1. CAS, letter to AWD, February 24, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, October 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early April 1932] (SL 175).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, October 27, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
5. PD 74.
The Supernumerary Corpse
The concept of “The Supernumerary Corpse” occurred to Smith early in his career as a fiction writer, the title appears in a list of possible titles that dates to late 1929. His notes for the story describe it succinctly: “A man dies, and leaves two corpses, in two different places”.1 CAS first discusses the story in a letter to Lovecraft in mid-November 1930.2 It apparently failed to fire his imagination sufficiently as it was not completed until April 10, 1932. CAS submitted it to Wright, wryly noting that it “may be punk enough for him to buy,” and adding that he could not decide if “the carbon is worth circulating”.3 It was published in the November 1932 issue, and remained uncollected until after Smith’s death, in OD. The current text is based upon a carbon of the typescript at JHL.
1. SS 159.
2. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. November 16, 1930] (SL 136).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early April 1932] (ms, JHL).
The Colossus of Ylourgne
The story germ of this story may be found in Smith’s “Black Book,” which he described in the fanzine the Acolyte as “a notebook containing used and unused plot-germs, notes on occultism and magic, synopses of stories, fragments of verse, fantastic names for people and places, etc., etc.”,1 under the title “The Colossal Incarnation”:
An immense giant, moulded from innumerable dead bodies by a sorcerer. The tale to be told by one of his assistants, who has helped to collect the bodies, stealing them from graves and charnels. Having read his own horoscope, and knowing that his death is imminent, the sorcerer plans to have his spirit pass into the vast body through which, among other things, he will take revenge on a city that had flouted him. But the body, being composed of the dead, is not sufficiently subject to his control. Its elements long only for sleep and oblivion; and instead of destroying the city, it proceeds to dig itself a colossal grave.
2
Completed on May 1, 1932, Smith described the story as “about the most horrific of my tales dealing with the mythical province of Averoigne”.3 It was accepted by Harry Bates for Strange Tales, but as in the case of “The Double Shadow” and “The Seed from the Sepulcher,” it was returned to Smith after the magazine folded. It was the most popular story in the June 1934 issue of Weird Tales and was included in both GL and RA.
The next year Smith was approached by Universal Pictures regarding whether he had any stories that might be suitable for adaptation as screenplays.4 Smith offered “The Colossus of Ylourgne” and “The Dark Eidolon.” Apparently the studio expressed interest in these properties, since Smith asked Wright to release the motion-picture rights, which he did on October 11, 1935,5 but the Laemmele family lost control the next year, and the new management may not have cared for such unconventionally imaginative material.
1.“Excerpts from the Black Book,” The Acolyte (Spring 1944), reprinted in BB 77.
2. BB item 57.
3. CAS, letter to DAW, May 4, 1932 (ms, MHS).
4. Universal Pictures (Edward Churchill), letter to CAS, August 21, 1935 (ms, JHL).
5. FW, letter to CAS, October 11, 1935 (ms, JHL).
The God of the Asteroid
This story is yet another testament to Gernsback’s proclivity for changing the titles of stories without first consulting the authors. First published in the October 1932 issue of Wonder Stories under the title of “Master of the Asteroid,” and receiving a fine cover illustration by Frank R. Paul, all contemporary references to the story by Smith use the present title, which dates back to a listing of possible story titles he recorded in late 1929 or early 1930.1 For instance, he refers in a letter to the Lovecraft-revised story “The Man of Stone” by Hazel Heald as “a story in the Oct. Wonder Stories (which featured my ‘God of the Asteroid’) ….”—after he had learned of the title-change to “Master of the Asteroid.”2
A synopsis titled “The God of the Asteroid” was found among Smith’s papers: “A space-ship manned by three terrestrial explorers is wrecked on an asteroid. One of the three survives, and is worshipped as a god by the grotesque inhabitants. He goes stark mad, but lives for years, still revered and tended as a deity”.3 The present story was completed on June 9, 1932. Smith received forty dollars for the story.
Smith refers in the story to Mohammed’s coffin, which was supposed to have been suspended between Heaven and Earth. He had written another story, “Like Mohammed’s Tomb,” that unfortunately has not been located and may not survive.
The first indication that Smith had resigned himself to the name-change was when he allowed the story to be reprinted as “Master of the Asteroid” in August Derleth’s anthology Strange Ports of Call (Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948). This might have been due to purely commercial considerations, since under the published title it was a well-known and popular story. Sometime in the late 1950s Smith’s wife Carol prepared a new typescript using the title given to the story by WS, and it is under this title that it was collected posthumously in TSS, and later in RA. Surprisingly, in light of the praise lent the tale by Ray Bradbury in his foreword to the unpublished paperback collection Far from Time, Smith did not include this story in that book.
1. SS 182.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, December 24, 1932. (SL 198).
3. SS 155.
APPENDIX TWO: THE FLOWER-DEVIL
(The Poem that “The Demon of the Flower” Was Based Upon)
In a basin of porphyry, at the summit of a pillar of serpentine, the thing has existed from primeval time, in the garden of the kings that rule an equatorial realm of the planet Saturn. With black foliage, fine and intricate as the web of some enormous spider; with petals of livid rose, and purple like the purple of putrefying flesh; and a stem rising like a swart and hairy wrist from a bulb so old, so encrusted with the growth of centuries that it resembles an urn of stone, the monstrous flower holds dominion over all the garden. In this flower, from the years of oldest legend, an evil demon has dwelt—a demon whose name and whose nativity are known to the superior magicians and mysteriarchs of the kingdom, but to none other. Over the half-animate flowers, the ophidian orchids that coil and sting, the bat-like lilies that open their ribbēd petals by night, and fasten with tiny yellow teeth on the bodies of sleeping dragon-flies; the carnivorous cacti that yawn with green lips beneath their beards of poisonous yellow prickles; the plants that palpitate like hearts, the blossoms that pant with a breath of poisonous perfume—over all these, the Flower-Devil is supreme, in its malign immortality, and evil, perverse intelligence—inciting them to strange maleficence, fantastic mischief, even to acts of rebellion against the gardeners, who proceed about their duties with wariness and trepidation, since more than one of them has been bitten, even unto death, by some vicious and venefic flower. In places, the garden has run wild from lack of care on the part of the fearful gardeners, and has become a monstrous tangle of serpentine creepers, and hydra-headed plants, convolved and inter-writhing in lethal hate or venomous love, and horrible as a rout of wrangling vipers and pythons.