"My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.” - Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961)

Like a sledgehammer pounding a nail into wood, The Hunters from Beyond strikes my own recollected childhood fears with unmistakable force, thus it took me some time to muster up the needed gumption to write a review of this harrowing tale, a tale disturbing in the extreme for a number of reasons, not the least of which, as noted in the above quote, the power of the author’s linguistic black magic to cast a spell, an incantation, compelling a reader to enter heart and soul into the story’s nightmarish reality. True, the tale lends itself to comic book style illustrations (just take a gander at the cover below), but to my mind, in this case, such art adds to rather than subtracts from the terror. For more specifics as to why, please read on.

One sunny summer afternoon in a San Francisco bookstore, our first-person narrator, a well-mannered, clearheaded young author of supernatural and occult fiction by the name of Philip Hastane, peruses the pages of a deluxe edition containing many terrifying illustrations created by the great Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, when, looking up, he spots a hideous, macabre creature squatting in the corner among the stacks of books, a bestial thing, shriveled, grayish-white, possessing “the head and brow of an anthropoid ape, a semi-canine mouth and jaw, and arms ending in twisted hands whose black hyena talons nearly scraped the floor.”

Whoa! Not in a hidden cave, not in the dark, not in an abandoned castle, but right there out in the open, crouching in, of all places, a bookstore, a bookstore, moreover, located on a crowded, sun-drenched city street.

In his shock, Philip drops the book he is holding and the creature instantly vanishes. However, thereafter, walking down the much trafficked street toward the spacious second-floor loft of his distant cousin, a sculptor by the name of Cyprian Sincaul, Philip has the distinct impression he is being followed by an unseen someone or something. And upon his arrival at the loft, Philip immediately beholds a tremendous transformation in his cousin’s appearance, and equally dramatic, in his cousin’s artistic productions - from past mediocrity, Cyprian's sculptures now border on authentic artistic genius. And the subjects for Cyprian's art? Demons, satyrs, ghouls and other creatures equally foul and evil to the core.

Philip commences a series of probing questions respecting Cyprian's source of inspiration for such bizarre, disturbing figures. Following an emotionally-charged verbal exchange, action replaces words - Cyprian pulls away a burlap cloth revealing his latest creation. Thereupon, in wide-eyed astonishment, Philip observes: “Before me, in a monstrous semicircle, were seven creatures who might all have been modeled from the gargoyle that had confronted me across the folio of Goya drawings. Even in several that were still amorphous or incomplete, Cyprian had conveyed with a damnable art the peculiar mingling of primal bestiality and nortuary putrescence that had signalized the phantom."

From this point onward shock and revulsion deepen as we are clearly dealing with hideous creatures from another, non-material dimension, noxious, aggressive beings Cyprian calls “hunters from the beyond.” Alas, the very next morning, the grey-white gargoyle from the bookstore reappears in Philips's hotel room - it stands at the foot of Philip’s bed, it stares into Philip’s eyes, it causes the surrounding walls to dissolve into an ugly grey ooze, it attempts to lure poor Philip into its spell, it wishes to claim Philip as its prey. And it comes without his bidding! Enough to drive a clearheaded writer crazy. That's the eerie part of such forms of life- the power to penetrate into our material plane and confront us by their own wish and the power of their own will.

What infuses The Hunters from Beyond with additional layers of scariness is the fact that parallel universes inhabited by intelligent non-human creatures isn’t the exclusive domain of fantasy and science-fiction. The esoteric Tibetan Buddhist tradition with its Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) details how we are constantly surrounded by unseen beings. Also, the mind-bending implications blooming like flowers within the world of quantum physics with its discoveries of spatial realities beyond our familiar three dimensions.

It is precisely this theme at the heart of H.P. Lovecraft's literary aesthetic in such tales as The Unnameable wherein the narrator justifies his devotion to horror fiction with speculations on the existence of remarkable, uncanny presences inhabiting abandoned houses and empty fields. Likewise, in H.P.'s short tale, From Beyond, mad-scientist Crawford Tillinghast constructs a wave-generating machine enabling humans to gaze at the full range of numerous diverse sentient creatures floating overhead and crawling underfoot.

Back on Hunters, the horror of the tale is ratcheted up many times over by the addition of a beautiful woman Cyprian is employing as a model for his new art. Yes, there is the lovely nude Marta in the middle of the sculptor’s seven ghoulish, horrid, ghastly clay hunters. Recall how the inclusion of a nude woman as a model adds explosive energy to an artist’s canvas in Honoré de Balzac’s classic story, The Unknown Masterpiece. Such is the power of creativity linked with a beautiful woman’s nudity.

And this power is boosted a hundredfold when erotic love is added to the equation. Ah, yes, turns out Marta loves Cyprian and Cyprian loves Marta. And Clark Aston Smith doesn’t stop there – alarm and dread is deepened even further by the addition of another very human capacity – sacrificing oneself for one’s lover. By my reckoning, The Hunters from Beyond is one of the most unforgettable and gripping tales I’ve ever encountered, a tale within the genre of the weird and horrific that is also a meditation on art and creativity, on love and compassion, on sacrifice and bliss.

The Hunters From Beyond: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/93/the-hunters-from-beyond

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