OSR and Clark Ashton Smith

Awaiting the acolyte Orderic, the young veteran Frembas handled packages for tower mages along a fading coast. The year had gotten late, flapping helplessly like creatures in Jules Massenet's 2 Pièces pour piano: No. 1. Papillons noirs.

The visits there were fine. Antiquaries in their towers shared sometimes sublime, sometimes 'execrable' texts and tomes!

 [fragment from Rodolphe Bresdin's lithograph The Comedy of Death (1854)]

Like this one - Bresdin's lithographic dream. 'Who was this Bresdin,' Frembas' host exclaimed. 'How was it, Bresdin saw these Lazari dance? What made them rise?' 

***

Clark Ashton Smith knows what makes some shadows rise! In his The Maker of Gargoyles (1932), spurned Blaise Reynard's rage infused two murderous gargoyles:

[Blaise] would not have said, perhaps would not have even known, that in one of the gargoyles, he had imprisoned all his festering rancor, all his answering spleen and hatred..."

And in the other,

...perhaps he would not even have dreamt that in the second gargoyle, he had somehow expressed his own dour and satyr-like passion...

Such rancor made his lusting gargoyles dance.

In The Double Shadow (1933), Smith's Pharpetron, 'The last and most forward pupil of wise Avyctes,' knows what animates evil 'adumbrations.'

...we have delved more deeply than all others before us in an interdicted lore; we have solved the keyless hieroglyphs....we have talked with the prehistoric dead, we have called up the dwellers in sealed crypts...

Blaise Reynard and Avyctes' pupil Pharpetron were 'connoisseurs of horror.' In Smith's numerous Weird Tales, spirits dance when his heroes summon 'the deadly, the malign, and baleful things that lurk in the labyrinth of existence.' 

As in old school games, Smith's imperfections are strengths, as are his brevity, pacing, and the gorgons, gargoyles, and shadows.

***

Here, darkness covers all. I hear skeletons dancing. What makes them rise?

                                              
[Skeletons in my closet, Heritage - Dungeon Dwellers]

***

Thanks for reading!



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