THE DEEP ONES: "Genius Loci" by Clark Ashton Smith

"Genius Loci" by Clark Ashton Smith

Discussion begins October 16th.

First published in the June 1933 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/78/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?62558

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
A Rendezvous in Averoigne
American Fantastic Tales
Genius Loci and Other Tales
The Maze of the Enchanter

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_loci
http://www.eldritchdark.com/galleries/by-cas/
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/correspondence/
http://openarchive.icomos.org/243/1/inaugural-Vortrag_Petzet.pdf
http://tinyurl.com/lcadag6

Thank you, Margaret! I'll be reading from The Maze of the Enchanter.

I'll be rereading this out of American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps.

>2 gwendetenebre:

Thank you, Margaret!

"We're not worthy! We're not worthy!" :D

What a WT issue that was! Peak-of-form stories from REH and CAS, with a quintessential Brundage cover.

I will be reading out of The Maze of the Enchanter. Alas, Brundage is not on the cover of that one.

I only have it in Dutch translation in De Gewelven van Yoh-Vombis , so I'll be reading that one.

>4 paradoxosalpha:

That is a perfect WT cover, isn't it?

>6 Nicole_VanK:

That is a perfect WTF cover, isn't it?

:-D

American Fantastic Tales is nearest to hand, for me.

>6 Nicole_VanK: & 8

Lol - that is an extremely... odd illustration, isn't it? And who's the little guy in the lower right-hand corner? A teddy bear? A grey alien, perhaps? :D

> 6,8,10

It's odd, but it is genuinely illustrating the title story; it's not just 60's-style surrealism for the sake of it.

>6 Nicole_VanK:,8,10,11

That 1970's Bruna FEH series actually turns out to be pretty interesting - check out the other titles that can be found: http://www.sf-boeken.nl/bruna-feh.html

Can anyone provide more info on this (Dutch?) publisher?

Yes, it's a Dutch publisher. What else would you like to know about them? They pretty much do mass market stuff in any genre - something like Penguin Books for the English language area.

The cover illustration refers to the title story "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis". I don't think it's doing a bad job at that. The teddy bear in the corner is because that publisher had a label called "Zwarte Beertjes" (= little black bears). Hugely famous here, so after a while they slapped that logo onto just about everything they published (even if on a black cover like this, the colour had to be reversed).

>13 Nicole_VanK:

The teddy bear in the corner is because that publisher had a label called "Zwarte Beertjes" (= little black bears). Hugely famous here, so after a while they slapped that logo onto just about everything they published (even if on a black cover like this, the colour had to be reversed).

Aha! Ask, and ye shall receive. Thanks. :)

Good info Matt, thanks. These seem to be vintage 70's editions. Is Bruna still publishing sf/horror titles?

That specific sub-series wasn't a huge success apparently, and it was discontinued. But yes, they have published fantasy, horror and especially sf in their main "Zwarte Beertjes" series.

ETA: They're bigger in thrillers and detective fiction though.

http://www.librarything.com/publisherseries/Zwarte%2520Beertjes

The framing of this one with the contemporary artist and writer put me strongly in mind of "Sticks." I wonder if this story was a conscious influence on Karl Edward Wagner when he wrote that one.

Also: The Chinese factotum may have been transparent to Smith in 1933 California, but certainly seemed incongruous to me.

The locus looks to be a shout from I-80 these days.

This is a fairly standard weird tale for CAS, but I still enjoyed the atmosphere he creates:

In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace-weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort.

There is something cartoonish about those trees wanting to avoid the water, but it works all the same in conveying the sinister aspect of the place.

I like Smith's idea of a vampiric place set in nature, as opposed to a man-made structure, as one might argue for something like the malevolent buildings in Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings or Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

For a while I thought it'd turn out the genius loci was Chapman, making the story a haunted house one minus the house. But CAS had the better idea, I think.

Given the Latin title, I wonder if it's significant that the fiancée's name, Avis, is Latin for "Bird". But I'm not sure what the significance would be; apart from the slang bird = girl, there's nothing particularly avian about her.

> 19 a fairly standard weird tale for CAS

Unusual for CAS in being a fairly standard weird tale, right? No exoticism at all in this one.

>22 paradoxosalpha:

Correct. Smith has only stepped out of his typically "exotic" form a couple of times in my reading experience to date.

Additionally, Smith was a bit worried that Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales wouldn't care for this one because it didn't have an identifiable monster. Wright actually accepted it right away.

Yeah, it's CAS writing in the Blackwood tradition, which is something of a surprise.

As I read "Genius Loci", I thought CAS was pastiching HPL. It was a matter of the vocabulary used by the narrator, and the rhythm of the prose - it was subtle, but it stayed with me to the end.

When I found my copy of The Maze of the Enchanter and read the story notes, I was surprised that neither of them remarked on it, or even, apparently, noticed it.

I did think the plot of the story was straying into Algernon Blackwood territory, and indeed the story notes in Enchanter specifically refer to his story "The Transfer" as a possible source, but it also mentions Montague Summers's The Vampire: His Kith and Kin. This has a section about Chinese beliefs about will-o-the-wisps and marsh gas being understood as "sign of a place where much blood has been shed...all mists {are} connected with the belief in vampires and spectres which convey disease."

If Montague Summers is the (or a) source, the narrator, Murray's, "factotum", Li Sing, could also have his origin here. He does seem odd here, but perhaps our reading is coloured by our knowledge of the Weird Tales writers precarious financial positions.

The recent reviews of William Boyd's new Bond novel have pointed out that one of the original novels' attractions was to bring a taste of upper-class lifestyles (and/or, middle-class US lifestyles) to working-class British readers. I wonder if the lifestyle of characters like Murray in this story, or Jules de Grandin's gourmandising at the beginning and end of many of his stories, had done a similar thing for depression-era readers twenty years earlier.

>19 gwendetenebre:
Yes, the trees are cartoonish, but in an early-Disney way, which some contemporary audiences did apparently find quite disturbing.

If Montague Summers is the (or a) source, the narrator, Murray's, "factotum", Li Sing, could also have his origin here. He does seem odd here, but perhaps our reading is coloured by our knowledge of the Weird Tales writers precarious financial positions.

The narrator appears to be a novelist, which may be more remunerative than a WT writer. But wealthy narrators are so common in weird and allied fiction that I didn't reflect about it when reading the story.

It's been suggested (by Göran Hägg if no-one else) that sad stories are often set in the highest social circles because it appeals to half- or unarticulated ideas of fairness that those with no financial cares should have other sorrows, whereas inflicting heartbreak or vampires on the already unfortunate might seem like too much.

I have to wonder why CAS chose to call the 'entity' - if we can even call it that - "Genius Loci". It's a term with a long tradition, referring to a protective spirit of any certain place place (town, river, whatever). They were usually benevolent, depicted with cornucopia, etc. Ah well...

The story quite strongly reminds me of "The Colour out of Space", but seen in that light I prefer the latter. I was also reminded of Mark Rainey's "The Lake of Shadows" in his Other Gods, but obviously that's a much later story.

The style seemed a bit laboured to me, but maybe now I'm commenting on the skills of the translator of my version. So: pace.

>17 paradoxosalpha:: Just curious: what's more surprising? The protagonist having any factotum, or him being Chinese?

> 28

Mostly that he has a factotum at all, but the Chinese element throws it into relief somewhat.

> 27 They were usually benevolent, depicted with cornucopia, etc. Ah well...

CAS seems to try to communicate this idea. Amberville mentions having encountered such phenomena before, but always thinking them beneficent. The story is about an anomalously bad genius loci. It's not such a stretch to use the term in this fashion; with no reference to Smith, I mentioned malign genii locorum in my review of The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield.

>27 Nicole_VanK:, 30

With genius loci, the concept of a benevolent guardian spirit of a place originated with the Romans. In Western and Asian traditions, the spirit doesn't seem to have that restriction. Laird Barron correctly points out that the 2008 horror film Sauna is a perfect example of genius loci (Wikipedia also mentions 2001's Session 9). It would seem that certain haunted houses, such as those in works by King and Jackson, do not become haunted by the ghosts of humans as much as they are the genius loci of places of primeval power.

>30 paradoxosalpha:/31: Interesting. Thanks.

There's some extensive and interesting theory about the spirit of the place as a determinant of primitive religion in W. Robertson Smith's seminal Religion of the Semites (see my review).

Thanks. I have a copy, but I never got around to reading it. Will investigate.

>19 gwendetenebre: et al.

Agreed, this is an atypically prosaic tale for Smith, although we do get a lot of examples of his idiosyncratic vocabulary here ("benignant", "tenebrific", "coadjutation", etc.). I wonder why Peter Straub selected it for American Fantastic Tales? Did he think it would be more palatable to Library of America subscribers than, say, "Empire of the Necromancers" or "The Dark Eidolon"? Or was it merely a reflection of personal sensibility/taste? (I suspect the latter, fwiw.)

I finally got around to reading this story -- again. I've read it twice before. The vocabulary was not as mainstream as I remembered though certainly not as outré as his poetry or Zothique stories. And, yes, it is a bit reminiscent of Lovecraft and Poe.

To everybody else's observations I can only add this seems another example of Smith's theme of self-destructive compulsion and obsession -- maybe best seen in "The City of the Singing Flame".