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The Tale of Satampra Zeiros Review
Well, we are definitely out of Lovecraft for a while! CAS has a much different style of writing. So let’s talk!
A few notes about Clark Ashton Smith – He had a memory that was almost eidetic. He read a dictionary from front to back while a child, and remembered most of the words. He also read the Encyclopedia through twice. As such, his works tend to be littered with words that I have to look up or skip over. I love it! I learned the word ignescent a few weeks ago and have used it twice since then.
This is a classic CAS story. CAS has a weakened reputation among fantasy enthusiasts because he was never published in the right way. Let me explain. Right now, if I want, I can buy a book of Robert E Howards Conan tales or horror tales. I can find a collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs Pelucidar stories or H Rider Haggard’s Allen Quartermain stories and so forth. You can’t do that with CAS. You have to buy a big, expensive hard cover book of all of his stuff. You just can’t spend 5 bucks for his Hyperborea cycle or his Zothique Cycle. The copyright is still owned, because he died a lot later than many other writes of his era. Anyway, his stuff is really good, with different language, different tones, and different moods that most other stories of his era or other Mythos tales.
While this is a fantasy story, it’s also clearly a horror story. There’s no question that this is different from both Lovecraft’s sci-fi horror or the eldritch horror of much of the Mythos. It’s nice to read it, because CAS is a nice blast of fresh air.
CAS has a different take on the eldritch characters such as Tsathoggua. He writes the character as virtually a malign deity not unlike many others in mythology. He might be a bit ugly, but Tsathoggua is not unlike Loki. Because CAS’s stuff was all written on Earth in various ages, he incorporates these elements such as Tsathoggua everywhere. That means most of his entire output of literature is essentially Mythos, but I’d say it’s Mythos-lite for the most part. Because of that, we’ll read more by CAS before REH moves in for a while.
Overall, this story is a hallmark of CAS’s style – dark humor, fast paced, not a lot of time on detailed discussions of the area (compare his one paragraph description of Commoriom vs Lovecrafts two and a half pages to begin The Colour Out of Space), and tight. It’s a great story that stands on its own.
(For historians, it is important to note that while this story is the one the creates Tsathoggua in 1929, it is not published until 1931. Lovecraft read the script and incorporated Tsathoggua into a story that was published in 1930, so by some accounts, this is not the introduction of Tsathoggua in print).
Tsathoggua is one of the big greats of the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft uses him a lot, and Howard uses him a ton more than any others.
I give it four stars out of five.
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