Episode 5: Pulp-in-the-Mist

“The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns.” – Clark Ashton Smith, The Abominations of Yondo, 1926

F*ck yeah. Let's go.

Cover page spread of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Dark Eidolon” as it appeared in Weird Tales January 1935. Illustration by Clark Ashton Smith.

Welcome back to Something About Dragons for Episode 5: Pulp in the Mist. To get us started today, we’ll be discussing Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees, and the pulp short stories of one of the masters of the form, Clark Ashton Smith, source of the quote at the top of the post. We’re about to start discussing some of my personal favorite early fantasy literature, so let’s dive on in.

First, Lud-in-the-Mist is the third and final novel by Hope Mirrlees and the only one really of required reading for genre fans, though Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem has been called, “modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition.”[1] Having read a bit of it in preparation for this episode, I have to agree. It’s fantastic, just not “fantastic”, you know? Lud-in-the-Mist is a quiet, though tense, meditation on our inner nature, the necessity of reconciling our conflicting desires for both comfort and novelty, rationality and spontaneity. It is at times dryly humorous, at times slapstick, at times densely terrifying, and at times incredibly uplifting, as when Nathaniel Chanticleer risks his soul and his life to rescue his son from Fairyland and then reconciles the rational world with the capital-O Otherworld. It is, as one recently disgraced fantasy author put it, “one of the finest [fantasy novels] in the English language…a little golden miracle of a book.”[2] 

Right on.

We’re not going to discuss it much.

We’re not going to discuss it much for a few reasons. First, Lud-in-the-Mist is without a doubt massively successful as a fantasy tale and work of art, being thematically deep, imminently readable, and full of relatable characters. It’s somewhere between the almost pure romance/fairy tale approach of Dunsany, and the style of the early 20th century Modernist authors. In my opinion, it’s at least as good a book at The King of Elfland's Daughter and, in my opinion, better. It interrogates the shift from the feudal to the early capitalist systems and social organizations in a way I haven’t really seen fantasy do elsewhere, though some later 20th century authors like L.E. Modesitt have taken up this theme from Mirrlees. And it does it almost in passing as part of the setting, which is much closer to the Early Modern period or the Dutch Golden Era of the 17th century than to fantasy’s typical high-Medieval setting.

Though LITM should absolutely be on any fantasy fan’s “to read” list, I think we’ve beaten the dead horse of early 20th century Romances pretty thoroughly. Additionally, despite the unparalleled quality of her work, Mirrlees doesn’t really have the larger body of genre work of someone like Dunsany. To be sure, we have also reviewed Lindsay and Eddison, who also had relatively smaller bodies of work, but Lud-in-the-Mist represents a vein of ore that has yet to be extensively mined by later fantasy authors.

Mirrlees’ masterpiece has absolutely been influential on specific authors (e.g., Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is an obvious parallel) but the depth of this one story really haven’t been effectively incorporated into fantasy literature. There is so much more to take from this story – the dual nature of Fairyland as both the abode of elves and the land of the dead, the flexible and non-static nature of fairies, the relationship of certain mortals to Fairy, the fact that certain characters (spoiler alert) have no fear of dying for their “crimes”. Is it because they will be reborn in Fairy? Mirrlees develops a view of the otherworld that is radically shifting and ephemeral. It’s permanent, but fluid. It’s always there, but its manifestations change.

We’ve spoken a couple of times about potential “roads not traveled” with fantasy lit. What if A Voyage to Arcturus had been fantasy’s ur text and everything was body horror and philosophical musings? What if everyone had turned head over heels for gratuitous Jacobean English and feudal apologia, and Lord Juss was our Aragorn?

Viggo Mortensen still could have played Lord Juss in the movie.

Lud-in-the-Mist offers another plausible option for later fantasy writers, but one that is, in large part, still available as insporation to modern authors. Honestly, I’m only a casual fan of steampunk (or clockpunk, Gaslamp fantasy, etc.), but there’s so much in Lud-in-the-Mist that could inform different subgenres, especially with regards to social and political relationships during the early Modern Era, even apart from the deeper themes of the book.

Honestly, I think Mirrlees’ ambiguity regarding Fairy and the otherworld got buried by later, D&D inspired fantasy. When you bring fantasy down into an RPG/gaming world, by necessity, you must nail things down. You have to stat things. Otherwise, how will you know what you need to role to trick an elf or shoot an arrow at a dragon? Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist is antithetical to that kind of solidification, by design. D&D and gaming were SO incredibly influential on late 20th century fantasy authors – basically every major author post-1970’s said they played it – that that need to define abilities and establish hard, Vancian magic systems dominated, and Mirrlees’ fluid, mutable take on the supernatural fell by the wayside.

Again, I cannot praise this book enough. It is without a doubt one of the most skillfully and thoughtfully written books we will come across in this podcast. Go get it. Go read it. Then wait a couple weeks and read it again. It’s well worth it. It has depth, patience, and rewards reading and rereading.

Who designed these early book covers?

It’s basically a 180 degrees from what we’re going to spend most of this episode (and quite a few of the next couple episodes as well) actually talking about: pulp fiction.

We haven’t touched on pulp much yet, other than Tarzan of the Apes, which was originally published in 1912 as a serial in the early pulp magazine The All-Story. The All-Story was a general fiction magazine, however, and Burroughs started publishing Mars and Tarzan stories about a decade before the publication of the first major genre pulps, including the one we’re going to focus on most, Weird Tales, first published in March 1923.

Now that's a cover! Does a fantastic job of hiding the eugenics! Also cost approximately $4.89 in 2025 money.

Also, the other reason we are going to give Hope Mirrlees shorter shrift than she deserves, is because, while her quality is exceptionally high, she is largely on the same path as the other early 20th century Romance authors we’ve previously discussed. Or, at least, a nearby path? A somewhat parallel path? Maybe not parallel to A Voyage to Arcturus but close to authors like Dunsany and Eddison. Or a parallel stream, to keep with the river delta metaphor I’ve been butchering the last few posts. The other author, on our list today, Clark Ashton Smith, however, is really not.

Full disclosure, I am an unabashed lover of pulp genre fiction. I honestly think that the pulp genre fiction most closely associated with the fantasy genre holds up as well or better than the sci-fi short story pulp fiction of folks like Heinlein, Hubbard, Pohl, Clarke, or Asimov. Or at least, again in my very humble opinion, not one of the Golden Age sci-fi authors has a pulp or short story canon that matches someone like Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E. Howard in quality.  

And Clark Ashton Smith, is, without a doubt, a master of the form. Now, up front, let me state that pulp is, without a doubt, a flawed portion of the fantasy genre. It is frequently horrendously racist – by both modern and contemporary standards. It is frequently horrendously misogynistic – by both modern and contemporary standards. It was basely commercial, exploitative, and written almost entirely by struggling writers trying to make a few bucks and stay out of complete poverty. Clark Ashton Smith was no exception to any of this. There’s no “but” coming because that’s just an accurate description of pulp fiction.

It is also, without a doubt, a shot of pure adrenaline after stuff like Dunsany or Oz.

As I mentioned, most of the fantasy we’ve covered and discussed so far (that isn’t children’s literature) could be categorized as elite romances. The writers are academics, literary types, trying to retain or inject some capital-R Romanticism back into the literary streams that were binging on modern writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, etc. Hope Mirrlees, not incidentally, was actually published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and influenced both Eliot and Woolf, major Modernist figures.

However, and this should be clear, the authors of what we're calling early fantasy Romances weren’t very successful, at least critically, and most weren’t commercially successful either. Poor Eddison survived as an insurance salesman. Someone like Dunsany was relatively popular, but most of his biggest commercial successes came from stories, poetry, and plays without fantastical elements. Though his popular Jorkens stories often contained fantastical elements, if an unreliable narrator. Folks like Lindsay, Mirrlees, not so much. Lin Carter didn’t even know if Mirrlees was alive or dead when he republished Lud-in-the-Mist as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (for more info, see: Hope-In-The-Mist by Michael Swanwick.)

The exception to this is the children’s literature of the time – Oz, Wind in the Willows, Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, etc. The fantastic was seen mostly as something for children’s stories. Serious adult people read serious adult things and not silly fairy stories. Tolkien will have quite a bit to say about that in a future episode (Preview). Even those fantasy stories that were successful weren’t exactly given the same critical appreciation as someone like Hemingway or Woolf.

To compound things, these elite Romances – both the ones we’ve covered and some of the 19th century predecessors like George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin or William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World – tend to be written like adult fairy tales. Meanwhile, contemporary non-fantastic modernist writers (1920’s contemporary, to be clear) are specifically trying to break with the past, both stylistically and in their content. The Modernists are much more apt to delve into a character’s psychology, rather than simply their actions, address modern social issues, and investigate the inadequacy of old social forms in a time of massive technological advancement and, well, mass death (i.e., WWI). Which, honestly, could make an argument for identifying Lud-in-the-Mist firmly as a modernist piece of romanticism…? There’s something there; I’ll work it out for my eventual literature dissertation.

Anyway, to be overly broad, the earlier Romances were more elitist, more circumscribed, more “adult”, out-of-step with then current literary fashions, and Lud-in-the-Mist was absolutely in that vein. These stories were consciously trying to evoke an older style. They were more literary and restrained.

Ok, not A Voyage to Arcturus, but the others.

Pulp fiction was, by contrast, and this is a technical literary term, batshit crazy.

Mostly naked lady? Check. Purple prose? Check. Problematic antagonist largely defined by his racial attributes/physical characteristics? Check. Welcome to the pulps.

What do I mean by that? Well, first and most obviously, folks like CAS and his contemporaries like Lovecraft and A. Meritt are obsessed with what drives people (mostly men, it must be said) mad! Madness is like the default state for a Lovecraftian hero, and CAS’s narrator in a story like “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” basically documents his descent into madness, recording his terrifying experiences on Mars during a lucid period and then the narrator flees back to where all his friends died, assaulting several hospital staff on the way out. Likewise, the narrator of “The Devotee of Evil” similarly has lasting psychological damage from his brush with pure cosmic-evil-as-universal-constant.[4]

But more importantly than narrator madness – always a nice fall back when you’ve written yourself into a corner or your deadline was yesterday – the pulps introduce new settings, new energy and extravagance, new plots that break out of the fairy tale/historical romance mode. If I’m being fair, a lot of the plots are variations on “attractive lady tied to the railroad tracks by a mustache-twirling villain” but still.

This is Jazz Age exploitation fiction. And later, Depression-Era exploitation fiction. Looking back to earlier influences, pulp finds far more of its inspiration in Poe and Kipling rather than Dunsany or older 19th century romance authors like George MacDonald. The pulps emphasize violence, horror, lots of lurid titillation and absolutely metric tons of repressed sexual energy. For example, the lovers in “the Ninth Skeleton”, an early Clark Ashton Smith short horror story, ain’t meeting in that wooded clearing to play tiddlywinks. Clark Ashton Smith also tends to make drive-by comments about female characters imagining how good powerful men are in bed (see The Dark Eidolon). Just bonkers, gonzo stuff after the considerably more formal prose and throwback style of the “romance” writers

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to peddle some tired dichotomy of “high” art and “low” art. Many pulp magazines, and they were legion, had (or, at least, stated that they had) ambitions of publishing more artistic, sophisticated literature within the genre of what was then called “weird fiction”. Now, if you’ll allow me a brief personal aside, my day job is working in housing policy. And I tell folks that every apartment building ever constructed has been advertised as “luxury” housing. No one markets their place as a tenement.

Similarly, some of the pulp magazines, like Weird Tales, wanted a little respect and to stand out a little in a crowded market of mass-produced pulp with really low barriers-to-entry during tight economic times, particularly in the 30’s. That desire for a little critical respect was understandable. The pulps were, at least in retrospect, absolutely breaking some new literary ground and giving people entertainment that they consumed mass quantities of.

They were also, to many people and critics, indistinguishable from the so-called “shudder pulps” (e.g., Terror Tales, Dime Mystery Magazine, The Black Mask, etc.).[5] Shudder pulps were basically the exact thing you think of when you think of pulp fiction: blonde female victims captured by sadistic villains, and a lot of torture, brutality, sex, and death. But, much of that stuff didn’t survive or have broad influence, while many of the writers for pulps like Weird Tales – like Merrit, Clark Ashton Smith, Eddy, Lovecraft, Howard, later Bradbury and Fritz Lieber – went on to become, if not household names, at least genre touchstones.

Then again, a quick look at the Weird Tales covers makes you wonder how deep that devotion to literary “sophistication” really went. Or, at least, what concessions the editors and publishers were willing to make in a crowded marketplace. The covers are awesome, but not exactly something that screams “literary sophistication”. R.E. Howard was known to put whipping or nude-ish scenes into stories in hopes of getting the cover story, because you got paid more for a cover story. Well, if you got paid at all, which was ALWAYS an issue with the pulps.

Just as an example, here's the Weird Tales cover from July 1936.[1] The cover story is Part 1 of “Red Nails,” a Conan story by Robert E. Howard. The edition also has stories by Clark Ashton Smith, Ronal Kayser, and CL Moore. Damn good issue. Hell of a read. And, as you can see, the cover also has one naked lady being sacrificed on an alter while being held down by three scantily clad ladies with strategically placed limbs. Which isn’t at all out of character for that most influential and sophisticated of fantasy pulps.

Millions of Depression-Era kids telling their mother they "read it for the stories."

And thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, pulp magazines had mass-market appeal, if not critical appreciation. Particularly to the developing market of teen and pre-teen boys. Of course, boys were absolutely NOT the only readers, but that’s definitely who the pulps were marketing too.

By contrast, the earlier Romances were written for adults. And relatively scholarly, intellectual adults. The pulps were not. Again, I’m not trying to set-up a low-brow/high-brow dichotomy, but I can’t imagine Lord Dunsany publishing a story entitled “The Consuming Flame” with the tagline: DOCTOR SATAN spreads icy terror in Detroit! Read it all here!

Weird Tales, November 1935. I think I can quit beating this dead horse.

The pulps were something different, something new. Or new-ish, being something of a successor to the penny dreadfuls and later 19th century “dime novels” that became financially practical due to rising literacy and new, cheaper papermaking technologies. For the truly interested, the link in the previous sentence takes you to the Wikipedia page for the "sulfite process." Essentially, industry started making wood pulp using sulfites rather than a mechanical process. This was apparently cheaper. Don’t ask me to explain more, I’m not a chemist.

Pulp stories were easier to digest and more disposable. They focused on evoking horror, flight or fight, violence, action, basic boy-meets-girl romance. Just go read a story or two from Time and the Gods and then go read “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis.” Or “The Hunters from Beyond” or “The Maze of the Enchanter” or “The Door to Saturn” or “The Noun Preposition Proper Noun.” Ok, I made the last one up, but the first four are fantastic Clark Ashton Smith short stories. But even Clark Ashton Smith, who is one of the more…meditative (for lack of a better term) pulp writers – next time we’ll discuss Howard and Moore and they’re like a whole other level – read a Clark Ashton Smith story and then compare that to Dunsany. Or the seemingly endless middle section of A Voyage to Arcturus. The action, the running, the mounting terror as "The Vault of Yoh-Vombis's" narrator’s companions are picked off and zombified one by one. You’ll shiver. This isn’t slow, nostalgic appreciation of a fading romantic past. This is pulp. It’s literary night and day. And it’s awesome!

Alright, I'm going to continue doing what I've done for the last several installments and split up a longer post into separate sections. We're 3,300 words into this post, and I haven't even really gotten to the meat of what I want to talk about with Clark Ashton Smith. So, come back in a few days for Episode 5.5 where we discuss the impact of the early pulps and how they broadened the audience for what became fantasy literature and helped create the next generation of both fantasy readers and fantasy writers.

[1] Julia Briggs, https://thebluelantern.blogspot.com/2020/03/hope-mirrlees-underground-modernist.html 

[2] Neil Gaiman, 1999, http://www.sfsite.com#_ftn4/fsf/1999/cur9907.htm. As most any fantasy fan will have probably heard by this point, Gaiman has credibly been accused of some pretty horrible crimes against multiple women. For me, it's worth considering whether or not to include much material by Gaiman at the point in this project - far in the future - when he comes in as an influential author. I retained this quote in this episode because Gaiman is probably the most prominent and outspoken fan of Mirrlees' book among major, mainstream fantasy authors, and he's probably the most prominent author to have taken significant inspiration from her. This does not negate his obvious failings as a human being.

[3] Citation needed.

[4] Just a brief content warning. “The Devotee of Evil” also has some of the worst of CAS’s casual racism. For example, in the descriptions of the Chinese murderer, quotes like, “He was a sallow, saturnine Creole, with the marks of race in his hollow cheeks and feverish eyes.” The word “mulatress” gets thrown around a LOT. I won’t say that CAS’s racism is lesser than Lovecraft or Burroughs – racism isn’t something you measure by the word. I will say it’s less prominent in his catalogue and doesn’t seem to act as the underlying foundation of his work/worldview. Yes, his non-white characters are almost universally evil or antagonists and his descriptions border on creepy. The non-white characters, while almost universally bad, also tend to be written with some depth and interesting motivations, as in “The Devotee of Evil”. It’s a tough issue to parse and, fair warning, we’ll run into it time and time again, especially in the pulps. [5] https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/colloquium/2013/06/05/weird-tales-slick-paper-fiction-wrapped-in-pulp/