THE DEEP ONES: "Monsters in the Night" by Clark Ashton Smith

"Monsters in the Night" by Clark Ashton Smith

Discussion begins November 17, 2021.

First published in the October 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?68911

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Werewolf!
The Last Hieroglyph: Volume Five of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith
100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories
Hauntings and Horrors, Ten Grisly Tales

ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/139/monsters-in-the-night

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqYuEQ4vGSo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyIEyzdTSBk

MISCELLANY

http://www.eldritchdark.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-bard-of-auburn-getting-weird-in-the-long...
https://tinyurl.com/pdsr56vy

This one's very short but pretty good I think. CAS is positively restrained in his vocabulary.

If I recall from the notes in The Last Hieroglyph, Smith's original draft explicitly explained that the intended victim was a humanoid robot; the editor at F&SF suggested letting the readers work it out. Definitely a change for the better if so.

My second reading of this story.

Some werewolf tales not only mention the bloodlust but smelling the victim. Obviously not the case here. His wolf senses seem pretty human in their limitations.

Quite a kick to this one. The ending took me by surprise, then left me rather sad. I love the old-fashioned horror story—werewolves, vampires, half-ruined old castles in fantasy mittel-European settings. Then it comes slap bang up against futuristic sci-fi and shatters and dies. An old genre being cast aside by the new.

>3 RandyStafford: Some werewolf tales not only mention the bloodlust but smelling the victim.

CAS usually seems to be attuned to the full sensorium, I went back to see if the omitted reference to smell was intentional: a steel android, presumably, would have a smaller olfactory signature. I didn't find mention of any smells, however.

The short story does pack a punch, and though CAS's reference to other monsters assured me the intended victim would not be another beastie, I started to anticipate the victim would be a blood relation. The android was a surprise.

This story left me feeling a bit sad too: it feels rather like it's bidding farewell to a whole world of fantasy, as a new scientific era begins. I suppose the 1950s felt like that (judging from the popular culture of the day).

Maybe the "windless night" explains why the werewolf wasn't warned by his prey's lack of a scent?

Presumably the title means CAS considered robots monsters, too.

From the werewolf’s PoV, the robot’s monsterhood is pretty unarguable I think.