive with malignant hate. Even with the marks of corruption upon them, the features bore a manifest likeness of those of John Carnby; and plainly they could belong only to a twin brother.
I was beyond horror, beyond terror; and I do not believe I could have stirred again if it had not been for the thing that happened now. As if the animating and uniting power had been removed with the completion of its task, the headless cadaver toppled to the floor, scattered in all its original portions. The life had gone out of the eyes in that terrible head; and there was nothing but a heap of mouldy members, beside the fresh fragments of that other.
The spell was broken. I felt that something had withdrawn from the room—the overpowering volition that had held me captive was gone. It had released me, even as it had released the corpse of Helman Carnby. I was free to go; and I fled from that ghastly room and ran headlong through an unlit house, and into the outer darkness.
APPENDIX THREE:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“The Door to Saturn.” ST 1, no.3 (January 1932): 390-403. In LW.
“The Red World of Polaris.” Red World of Polaris by Clark Ashton Smith. Edited by Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003).
“Told in the Desert.” Over the Edge. Edited by August Derleth (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964; London: Victor Gollancz, 1967; London: Arrow, 1976). In OD.
“The Willow Landscape.” Philippine Magazine (May 1931). WT 34, no.1 (June-July 1939): 87-90. In DS, GL.
“A Rendezvous in Averoigne.” WT 17, no. 3 (April-May 1931): 364-374. WT 33, no. 1 (January 1939): 112-22. In OST, RA.
“The Gorgon.” WT 19, no.3 (April 1932): 551-58. In LW.