Tag: h. w. wesso

Novella Review: “Wolves of Darkness” by Jack Williamson

April 19th, 2025

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

Who Goes There?

Despite the sheer length of his career and how much of SF history he was involved with, there’s been relatively little retrospective material on Jack Williamson. He made his debut in 1928 and kept writing, albeit with quiet periods in his career, until his death in 2006. By the time First Fandom arose in the late ’30s, Williamson was already considered something of a titan in fandom circles, yet he also outlived most of the young folks in First Fandom who looked up to him. Williamson’s obscurity could be tossed up to him being a B-tier writer who occasionally wrote A-tier material, and also because despite being pretty popular within SF fandom, especially in the ’30s and ’40s, his influence is nowhere near as pronounced as, say, Robert Heinlein’s or even A. E. van Vogt’s. As he more or less admits in his memoir, Wonder’s Child, Williamson didn’t think of himself as a capital-A Artist™, but rather he wrote genre fiction because he enjoyed it. In a way he was the longest-lived and most persistent of the pulpsters, having more in common with the likes of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs than Heinlein. “Wolves of Darkness” itself is a curious if imperfect SF-horror blend that marked one of several turning points for Williamson as a writer. It was, up to that point, his biggest paycheck for a single story, it was made the cover story for the January 1932 issue of the short-lived Strange Tales, and it was also his first attempt at applying an SFnal rationalism to what was then considered purely the ground of fantasy: lycanthropy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. It was stranded there for 35 years, until it was reprinted in the November 1967 issue of Magazine of Horror. It’s also been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Classic Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1930s (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), Rivals of Weird Tales (ed. Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg), Echoes of Valor III (ed. Karl Edward Wagner), and the Williamson collection The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson: Volume Two.

Enhancing Image

Clovis McLaurin is a med student, so somewhere in his twenties, who makes his way to the rural Texas landscape on account of his weird scientist dad needing his assistance for some vague purpose. Dr. McLaurin had inherited a ranch plus some funds from his brother, and has apparently been using the combo of free home and secluded location to conduct experiments. Clovis convinces one the locals, Judsgon, in the town of Hebron, near enough to the ranch, to help him on his way, although traveling by night ends up being a huge mistake for both of them. We’re already told early on that the landscape in these here parts of the state seem to be tormented at night by a pack of wolves, or maybe a werewolf. The introductory blurb for “Wolves of Darkness” tells us that this story will have to do with lycanthropy, which is true enough, although Williamson’s treatment of it pretty unconventional by the standards of pulp fiction. It’s also worth mentioning that one major plus in this story’s favor is its sense of place, which is no doubt inspired by Williamson spending much of his life in rural areas. He was, in fact, born in what is now Arizona, before it had become a state (that’s how old he is), before his family moved to Texas and then New Mexico, literally in a covered wagon in the 1910s. Despite being ostensibly set in what was then modern times, “Wolves of Darkness” is a depiction of the southwest at a time when it was still in the early stages of modernization. It’s set in the 1920s or early ’30s, but could almost just as well takes place circa 1900, as if the past and present were converging. Incidentally Jack Williamson and Robert E. Howard were close contemporaries who were both from the southwest, and thus reading their work from the ’30s you can get an idea of what early modernization for that region was like, albeit from quite different perspectives: Howard had a very love-hate relationship with Texas while Williamson was more forgiving.

Anyway, Clovis ~~it’s such a weird name I’m sorry~~ and Judson are attacked by wolves and a rather skimpily dressed lady with glowing green eyes—in fact the wolves have the same sort of uncannily green eyes, as depicted in the cover. Judson gets killed off-screen, but the woman and her wolf pack take Clovis back to the ranch as a captive. Clovis swears he recognizes the girl from somewhere, and realizes it’s at least the body of Stella Jetton, the daughter of Dr. Jetton, who is (or was) Dr. McLaurin’s colleague. The problem is that Stella doesn’t recognize Clovis, and going by her actions it’s more likely that some outside force has taken control of her body. This turns out to be the case, not just with Stella and the wolves but Dr. McLaurin himself, who is, let’s say not quite himself once Clovis meets him. Both the people and wolves Clovis meets all have green eyes, and all seem to be possessed of some fierce intelligence that while in the bodies of “lower” animals appears to give them extra intelligence, while in the bodies of people they become more animalistic. The big weakness of this outside force becomes apparent early on when Dr. McLaurin (or the thing inhabiting his body) tells Clovis that they really dislike light of any kind, so as to why the interior of the ranch is only shown in a dim red light. The beings who have taken over these bodies are nocturnal, or rather they come from a world that is deprived of light—a notion that seems outlandish, although there are many organisms in the depths of our own planet’s oceans that have never known sunlight. “Wolves of Darkness,” like much if not necessarily all of weird fiction, is basically about someone trespassing beyond the boundaries of the natural order and in so doing fucking around and finding out, as we say. In the case of this story it’s Dr. McLaurin who, prior to the beginning, had tampered with studies in possible alternate dimensions. This is what I mean by the story being SF rather than fantasy, since we’re given an SFnal explanation for why these things are happening.

Even in 1932 the premise of humanity coming into contact with malicious alien life was by no means new, although what’s more novel here is that “Wolves of Darkness” is an early example of aliens of the body-snatching variety. We never see what they look like, although from what I can tell they’re more like energy beings of the sort of that appear regularly in Star Trek; rather we only see them as filtered through the organic Earth bodies they take over. The conflict thus boils down to Clovis being held hostage, to help the aliens make a machine that would basically facilitate an invasion of Earth, or die a horrific death. Of course, he figures he’s gonna die either way, but he’d much rather defeat the aliens and save Stella in the process (he’s not as concerned about saving his dad). I’ve read enough early Williamson that I can tell Clovis very much fits in the mold of what Williamson was doing at the time, which is to say Clovis is a typical early Williamson protagonist: he’s sort of shy and intellectual, but also antsy, and he has a hunger for adventure that puts him in dangerous situations despite his social insecurities. In a way this is wish-fulfillment, a fact which Williamson was not exactly secretive about when it came to his ’30s output. (Some writers intentionally keep the methods behind their madness hidden while others, especially in the age of social media, are a little too eager about sharing with us all the boring fucking processes of their work. Williamson, in Wonder’s Child, takes a pleasant middle ground and only gives us insight into what really mattered to him as both a writer and person. If I ever become a professional writer of fiction, please put a gun to my head if I start oversharing about the miserable and solitary process of writing and getting my stories accepted wherever.) The “romance” between Clovis and Stella (the two barely interact if we discount scenes where the latter is still possessed) is also indicative of pulp fiction, in that it’s totally unconvincing.

What’s more convincing is the thinly veiled sexual angst, which Williamson also points out in his memoir as being rooted in his own failed attempts at romance and sexual intimacy at that time. There’s a memorable scene in which Stella bites Clovis’s leg in retaliation and licks the blood, in a way which is animalistic but also evocative of a merciless dominatrix. Clovis carries that leg wound for the rest of the story, and it gets brought up a few times so as to remind us that Clovis is not in the best physical shape to run from these horrors, but it’s also a connection he has with this woman he is irrationally driven to save. The idea is that he really want to fuck Stella, although this sentiment is never made explicit, or rather it’s shrouded under the guise of “true love.” Their relationship is unconvincing when taken on its face, but is more convincing when read as repressed lust, helped by the fact that Stella is barely clothed for pretty much the whole thing. Another neat thing is that the energy beings are apparently able to inhabit any organic life, even those who are dead, resulting in a small army of green-eyed zombies, including the resurrected Judson. There’s a memorable little passage in which Williamson describes one of the zombies, apparently missing its head, with a pair of gaseous green eyes protruding from its neck stump. This is the kind of gory and unabashedly horrific stuff that would’ve been fine in Weird Tales but would probably not have been fine for Unknown a decade later. “Wolves of Darkness,” aside from just being too long (it’s a novella but has the plot and character depth of a novelette), is a slight challenge to recommend because it has elements of both pulpy weird fiction and more sophisticated SF and fantasy that would appear later.

There Be Spoilers Here

After a lengthy infodump, in which Clovis manages to put Stella under hypnosis and make the energy being recede from controlling her temporarily, and also a failed escape attempt, Our Hero™ knows what he must do. The aliens really hate light, to the point that enough exposure might be able to kill them, or at least make them retreat from the bodies they control. With the help of a few locals, some dynamite, and some matches, he kills the fuck out of some of the zombies and ultimately is able to turn the tables on the aliens. Of course everyone who fell under the possession of the aliens is dead now, including Clovis’s dad, a fact which he doesn’t seem to mind much, leaving Stella as the sole survivor. All’s well that ends well, I guess? It’s a weirdly upbeat ending, considering the death toll and also the strain it put on Clovis’s mental health; meanwhile Stella conveniently doesn’t remember being a meat puppet. Not one of the more convincing endings among Williamson’s fiction.

A Step Farther Out

A few years ago, when I really started to get into magazine fiction, I remember being instantly captivated by H. W. Wesso’s splendid cover for this issue of Strange Tales. I didn’t even know what Strange Tales was at the time; it was actually the horror/fantasy sister magazine to Astounding Stories, back when both were published by Clayton. Astounding almost didn’t make it, but Street & Smith came to the rescue, although Strange Tales was left to rot. Since it was the cover story for this issue, I’d been wanting to read “Wolves of Darkness” for a minute, and I’m glad I finally did. I will say that it does pale a bit in comparison with Williamson’s later attempt at putting an SFnal twist on lycanthropy, “Darker Than You Think,” which I had read a couple years ago, although I may revisit that for the sake of writing about it. “Wolves of Darkness” is a liminal piece in Williamson’s career that I’d recommend for anyone interested enough in the trajectory of the man’s career and/or the history of old-school weird fiction.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: April 2025

April 1st, 2025
(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

My schedule is not what it used to be, although I’m not sure if that’s my new living conditions, work slowly growing down on me, the real-world turmoil happening just outside of view, or some combination. I used to run this blog as a way of escaping temporarily from the drudgery of my everyday existence, between my job and living with my parents; but since I moved out four months ago, the scales have shifted in balance quite a bit. Writing for this blog no longer feels like an escape, but just more work that I have to do. I must write every couple days or else… what? What would happen if I took a break for, say, a month? Most likely my skill at writing would wither, if only a bit. Writing is like any other skill in that if you don’t do it for long enough then you sort of forget how to do it in the first place. It’s why I always find it amazing whenever an artist, be they a writer, filmmaker, musician, or whatever, takes a hiatus from the craft, then returns years later, seemingly out of hibernation, as if nothing had happened. Do you think Terrence Malick had to remember what it’s like to direct a movie when he was making The Thin Red Line, or if Robert Fripp, after not playing guitar for a couple years, had to refamiliarize himself with the damn thing when recording for David Bowie’s “Heroes”? Really this mindset can be applied to any skill, even one as worthless and solitary as writing.

I just remembered a depressing thought I had the other night, during one of my shifts, which is that I might be witnessing the death of human creativity in my lifetime. I’m not talking about creativity on an individual level, since I think it’s obvious that so long as humankind exists there will be artists, probably living on the margins, for the same reason there will always be Palestinians and Kurds and Chechens and what have you. I’m talking about a collective resentment towards creativity that has, at least in the US and UK, been building up since the Reagan and Thatcher years, if not earlier. Fascism, be it Christofascism or neo-liberalism of the Reagan-Clinton sort, is at its core a rejection of the human mind’s ability, indeed its incessant urging, to grow and progress. There is a Freudian return-to-the-womb desire inherent in fascism, except on a systemic level. The fascist wants to stop the future from happening—not a good or bad future, but the future as a concept. You can at least give the Chinese credit for envisioning a future, although if we’re being honest it’s a rather bleak one. In a more just world “AI” would be used only to make soul-crushing labor easier to stomach for human workers, but instead the right-wing technocrats who have increasingly gotten a stranglehold on government and commerce think such incredible technology should rather be used for kneecapping the human imagination. It’s possible that in just a decade or two the artist will be treated like how drug addicts and the homeless are treated today, which is to say the artist will be treated in the mainstream as at best a nuisance and more often as a threat to “the status quo.” We are undoubtedly on the path to that conclusion, and really it’s been a long time coming.

So what can I do? I talk a lot about art and artists, because I’m of the firm belief that without art human existence is really not worth it. Evelyn Waugh said that without God human existence is “unintelligible and unendurable.” I mostly agree with that sentiment. I write about art, even bad art, even the pulpy stuff, because I think there must be some value in it, and because God knows there isn’t much value elsewhere. Speaking of which, I decided it’s been too long since I last covered material from the pre-Campbell years that isn’t from the pages of Weird Tales. (I can’t help it that on average Weird Tales aged a lot better than its SF contemporaries.) So, I’m doing something a bit different this month. The serial, along with both novellas, will be from the pre-Campbell ’30s. I’m also finally checking the E. E. Smith box off my list, although not by reading a Skylark or Lensman novel but a standalone that caught my eye if only because of its convoluted publication history. The two short stories are from lady writers, one of whom you might’ve heard of if you’re really into crime fiction, while the other is totally obscure. See, the news is not all bad. Spring is finally here, and while my allergies may be kicking in I’m no longer freezing to death.

I’ve done enough yapping. What will I be reading? We have three stories from the 1930s and two from the 1950s.

For the serial:
1. Triplanetary by E. E. Smith. Serialized in Amazing Stories, January to April 1934. Smith was immensely popular in SF fandom during his lifetime, and yet despite a few attempts to resurrect his reputation he has since then been relegated to something of a sideshow attraction. Along with Edmond Hamilton he was one of the pioneers of space opera, with his novel The Skylark of Space especially laying the groundwork for future entries in that subgenre. The magazine version of Triplanetary was a standalone novel that Smith later retooled so as to make it a prequel in the Lensman series.
For the novellas:
1. “Proxima Centauri” by Murray Leinster. From the March 1935 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I actually don’t remember if I’ve read this one before, so I’m counting it as a new read. Anyway, Leinster is curious if only because he’s one of the few writers from the Gernsback era to survive the coming of Campbell; not only that, but he actually hit his creative peak in the ’40s and ’50s.
2. “Wolves of Darkness” by Jack Williamson. From the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. Williamson had one of the longest careers of any writer, inside or outside of SF, debuting in 1928 and remaining active until his death in 2006. “Wolve of Darkness” stands out as, if I remember right, getting Williamson his single biggest paycheck for a story up to that point, as he says in his autobiography.
For the short stories:
1. “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs. From the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is now the third time I’ve nabbed a story from this issue of Galaxy. I unfortunately have next to nothing to say about Jacobs since we know basically nothing about her, not even when and where she was born. She wrote a handful of SF stories in the ’50s and ’60s and then vanished.
2. “The Muted Horn” by Dorothy Salisbury Davis. From the May 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe. This is a case where looking at an author’s ISFDB page can be deceiving, since going by it one would think Davis wrote very little; but actually she was a prolific crime novelist, and was even President of the Mystery Writers of America when she wrote this story, which is apparently horror.
Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith

October 27th, 2023

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

Who Goes There?

Last time I reviewed a Tanith Lee piece, and Lee is one of the two returning authors from last October; the other is Clark Ashton Smith. Of the big three (or four, if we count C. L. Moore) voices of Weird Tales during its 1930s heyday, Smith might be my favorite just in terms of how pleasurable he is to read on a paragraph-by-paragraph level. Whereas Robert E. Howard was a master of action, Lovecraft a master of atmosphere, and Moore a sort of jack of all trades, Smith had an intimidating capacity to conjure raw imagination through his prose, which is often hypnotic, colorful, and occasionally hard to grasp without a thesaurus on hand. His style of writing is a bit divisive. Isaac Asimov was outspoken about disliking Smith’s writing, which makes sense since Asimov handled prose like a mechanic would handle his tools while Smith thought himself a poet first and foremost. The result is that his stories often read like dark-hued prose poems.

Between 1929 and 1934 Smith wrote a truly staggering amount of short fiction (and it was always short fiction, since except for a novel he wrote as a teenager he never wrote longer than novelette-length), which resulted in several series. Today’s story, “The Door to Saturn,” takes place in Hyperboria, a mythical continent that’s set in a distant alternate past—one where prehistory and wizardry coexist. It’s also here that we’re met with the sorcerer Eibon, which should ring a bell if you’re into the Cthulhu mythos since the Book of Eibon is one of those fictional texts that gets cited there. Eibon is Smith’s creation and one of several examples of Smith and Lovecraft influencing each other, although as far as I can tell “The Door to Saturn” is the only story where he’s a main character.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales, which is on the Archive. I’ll be honest, I partly chose this story because I needed an excuse to pull up Wesso’s cover for this issue, it being one of my favorite covers for any pulp magazine. As for other appearances, “The Door to Saturn” has never been anthologized in English, but it’s made a pretty steady number of appearances in Smith collections over the years, including Lost Worlds in 1944, Hyperborea in 1971, The Emperor of Dreams in 2002, and The Door to Saturn: Volume Two of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith in 2007. It was also printed in the November 1964 issue of Magazine of Horror (available on the Archive), which is funny to me because it’s really not a horror story; on the contrary, this is a planetary romance that sees Smith at his most upbeat and humorous.

Enhancing Image

Morghi, an inquisitor and zealot of the elk-goddess Yhoundeh, has come to Eibon’s pentagondal abode with a posse, with the intent of bringing the dark wizard to justice. It’s a surprise raid, which makes Eibon’s absence all the more surprising. Where the hell could the bastard have gone? He could not have known about the raid in advance, except maybe by consulting his god, the ape-like Zhothaqquah. As the zealots search every corner and crack of the tower, Morghi finds a series of paintings, sculptures, and works of pottery on the highest floor, all of them seemingly ancient, many of them depicting Zhothaqquah in some way.

On each of the five walls there hung one of the parchment paintings, all of which seemed to be the work of some aboriginal race. Their themes were blasphemous and repellent; and Zhothaqquah figured in all of them, amid forms and landscapes whose abnormality and sheer uncouthness may have been due to the half-developed technique of the primitive artists. Morghi now tore them from the walls one by one, as if he suspected that Eibon might in some manner be concealed behind them.
(This is a fairly concise paragraph by Smith’s standards.)

But curiously, behind one of these paintings is a metal panel large enough to fit a person and which seems to function like a door, opening outward on its hinges; problem is that it would open into the outside where one would fall into the sea. This is assuming it’s a normal panel, which it’s not. It’s at this point that we flash back to Eibon’s POV, sometime before the raid, in which he has a chat with Zhothaqquah—as you do. Zhothaqquah had made a deal with the dark wizard in which Eibon is granted one means of escape, in the event that the fuzz come for him and he wouldn’t be able to elude them by natural means, or even with the power of his sorcery. The panel on that topmost floor is a portal, opening to Cykranosh, known to us as Saturn, millions of miles away, with the likelihood of anyone else going through it and finding Eibon being practically 0% (making Morghi’s subsequent entry pretty miraculous!). The catch is that this is a last resort: once you go through the portal, returning to Earth is basically impossible.

Shifting POVs in a short story can be tricky, but here I think the shift early on from Morghi to Eibon (before taking on an omniscient perspective) was called for, even if it treats the portal as a mini-twist. Smith was never a great plotter and so the opening scene reads more like a necessary evil than anything, so that we can get to the good stuff; it’s the weakest part of the story, but it’s brief enough as to not be a grind. Once we’re on Saturn (I’m calling it that and not Smith’s name for it because I prefer to use words that could feasibly exist), the game is afoot. The bad news for Eibon is that it doesn’t take long for Morghi to find him; the good news (for Eibon anyway) is that arresting him is now pointless since they’re both stuck here. They have to work together to survive, and in Eibon’s case he has to find connection here, since Zhothaqquah had gone through Saturn and indeed there’s an abundance of intelligent life here.

This, of course, is not the Saturn we know: it’s not a gas giant, evidently, and the air is breathable for humans. Mars or Venus would’ve made more sense in the context of ’30s SF (indeed “The Door to Saturn” qualifies as what we now call science-fantasy, sort of in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mode), but I think Smith wanted an even more exotic locale which is farther away from Earth and more unusual in appearance. Saturn is famous for its rings, but Smith goes the extra mile to present even its terrain as unusual, using his knack for language as a tool to accomplish this. A common tip for writing is “Don’t use a two-syllable word when a one-syllable word will do,” or something like that, but Smith always heads in the opposite direction. It’s not enough for there to be rivers of liquid metal, they have to be rivers of “liquescent” metal. The sky is “greenish-black” and “was over-arched from end to end with a triple cyclopean ring of dazzling luminosity.” “Sulphurescent” is apparently not a real word, but it conveys well the harsh smell of the planet’s air. Here, Smith uses alien language to describe an alien place.

(Worth mentioning that word processors really hate Smith, given the exotic names of his own invention along with made-up words that sound like they might be real but aren’t, not to mention vice versa.)

Speaking of which, the main alien race of the story are the Bhlemphroims, a hairy bipedal race with their heads fused to their upper abdomens such that they lack necks, and who bear a resemblance to Zhothaqquah; indeed they are related, but the Bhlemphroims no longer worship that god, nor any god to speak of. A race of unbelievers. When Eibon tries to persuade them with a phrase Zhothaqquah had passed on to him, they don’t react, but they do thank Our Heroes™ for having (unwittingly) returned one of their livestock—a reptilian beast with dozens of tiny legs, so enormous that when Eibon and Morghi encounter it they don’t even see its head from ground level. The Bhlemphroims, being a docile and unimaginative race, give Our Heroes™ a warm welcome, even offering them up as husbands for the lead female, who needs mates and is not discerning as to the race.

This proves to be a huge problem. For one, the “national mother” is what you would call a looker, being a ginormous and gelatinous creature, having been selected out of the many females and fed over time so as to be able to give birth to a whole generation of Bhlemphroims. The prospect of mating with such a creature is horrifying. “Thinking of the mountainous female they had seen, Morghi was prone to remember his sacerdotal vows of celibacy and Eibon was eager to take similar vows upon himself without delay.” That’s right, you’re seeing a joke in a Clark Ashton Smith story; and I’ll be honest, this particular one cracked me up. There are actually several jokes made through the third-person narrator, who proves to be a bit snarkier than what you’d expect for an old-school weird tale. “The Door to Saturn” is a planetary adventure, but it’s also a surprisingly effective comedy.

An even more severe problem than the prospect of making love to a mountain of alien flesh is that the national mother, like the female praying mantis, devours her mates after copulation. The Bhlemphroims are a peaceful race, but they also see getting eaten by the national mother as a profound honor. Lovecraft was probably asexual, and refrained from bringing up sex even implicitly in his fiction (with one or two exceptions), but Smith had no such qualms, with his male characters experiencing temptation and jealousy, and with flowers often symbolizing attraction (but also malicious deception). In this case the national mother is a stand-in for a deeply unattractive woman whom Our Heroes™ want to avoid. Now, rejecting their obligations to the Bhlemphroims and getting the hell out of Dodge will prove to be quite the challenge, right? Sounds like a recipe for adventure.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s pretty easy, as it turns out.

There are several moments of playful irony in “The Door to Saturn” that help make it considerably less self-serious than the usual Smith story. Subverting what was already a well-worn pulp trope of the time (the alien race being akin to violent savages), the Bhlemphroims are so peaceful that they just let Eibon and Morghi go on their merry way, simply uncomprehending as to why such men would deny the national mother. When they meet the Ydheems, who are also related to Zhothaqquah and who are, unlike the Bhlemphroims, still true believers, Eibon uses the phrase Zhothaqquah had bestowed on him—a phrase that, unbeknownst to Eibon, simply means “Be on your way.” The saying ends up saving both Our Heroes™ and the Ydheems, as it convinces them to move out of their village just as an avalanche (of giant mushrooms) is about to decimate it. There’s irony in that Eibon accidentally saves a race of people (just as Our Heroes™ had before accidentally saved one of the Bhlemphroims’ livestock), but also there’s the implication that Zhothaqquah had basically told his most devoted human disciple to fuck off. It’s funny to think about.

The irony continues when we’re informed at the end that, since Morghi had vanished into the portal and was never seen again, his minions took to thinking he had been in cahoots with Eibon the whole time, and as a result the cult currounding Yhoundeh collapses; this is all right before an Ice Age comes over Hyperboria, no doubt leading to a mass extinction event. Life on Saturn ain’t easy (although being a savior to the Ydheems grants a few luxuries), but Eibon and Morghi remain blissfully unaware that they have it better on such a desolate planet than in their homeland, which is about to become nigh uninhabitable. At first “The Door to Saturn” seems like it might be a straightforward weird tale, the ironies start to snowball so that by the end it has become a grim but playful comedy. This is all uncharacteristically fun-loving for Smith, but I’m not complaining.

A Step Farther Out

Of the three Smith stories I’ve reviewed so far, this one is my favorite. Whereas “Vulthoom” (review here) was largely mediocre because it reads as Smith trying to write an “accessible” SF story of the time, “The Door to Saturn” is 100% Smith, which means some will find it impenetrable. I don’t mind because I tend to like Smith’s style, but this is also a fun yarn. The way Eibon and Morghi play off each other is entertaining on its own, but their adventure on a Saturn that never was, coming across some pretty inventively envisioned alien races, is where the fun is really at. If anything this is a story I would recommend to people who are curious about Smith that at the same time doesn’t water down what makes him unique—even if it doesn’t give one the impression that he normally skews towards horror.

See you next time.

Tag: h. w. wesso

Novella Review: “Wolves of Darkness” by Jack Williamson

Things Beyond: April 2025

Short Story Review: “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith