Smith included “The Beast of Averoigne” in LW. The original version was first published by Steve Behrends in Strange Shadows. Carbon copies of the first and final versions of the story may be found in Smith’s papers at Brown University, and were consulted to establish the present text.

1. SS 173.

2. SS 174-175.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, July 10, 1932 (SL 180).

4. AWD, letter to CAS, July 23 [1932] (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, August 21, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, September 1, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

7. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

8. CAS, letter to HPL [c. early November 1933] (SL 236).

9. Stefan Dziemianowicz, “Into the Woods: The Human Geography of Averoigne.” In FFT 302.

10. CAS, letter to AWD, April 18, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

A Star-Change

Smith wrote to Lovecraft late in 1930 that he had “a whale of an idea” for a story “[that illustrated] the conditional nature of our perception of reality.”¹ Smith had touched on this idea in “The Monster of the Prophecy,” but here he allows his imagination to run rampant. An outline from October 1930 reads

A man taken to an alien world, who suffers from the strange impressions to which he is subjected, and undergoes for relief an operation at the hands of his hosts which transforms all his sensory reactions so that the new world becomes tolerable. When he returns to earth, he sees an utterly alien and terrifying world—and dies mad in a hospital, his case having been diagnosed as d.t.

²

He expounded further on the idea in the same letter to Lovecraft quoted above:

I think there are huge possibilities in this, if it is carefully and graphically worked out. The change in the feeling of time, movement, geometry, the monstrous transmutations and amplifications and distortions and combinations of visual, aural, and other images, could be dealt with in a minutely realistic style. For instance, there might be an extension, or combination of tactility with visions which would cause acute torture from certain terrestrial images. The tale is so damnably possible when you think of what a little fever, or a dose of hashish, can do to one’s sensory apparatus. But it will be hard to write—and harder still to sell, since it will be analytic and descriptive rather than actional: which brings me to the reflection that one reason there are so few good weird stories is the damned editorial requirement for “action”, which makes it very difficult to build up any solid or convincing background, or to treat the incidents themselves with the necessary fulness of detail.

³

CAS described it to Derleth as “high-grade science fiction,” and thought that it might “be eligible for ‘Amazing,’ but probably won’t have enough plot or excitement for” either WS or Astounding Stories.⁴ He completed it on or about July 4, 1932. Smith submitted the story first to Weird Tales, but Wright returned it as “too descriptive and actionless.”⁵Amazing held on to it for five months before returning it,⁶ after which it was submitted to, and accepted by WS, where it was published in the May 1933 issue as “The Visitors from Mlok,” another victim of Hugo Gernsback’s penchant for changing titles. Smith was to have received fifty dollars for the story, but as discussed in the note for “The Dweller in the Gulf” he had to resort to legal action to collect.

Smith was proud of this story, stating “As far as I know, it is almost the only attempt to convey the profound disturbance of function and sensation that would inevitably be experienced by a human being on an alien world.”⁷ After reading the story in manuscript, Derleth passed it along to Lovecraft with the comment that “This is not very good, I regret to say.”⁸ This could be attributed to AWD’s antipathy toward contemporary sf,⁹ but in his response Lovecraft agreed, observing that “The idea is magnificent—but as you say, the mode of handling is mediocre.”¹⁰ CAS was undoubtedly handicapped by the necessity of using the trappings of Gernsbackian “scientifiction” in his treatment, since as he once remarked to HPL“the mythology of science is not one that intrigues me very deeply.”¹¹

After the story appeared, sf fan Forrest J. Ackerman objected to the appearance of stories such as “A Star-Change” in the pages of Wonder Stories (see note to “The Dweller in the Gulf” for further details). Smith wrote in a letter to a fan living in the San Francisco Bay area that “The funny part of this is, that this tale is about a hundred times closer to genuine reality in conveying the problematic sensations of an interplanetary traveler than the usual tales dealing with such themes. Oh, well... what’s the use?”¹²

1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 128).

2. SS 159 .

3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 129).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, August 2, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

7. CAS, letter to AWD, May 23, 1933 (SL 206-207).

8. AWD, letter to HPL, July 17, 1933 (Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi [New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008], p. 594).

9. See Derleth’s remarks in the notes to “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, ” VA, 307n6.

10. HPL, letter to AWD, July 23, 1933 (Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi [New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008], p. 595).

11. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 21, 1930 (LL 15).

12. CAS, letter to Lester Anderson, June 20, 1933 (SL 211).

The Disinterment of Venus

CAS mentioned to Derleth early in June 1931 that he had plotted three other tales of Averoigne, the first of which was “The Disinterment of Venus.”¹ This story, which was inspired in part by Prosper de Mérimée’s “The Venus of Ille” (1837), would describe what happened when

A marble Venus, exhumed in a monastery garden in Averoigne by some monks, which has a baleful influence on all who touch or behold it, inducing nympholepsy and a sort of pagan madness or possession. The statue is left standing in the field beside the pit from which it had been digged, and people fear to approach it. A young monk goes to it by night before moonrise, with a hammer, intending to smash it to fragments. The monk fails to return; and the next day it is seen that the statue has disappeared. People, among whom are the possessed and the unpossessed, visit the field, and find that the statue has fallen back into the pit, carrying with it the monk, who lies dead beneath its weight with his arms about the Venus, which is still unbroken.

²

When Smith finished the story in July 1932, he described it to Derleth as “a rather wicked story”³—too wicked, as it turned out, for Farnsworth Wright, who rejected it with the indignant complaint that “satyriasis is not a suitable theme for a WT story.”⁴ Smith revised and retyped the story, although he feared “of all my recent tales, [it] will be the hardest to sell, since it combines the risque and the ghastly.”⁵ Wright accepted the story after four revisions, stating that he liked it “much better with the new ending” and offering thirty dollars.⁶ Although CAS told Derleth that this version, as published in the July 1934 issue of WT, “practically restored”⁷ the original ending, he may have forgotten just how suggestive the story was originally. The expenditure of so much effort for such minimal remuneration did not do much to endear “The Disinterment of Venus” to Smith, since when he presented the original typescript to Robert H. Barlow, he offered this assessment, that it wasn’t “much of a story in any of its phases.”⁸ The present text is based upon this copy, which was presented by Barlow to the Bancroft Library, with reference to CAS’ carbon of the WT version at the John Hay Library.