Weird Tales published “The Dark Eidolon” in the January 1935 issue, along with an illustration that Smith did that earned him an extra seven dollars. It was warmly received by both the readers (sharing a four-way tie for first place with Robert Bloch’s “The Feast in the Abbey,” Seabury Quinn’s “Hands of the Dead,” and Laurence J. Cahill’s “Charon”) and by CAS’s fellow writers. Lovecraft wrote that “‘The Dark Eidolon’ is gaining a clamorous & unanimous panegyric among all my correspondents—& it certainly deserves it. ’dopol, what a yarn! It comes close to the best W T has ever printed.”6 “The Dark Eidolon” was included in OST and RA. The present text is based upon the carbon typescript kept by Smith and now deposited at Brown University.
1. BB item 10.
2. See note to “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” VA 329-330.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, December 23, 1932 (SL 198).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, January 4, 1933 (ms, SHSW).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, January 16, 1933 (ms, SHSW).
6. HPL, letter to CAS, January 23-24, 1935 to c. Feb. 1935 (AHT). At the same time Lovecraft wrote of the January 1935 Weird Tales “C A S is the whole thing. What a magnificent opiate ‘The Dark Eidolon’ is!” (Letter to AWD, January 28, 1932 [Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008), p. 677]).
The Voyage of King Euvoran
Smith announced the composition of “The Voyage of King Euvoran” in a letter to Derleth written in mid-January 1933, describing it as “humorous and grotesque rather than terrific.”1 He submitted it to Farnsworth Wright with the suggestion that it might be suitable both for Weird Tales and its sister publication The Magic Carpet, but Wright rejected it, “saying he had enjoyed it greatly himself, but feared that it would not have enough plot and suspense for many of his readers. I agree, in a way—it’s hardly a magazine story, but is more like a narrative poem in prose. If I print a pamphlet, I may include it for variety.”2 When Smith printed The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, “The Voyage of King Euvoran” was the lead story.
About a decade later, Smith looked to capitalize on the success of his first Arkham House collection Out of Space and Time by submitting old stories that had not seen professional publication to a new generation of editors, such as Dorothy McIlwraith at Weird Tales and Mary Gnaedinger at Famous Fantastic Mysteries. He cut out a third of “King Euvoran,” reducing it from nine thousand to six thousand words, and changed the title to “Quest of the Gazolba.”3 McIlwraith accepted it, and not only published it in the September 1947 issue of Weird Tales, but had Boris Dolgov prepare a wonderful cover illustration that captures precisely the flavor of the story. When Smith decided to include the tale in his fourth Arkham House collection, The Abominations of Yondo, in 1960, he not only restored the original title but also used the 1933 text. No typescript or manuscript exists of this version, so we consulted a copy of The Double Shadow that bears Smith’s handwritten corrections.
A reader who has read the stories in this series in sequence will undoubtedly notice that the overall tone of this tale of Zothique, the fifth in that series, is more akin to that of a “Hyperborean Grotesque,” to borrow the appellation Smith gave that series in Out of Space and Time. It seems that Smith originally conceived of “King Euvoran” as an entry in the earlier series, since it appears on a proposed table of contents for a hypothetical Book of Hyperborea book project described in the Black Book.4
1. CAS, letter to AWD, January 16, 1933 (ms, SHSW).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 9, 1933 (SL 201).
3. CAS, letter to AWD, July 9, 1946 (ms, SHSW).
4. BB item 8.
Vulthoom
An exceptionally complete synopsis of this, the third tale of Aihai (Mars), which was originally to have received the somewhat frivolous title “Beach-Combers of Mars,” exists among the Smith papers:
Two earthmen, stranded on Mars, and without funds, are approached by a great Martian, who offers them lucrative employment of an unspecified nature. Accepting the offer, they find themselves in the hands of the followers of Vulthoom, the evil deity of the Martians, who is worshipped in underground temples. Vulthoom is an actual being, almost immortal, who is said to have come to Mars thousands of years before from a world of the outer void. He is possessed of mysterious, though not necessarily supernatural, powers. His worship is forbidden by law, but he has many adherents, and desires to establish his power on earth as well as on Mars. He makes use of a terrible and degrading drug, administered as a perfume to enslave his devotees. The drug, which emanates from a fossilized flower, is worshipped on his altars, and gives off its carnalizing, brutalizing odor beneath the application of heat.
The two earthmen are compelled to take part in the ritual of the drug. One falls a temporary victim to its influence; the other, through some rare constitutional quirk, is comparatively immune. At the height of the drug-orgy, Vulthoom appears behind a geometric screen of {... } and approaches the terrestrials with a proposition. He will send them back to earth to proselytize his cause, if they will go voluntarily.
They refuse, and are turned loose in his caverns, ostensibly to wander as they will, but actually prisoners, besieged by terrible impressions and subtle influences—even pseudo-memories of a subjection to Vulthoom in some other frame of time and space—all of which is designed to break down their resistance. They see the frightful weaponries of Vulthoom; and a bodiless voice tells them the use of these weapons, to impress them further with the powers of the strange lord. They are separated, and each is made to believe that the other has yielded. Chanler, the more resistant, mad with rage at this belief, shatters a vial which is one of the weapons of Vulthoom—a vial that looses a black fire which eats its way upward through matter, and lets in the waters of the Yahan Canal on the cavern-world of the monster. Trying to escape before this catastrophe, Chanler finds his companion in the universal confusion; and both of them see Vulthoom for the first and last time, as the waters sweep him {...} cataract from his hidden sanctuary.
{detail:} Vulthoom and his people have awakened after a hibernation of a thousand akkals, or ten thousand years.
1
Smith began “Vulthoom” in October 1932, but did not finish the story until February 14, 1933. In the aftermath of the “Dweller in the Gulf” fiasco, CAS was no longer submitting stories to Wonder Stories; Strange Tales was dead and Astounding Stories comatose, so he took a chance and submitted it to Wright at Weird Tales. Smith didn’t think much of its chances, so he was pleasantly surprised when Wright accepted the tale, which was published in the September 1935 issue. “It fails to please me,”2 he wrote to Derleth, adding the next month that “It seems to have pleased [Wright], for some ungodly reason; but after all it’s a cut or two above Edmond Hamilton.”3 Smith received one hundred dollars for the story, which he later included in GL. In his letter of acceptance Wright mentioned that they were reserving the radio broadcast rights, but promised “if we receive any money from such broadcasting we will turn it over to you.”4 “Vulthoom” tied in the Eyrie’s reader’s poll for most popular story in the issue in which it appeared, sharing the honors with a reprint of Edmond Hamilton’s fine story “The Monster-God of Mamurth” and “The Man Who Chained the Lightning” by Paul Ernst.5 The present text is based upon Smith’s carbon, which is now deposited at the John Hay Library.