The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

 Clark Ashton Smith, "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" in Weird Tales, May 1932

Read the restored version here for free

If you are wanting to jump into some Clark Ashton Smith short fiction for the first time, you won't go wrong starting here. Smith delivers a tale reminiscent of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" without the extra 30,000 words, and leaves the reader drawing a more horrifying conclusion than one draws from Lovecraft's classic. As is typical of Smith, the prose here is a delight, and the story manages to spark the imagination and draw the reader into a doomed exploration of ancient ruins on the Mars landscape. With some great horror that will remind many of the film Alien, this one might actually manage to scare you!



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