"Extremes more terrible than madness": Clark Ashton Smith's, "The Isle of the Torturers"

So, I've been doing reading for my dissertation prospectus. Some of what I've been reading is the work of Clark Ashton Smith, who I believe will have his own chapter. This morning I want to review a short story of his I just read, "The Isle of the Torturers."

Original illustration in Weird Tales, March 1933

Published in in the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales, I highly recommend it. I'd describe it as a kind of "sword and sorcery" "weird fantasy."

Let me briefly summarize it: it's about a king whose kingdom has been beset by a horrible disease that has come out of the cosmos, a disease called "the silver death." Everyone in his kingdom dies, and so he flees his kingdom over sea. While fleeing, his ship crashes on an island where there is a decadent civilization that loves nothing more than to torture people. After being subjected to a horrible variety of tortures, he infects everyone on this island of torturers with the silver death. They all die.

We have here the story of a "sleeper agent," a single individual who seems like they are powerless before a great power but who is actually quite powerful.

I don't have much to say about the plot other than it's very gripping. I'm not very familiar with Smith's work, but my impression is that the strangeness and latent violence of the plot is characteristic of his work.

What fascinates me intensely by Smith in his style. He was a critically acclaimed poet before he began writing weird fiction. And this artistic past can be glimpsed in his prose style. Consider this passage, which relates the arrival of "the silver death" to the kingdom--it is called "Yoros"--of the protagonist:

There was no time to flee from the strange, inevitable scourge. Dreadfully and quickly, beneath the clear stars, it breathed upon Yoros; and few were they who awakened from slumber at dawn. Fulbra, young king of Yoros, who had but newly succeeded the throne, was virtually a ruler without people. (187).

Consider the cadence of the end of each sentence. Each sentence builds towards a stirring image or imaginable action: "inevitable scourge," "breathed upon Yoros," "slumber at dawn," "ruler without people." We have here a staccato of imagery that evokes a kind of despair.

Smith's prose style in this story is particularly rich, and I think this richness is a function of the story's plot, its preoccupation with the senses. Torture is, at its most basic level, the agitation of the senses. Consider this passage, where the torturers are torturing the protagonist:

For the islanders of Uccastrog had designed innumerable torments, curious and subtle, wherewith to  harry and excruciate the five senses; and they could harry the brain itself, driving it to extremes more terrible than madness (194).

Smith's prose style is pervaded by such imagery and other attempts to evoke sensory experience: sights, smells, tastes; his rich vocabulary and strange new words are, on the level of text-as-image, visually stirring. In a strange way, Smith's style is a kind of torture, a "harrying" of the senses, if you will.

There's a whole tradition of art being agonizing, excruciating, but also satisfying. There's something of that going on in this story. And I wish I had more time to trace it out.

By the way, I read this story is a famous anthology of Weird Tales titled, Weird Tales: 32 Unwearthed Terrors, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowcisz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (New York: Bonanza Books, 1988). It's available used on Amazon and a beautiful book.

Also, I've been compiling some Weird Tales resources, if you're interested. Not much is here just yet. Here's the link: Weird Tales