The Nameless Offspring by Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer born in Long Valley, California in 1893 who died in Pacific Grove, California in 1961, aged 68.  They are actually four hundred and twenty eight miles apart which is longer than the whole of England.  For comparison I have only made two hundred yards from the place I was born to the place I now live. He lived most of his life in the small town of Auburn, California.  He was madly neurotic, agoraphobic and as with Lovecraft, the existential unease he no doubt felt in life, intrudes into his stories, giving them their unsettling quality, I would guess. Because of his nerves, he was educated at home and was intelligent with a fantastic memory and educated himself by reading, including The Encyclopaedia Britannica all volumes cover to cover more than once. He taught himself French and Spanish and translated poetry from those languages, including Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. Naturally. Clark was a weird poet and one of the now defunct West Coast Romantics. I can see him playing guitar for Mazzy Star (if he’d been spared).  He was one of the ‘big three’ authors of Weird Tales, the others being Robert E Howard and H P Lovecraft. As a teen (though in those days I wouldn’t have been familiar with that word) I lapped up all three, though I preferred Ashton Smith. There is something more poetic and less rude about his style than either the barbarous, muscle-bound stories of Howard and the off-kilter, prolix and baroque tales of H P.  Though, as I say, I read them all, aye. All. We have done an Ashton Smith story before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkA3Hq8qIU (The Maker of Gargoyles). This story: The Nameless Offspring is another tomb story. We seem to have done a run of these recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pSp2_ZPOyA (The Catacomb), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC9epxbb-JU (The Secret of The Vault). And previously we did The https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC-kCEb_oTE (Fall of the House of Usher). It was p