The Double Shadow: A Clark Ashton Smith Podcast

Episode #13: “The Satyr”

This week, we’re covering the last published Averoigne story, “The Satyr” along with its variant conclusion.

The poet referenced in the story was Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), who was a member of the group of French poets known as La Pléiade.

The phrase we were looking for from the Podcast to the Curious was the “Jamesian whallop,” an especially good phrase when said in a British accent.

In next week’s episode, we’ll wrap up Averoigne with a discussion of the setting and a look at three synopses/outlines CAS wrote for potential Averoigne stories. The synopses we’ll be covering are “Queen of the Sabbat,” “The Werewolf of Averoigne,” “The Sorceress of Averoigne | The Tower of Istarelle.”

Thanks again to Kevin MacLeod for the music.

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  1. Odilius Vlak says:

    The treatment of evil in the Averoigne cycle drew from both sources at the same time: 1)- Clark Ashton Smith like a master of dark poetry, a condition that obviously fueled his metaphors with anything gloomy, ghostly and evil, and 2)- the nature of the Averoigne setting, whose essence would whisper in any narrator’s ear the darkest descriptions available in the imagination, even in a simple story like this one. The first ending is ok… it’d have inspired an amazing cover for Weird Tales. You know, Pan taking away Adele, like many aliens and every kind of freaky creatures have been doing it with scanty dressed women in each cover of “the unique magazine”. I don’t see it like a punishment for Adele, but her free ticket into the Old World. Beside, it shows the magic of different energies at work, the passion and love defeating the fear of a supernatural being and a supernatural environment. The second ending is mundane. The only thing Smith missed to add was the suicide of Raoul to complete the fucking portrait of a crime more fit for a detective novel than a weird story.

  2. Stephanus says:

    How about ..The Ashtonian Crunch as an equivalent or maybe a more American sounding Ashtonian Whack…(or Wham!)…worth a competetion for listeners to come up with a good one….

  3. Stephanus says:

    BTW The use of the term evil in the Satyr might eb being used in the context of the Cosmic Horror (as in Lovecraft some of whose ideas Smith at least sympathised with/was influenced by) as in a fundamentally malevolent undercurrent to the Older world predating the Christian/Roman milieux). Houellebecq has a bit to say about a Lovecraftian universe which is at best neutral to humans and at worst has malevolent designs on it. Smiths Averoigne here although more outre has similar touches..hence a primal eveil to the wildness of ancient natural scenes…