The cover for Worms of the Earth is for the 1976 Orbit edition.
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The cover for Worms of the Earth is for the 1976 Orbit edition.
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• Blurb
• Introduction |
The chamber into which he went with Wulfhere was lined with pillars decorated with human figures. But not even the most perverse and barbaric geniuses of Rome could have conceived such obscenities or breathed such foul life into the tortured stone.
Here and there in the sculpturing, the unknown artists had struck a cord of unrealness, a hint of abnormality beyond any human deformity. The thought that Cormac had briefly entertained—that he had seen and slain an hallucination—vanished.
Cormac gazed at the floor on which he stood. The pattern of tiles converged to a single, broad, octagonal slab on which he was standing. Then, even as he realized he was standing on the slab, it fell away silently from beneath his feet and he felt himself plunging into an abyss beneath. . . .
“This man’s eyes were narrow slits and of a cold-steel grey, and they, with a number of scars that marred his face, lent him a peculiaryly sinister aspect. . . .”
The seas of King Arthur’s Britain rage wild and cold, and only the wild cold heart of Cormac can match them. With his Viking comrade, Wulfhere the Skull-splitter, Cormac battles theives and monarchs alike in thrilling adventures that could only have been created by Robert E. Howard, master of heroic fantasy.
One of the most astounding literary phenomena of this century is Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) who, despite the disadvantage of living his entire short life in or near the dusty little village of Cross Plains, Texas—over a thousand miles from any of his literary peers in the genre of fantastic fiction—nevertheless produced a considerable body of inspiring fantasy-epic prose and poetry. Perhaps his very isolation helped spur his keen and colorful imagination in a frantic search for relief from the bucolic drabness around him; at any rate, the fastmoving adventures he contributed to the pulp magazines of the ’20’s and ’30’s are definitely among the best of their kind, equal to the creations of such masters as Burroughs and Merritt in engrossing the reader in the excitement of the plot or evoking wonder through the depiction of strange ages and lost empires, and second to none in their display of a heroic, poetic writing-style that derives from a line of epic bards extending from Robert Service back to Homer. Howard was first of all a poet in the heroic tradition, and a few of his tales deserved to be considered modern classics in that field.
In his article, “Robert E. Howard: The Other Heroes” Etchings and Odysseys #1, 1973, Ted Pons states: “Most readers tend to associate Robert E. Howard with his four principal creations: Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, and the Pictish tribal king Bran Mak Mom. . . . Not to be forgotten, however, are the other heroes: those other characters in the weird genre who also sprang to life from Howard’s fertile imagination and talented pen. . . .” One such character is the hero of this collection of tales: Cormac Mac Art, the Gaelic renegade and pirate who roved and slew with the Vikings in the days of King Arthur.
Howard seems to have had a preference for heroes with a strong Gaelic strain in their ancestry. All his protagonists tended to be vital and muscular to a superlative degree, to be sure, but his Gaelic heroes had a depth of character development and a certain intensity that set them apart. Howard himself had a strong Irish strain in his ancestry and identified heavily with it. Also, he very often used the idea of reincarnation in his tales—though it is doubtful that he took the idea very seriously, and probably used it for its poetic effect only. Still, it is tempting to think that Howard—himself a muscular, darkhaired man over six feet in height, like most of his heroes—may have toyed with the notion that the heroic figures blossoming so readily into his imagination were his own previous incarnations.
Just for fun, let’s examine this notion. Howard’s favorite hero-type is a tall, rangy, wolflike warrior of pure Gaelic ancestry—blue-eyed but with a rather swarthy complexion, black-maned and with a scarred, somewhat sinister countenance; he is always a barbarian, neither giving nor expecting quarter in open battle, but possessing a concealed, innate chivalry or basic decency that keeps him from being downright cruel. Cormac Mac Art fits into this type precisely.
So also do Howard’s mightiest epic-heroes, King Kull of Atlantis and Conan the Cimmerian. Kull, a barbarian from the island-continent of Atlantis, wins to the throne of Valusia—the mightiest kingdom of what then corresponded to the continent of Europe—through his skill with the sword and the might of his own steely thews; all this took place 100,000 years ago, if one is to believe the utterances of the old Pictish priest Gonar in one of Howard’s finest tales, “Kings of the Night.” Ages later, about 18,000 b.c., Atlantis sank and terrific cataclysms changed the face of the world; the Hyborian Age came into being, its glamorous civilization rising only after long millennia of barbarism following the cataclysms. Eventually, Conan the Cimmerian—a black-maned, muscular, scar-faced hero like Kull—wins to the throne of Aquilonia, mightiest of the Hyborian nations. In “The Hyborian Age,” an elaborate article Howard penned to detail the background for his Kull and Conan stories, it is stated that “North of Aquilonia . . . are the Cimmerians, ferocious savages . . .; they are the descendants of the Atlanteans. . . .” Thus Conan turns out to be of the same basic racial strain as Kull. Finally, near the end of his article, after describing the destruction of the Hyborian Age, Howard states: “The Gaels, ancestors of the Irish and Highland Scotch, descended from pure-blooded Cimmerian clans.” Thus a racial link is established between Kull of Atlantis, Conan of Cimmeria and the various black-maned, sinister-faced Gaelic heroes of Howard’s who rove and slay within the framework of more-or-less known history.
Perhaps the earliest of these “historical-Cimmerian” heroes is Conan of the reivers, who appears in the tale “People of the Dark.” Raiding a village on the west coast of Britain with his fellow reavers from Erin, Conan pursues into the forest a blond girl who has excited his primitive lust—and finds himself battling in her behalf the horrid, semi-human “Little People” (so well depicted first in modern horror-fiction by Arthur Machen, and later elaborated on by Howard). Conan of the reivers, like his Cimmerian predecessor, seems to have little on his mind but satisfying his brutish appetites, though a primitive chivalry comes to the fore in him when the chips are down; King Kull, on the other hand, often displayed a melancholy, philosophical temperament—a brooding wonderment that wrestled with the problems of what the universe was all about.
Conan of the reivers, judging from internal evidence, probably ranged the British Isles sometime during the first millennium b.c., before the coming of the Roman legions to the isles. Cormac of Connacht, the next Gaelic hero-figure in the series, appears at the time of the final military defeat that breaks the power of Rome in Britain. Actually Cormac is more of an observer than a hero, for the real hero at this time is Bran Mak Morn, king of the Picts. Cormac is a major figure in “Kings of the Night,” perhaps Howard’s greatest tale of epic heroism, in which the mighty King Kull comes out of the past to aid the people of the heather in smashing the overbearing legions of Rome; the only other story mentioning Cormac is “Worms of the Earth,” in which Bran Mak Morn induces the Little People to aid him in the destruction of a cruel and overweening Roman general. (Incidentally, I think an amalgamation of these two Bran Mak Morn tales would make an epic movie worthy of Cecil B. deMille—with someone like Jack Palance playing the part of the Gaelic hero Cormac of Connacht. . . .)
Not long after Bran and Cormac smashed the Roman legions in Britain, Rome itself fell to the Goths and the Empire was at an end. The British Isles slowly reverted to the bronze-age savagery of the Dark Ages as Pict, Gael, Saxon and Jute strove with the semi-Romanized Britons for supremacy, while the first trickle of Viking activity began to be felt from the north. It was during this period, renowned in semi-mythical history for the exploits of King Arthur, that the hero of this book flourished—Cormac Mac Art. Cormac is a hero out of the standard cloth—“a tall, rangily built man, deepchested and strong,” with “square-cut black hair and dark, smooth face. . . . This man’s eyes were narrow slits and of a cold-steel grey, and they, with a number of scars that marred his face, lent him a peculiarly sinister aspect.” Cormac is an outcast Irish sea-rover who ranges with the Danish Viking, Wulfhere the Skull-splitter.
Four tales of Cormac Mac Art are know to exist. Except for “The Night of the Wolf,” which appeared in the Dell paperback collection Bran Mak Morn, they are published in this collection for the first time. I have arranged these four tales in what I think is as logical an order as may be inferred from the internal evidence. In “The Temple of Abomination” (evidently the earliest attempt of Howard’s concerning this hero, and the only tale in the series having a supernatural theme) Cormac states to Wulfhere: “Alaric led his Goths through the Forum fifty years ago, yet you barbarians still start at the name of Rome. Fear not; there are no legions in Britain.” He goes on to say that “most of the chiefs are gathering about Arthur Pendragon for a great, concerted drive”—against the Saxons. “The Night of the Wolf,” which I have placed third in the series, ends with Cormac and Wulfhere escaping with their crew in a long ship called the Raven, which is the name of their ship in the fourth tale, “Tigers of the Sea.” Now, in “Tigers” there is a discrepancy: Cormac states in this tale that “Some eighty years ago . . . Alaric and his Goths sacked the imperial city”—implying that thirty years have passed since “The Temple of Abomination” yet he also says that “Damnonia and the country extending to Caer Odun, is ruled over by Uther Pendragon.” Yet mythology states that Uther preceded Arthur. I have changed the text to read “80 years” in both cases, as this is a little closer to the supposed period of Arthurian events. Evidently Howard wrote “Tigers of the Sea” so long after “The Temple of Abomination” that he had forgotten what he had written in the earlier story.
A few centuries later Turlogh O’Brien, an Irish outlaw-wolf very similar to Cormac Mac Art, appears on the scene. He roams alone, an outcast, fighting with Viking and Gael alike, the hands of all men against him. “The Dark Man,” in which a supernaturally-endowed image of the now-legendary Bran Mak Morn aids Turlogh in destroying the Vikings who kidnapped and slew an Irish princess, is one of Howard’s finest tales. Turlogh possesses the same streak of moody pessimism about the universe as Kull and Cormac; in “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” Howard writes of him: “. . . but to the black haired fighting-man of the West, it seemed that even in the loudest clamor of triumph, the trumpet, the drum and the shouting faded away into the forgotten dust and silence of eternity. Kingdoms and empires pass away like mist from the sea, thought Turlogh . . . and it seemed to him that he and Athelstane walked in a dead city, through throngs of dim ghosts. . . .” This is Howard’s own basic attitude showing through—the attitude of the outsider who feels life to be somehow unsatisfying and unreal.
Another Irish hero takes the stage in “The Cairn on the Headland”—Red Cumal, who fought under King Brian Boru against the Vikings at the battle of Clontarf. But Red Cumal does not quite fit into the pattern, for he is described as massive, bearlike and red-bearded; he is doubtless descended from one of those tribes with a strong dash of Celtic who arrived in Ireland later than the pure-strain Gaels.
Finally we have Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, another outlaw-warrior, who followed Richard the Lionhearted to the Holy Land for plunder and adventure. Cormac, of Norman-Gaelic ancestry, looks and acts more like Conan than any of Howard’s heroes since the Hyborian age. Dark, scarred, sinister, his great muscular frame suited in chain mail, he wades through his enemies like a steel juggernaut, the silver skull embossed on his shield striking terror into the hearts of Turk and Bedouin while his great Frankish broadsword hews them asunder. Only three tales of this Conanomorphic adventurer exist, none of which has appeared between hard covers. An unpublished fragment (which I have completed and titled “The Slave-Princess”) describes how Cormac Fitzgeoffrey fought in his first battle at the age of eight! Like Conan, he shows little tendency toward moody philosophizing on the ephemeral nature of life; he is out for what plunder he can get from Moslem or Christian, but possesses a rude, basic chivalry withal.
Such were the heroes one might call Robert E. Howard’s “former incarnations.” Certainly they symbolize his idealized self-conception, and no doubt it must have amused him to fantasize that such men had been part of his own ancestry back through the mists of time, even into prehistory and the heroic ages of myth. Two of the tales in this book were incomplete when they were discovered among Howard’s effects; judging from appearances, he probably finished them rather than abandoned them midway, and the endings were later lost. I have written the last 700 or so words of “The Temple of Abomination” and the last 5,200 of “Tigers of the Sea.” While I was editing this book, Glenn Lord discovered a much shorter and presumably earlier version of “The Temple of Abomination” the final sentences of the version presented here were taken from it. Howard’s text was left as he wrote it, except for routine editing where errors and slight inconsistencies have made changes desirable.
Richard L. Tierney
St. Paul, Minnesota
February 19, 1974
How can I wear the harness of toil
And sweat at the daily round,
While in my soul forever
The drums of Pictdom sound?
The Drums of Pictdom
There is one hobby of mine which puzzles me to this day. I am not attempting to lend it an esoteric or mysterious significance, but the fact remains that I can neither explain nor understand it. That is my interest in the people which, for the sake of brevity, I have always designated as Picts. I am, of course, aware that my use of the term might be questioned. The people who are known in history as Picts are named variously as Celts, aborigines, and even Germans. Some authorities maintain they came into Britain after the Britons, and just before the coming of the Gaels. The “Wild Picts of Galloway,” which figure largely in early Scottish history and legendry were doubtless of a very mixed race—probably predominantly Celtic, both Cymric and Gaelic—and spoke a sort of bastard Cymric, adulterated with elements of Gaelic and aborigine, in which latter strain there must have been considerable Germanic or Scandinavian mixture, as well. Probably the term “Pict” was properly applied only to the wandering Celtic tribe which settled in Galloway and presumably conquered and was absorbed by the aboriginal population. But to me, “Pict” must always refer to the small dark Mediterranean aborigines of Britain. This is not strange, since when I first read of these aborigines, they were referred to as Picts. But what is strange is my unflagging interest in them. I read of them first in Scottish histories—merely bare mentionings, usually in disapproval. Understand, my historical readings in my childhood were scattered and sketchy, owing to the fact that I lived in the country where such books were scarce. I was an enthusiast of Scottish history, such as I could obtain, feeling a kinship with the kilted clansmen because of the Scottish strain in my own blood. In the brief and condensed histories I read, the Picts were given only bare mention, as when they clashed with, and were defeated by, the Scotch. Or in English history, as the cause of the Britons inviting in the Saxons. The fullest description of this race that I read at that time was a brief remark by an English historian that the Picts were brutish savages, living in mud huts. The only hint I obtained about them from a legendary point of view was in a description of Rob Roy, which, mentioning the abnormal length of his arms, compared him in this respect to the Picts, commenting briefly upon their stocky and apelike appearance. You can see that everything I read at that time was not calculated to inspire an admiration for the race.
Then when I was about twelve I spent a short time in New Orleans and found in a Canal Street library a book detailing the pageant of British history from prehistoric times up to—I believe—the Norman conquest. It was written for schoolboys and told in an interesting and romantic style, probably with many historical inaccuracies. But there I first learned of the small dark people which first settled Britain, and they were referred to as Picts. I had always felt a strange interest in the term and the people, and now I felt a driving absorption regarding them. The writer painted the aborigines in no more admirable light than had other historians whose works I had read. His Picts were made to be sly, furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which followed—which was doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with ancient times. I made them a strong warlike race of barbarians, gave them an honorable history of past glories, and created for them a great king—one Bran Mak Morn. I must admit my imagination was rather weak when it came to naming this character, who seemed to leap full-grown into my mind. Many kings in the Pictish chronicles have Gaelic names, yet in order to be consistent with my fictionized version of the Pictish race, their great king should have a name more in keeping with their non-Aryan antiquity. But I named him Bran for another favorite historical character of mine: the Gaul Brennus, who sacked Rome. The Mak Morn comes from the famous Irish hero, Gol Mac Morn. I changed the spelling of the Mac, to give it a non-Gaelic appearance, since the Gaelic alphabet contains no k, c being always given the k sound. So while Bran Mac Morn is Gaelic for “The Raven, Son of Morn,” Bran Mak Morn has no Gaelic significance, but has a meaning of its own, purely Pictish and ancient, with roots in the dim mazes of antiquity; the similarity in sound to the Gaelic term is simply a coincidence!
Bran Mak Morn has not changed in the years; he is exactly as he leaped full-grown into my mind: a pantherish man of medium height, with inscrutable black eyes, black hair, and dark skin. In reading of the Picts, I mentally took their side against the invading Celts and Teutons, whom I knew to be my type, and indeed my ancestors. My interests, especially in my early boyhood, in these strange Neolithic people was so keen that I was not content with my Nordic appearance, and had I grown into the sort of a man, which in childhood I wished to become, I would have been short, stocky, with thick, gnarled limbs, beady black eyes, a low, retreating forehead, heavy jaw, and straight, coarse black hair—my conception of a typical Pict. I cannot trace this whim to an admiration for some person of that type; it was a growth from my interest in the Mediterranean race which first settled Britain.
My interest in the Picts was always mixed with a bit of fantasy; that is, I never felt the realistic placement with them that I did with the Irish and Highland Scotch. Not that it was the less vivid; but when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes. Thus in my first Bran Mak Morn story (Men of the Shadows), I told the story through the person of a Gothic mercenary in the Roman army; in a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper (manuscript lost), I told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall; in The Lost Race the central figure was a Briton; and in Kings of the Night it was a Gaelic prince. Only in my last Bran story, Worms of the Earth, did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!
Kings of the Night deals with Rome’s efforts to subjugate the wild people of Caledonia. The characters and actions are fictitious, but the period and the general trend of events are historical. The Romans, as you know, never succeeded in extending her boundaries very far into the heather, and after several unsuccessful campaigns, retreated south of the great wall. Their defeat must have been accomplished by some such united effort as I have here portrayed: a temporary alliance between Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal, and possibly Teutonic elements. I have a pretty definite idea that a slow filtration of Germanic settlers had begun in eastern Caledonia long before the general overflow that swamped the Latinized countries.
In Worms of the Earth, I took up anew Bran’s eternal struggle with Rome. I can hardly think of him in any other connection. Sometimes I think Bran is merely the symbol of my own antagonism toward the empire, an antagonism not nearly so easy to understand as my favoritism for the Picts. Perhaps this is another explanation for the latter; I saw the name “Picts” first on maps, and always the name lay outside the far-flung bounds of the Roman empire. This fact aroused my intense interest; it was so significant of itself. The mere fact suggested terrific wars—savage attacks and ferocious resistance—valor and heroism and ferocity. I was an instinctive enemy of Rome; what more natural than that I should instinctively ally myself with her enemies, more especially as these enemies had successfully resisted all attempts at subjugation. When in my dreams—not daydreams, but actual dreams—I fought the armored legions of Rome, and reeled back gashed and defeated, there sprang into my mind—like an invasion from another, unborn world of the future—the picture of a map, spanned by the wide empire of Rome, and ever beyond the frontier, outside the lines of subjugation, the cryptic legend, “Picts and Scots.” And always the thought rose in my mind to lend me new strength: among the Picts I could find refuge, safe from my foes, where I could lick my wounds and renew my strength for the wars.
Some day I’m going to try to write a novel-length tale dealing with that misty age. Allowing myself the latitude that a historical novelist is supposed to be allowed, I intend to take a plot some thing like this: the slow crumbling of Roman influence in Britain, and the encroachment of Teutonic wanderers from the East. These, landing on the eastern coast of Caledonia, press slowly west-ward, until they come in violent conflict with the older Gaelic settlements on the west. Across the ruin, of the ancient pre-Aryan Pictish kingdom, lone pinned between implacable foes, these warlike tribes come to death-grips, only to turn on a common foe, the conquering Saxons. I intend the tale shall be of nations and kings rather than individuals. Doubtless I shall never write it.
Robert E. Howard
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• Introduction
• The TNT Punch • The Sign of the Snake • Blow the Chinks Down! • Breed of Battle • Dark Shanghai • Mountain Man • Guns of the Mountains • The Scalp Hunter |
Conan is the most famous character ever created by Texas author Robert E. Howard. Through the last few years of his life, REH wrote 21 complete Conan stories, and five partial stories. Seventeen of these were successfully sold to Weird Tales. Conan was genre-busting, and while some may consider REH’s “The Shadow Kingdom” as the first true sword-and-sorcery story, it was the Conan stories that changed the literary world. While REH may have experimented with Kull, he hit his natural stride with Conan.
One truism of REH, he was not a one-trick pony. He wrote for a number of different pulps, in all sorts of genres. Being a big fan of boxing, and indeed being an accomplished boxer himself down at the local ice house, it was natural for REH to begin writing for Fiction House’s Fight Magazine in 1929. The editor for Fiction House, Jack Byrne, liked REH’s material, and kept asking for more. And unlike Weird Tales, Fiction House was much more timely about payment. So when Jack Byrne asked for more stories to publish in another Fiction House magazine, Action Stories, REH was more than happy to comply.
In January 1931, REH debuted in Action Stories with another boxing yarn. These were more in the line of Sailor Steve Costigan stories, about a not-very-bright tramp sailor going from port to port, prize-fighting and getting fooled constantly. It also allowed REH to try some similar boxing stories with different characters, though Jack Byrne apparently turned at least a couple of them back into Sailor Steve Costigan stories. None of the Action Stories boxing tales have ever seen mainstream reprinting. “Blow the Chinks Down!” and “Dark Shanghai” are being presented here in English for the first time since their original pulp appearance. The remaining three boxing stories have generally only been available in small run chapbook or fanzine publications, and are being presented in this format here for the first time.
A couple years after REH created Conan, he created another genre-busting character and story type for Action Stories. The character is Breckinridge Elkins, and the story type, is, well, different. It still amazes me that no one has ever come up with a good title for the genre that REH created with this character. It has elements of humor, tall tales, and westerns (REH himself referred to these stories as “Westerns”), but still uses a character of superior violence. These stories have much in common with the Conan stories. Breck Elkins is a superior physical fighter, master of all weapons he works with, incredibly fast and strong, master of fighting multiple foes at once, using whatever he can lay his hands on. Breck’s strength and knack for destroying property and waves of foes surpasses all other REH heroes. Indeed, having Conan or Breck simply fighting another human one-on-one is just not a fight. The opponents must be beasts, monsters, waves of enemies, or other superior humans. They are both barbarians in the civilizations they wander through. And as Conan had developed from Kull, so Breck Elkins had developed from Sailor Steve Costigan. Indeed, REH liked to use transition stories to shift from one character to the next. From Kull to Conan, it was “The Phoenix on the Sword,” in which Conan is a barbarian king like Kull. For Breck Elkins, it is “Mountain Man,” a story that involves our Not-Too-Bright Super-Hillbilly getting into a boxing match. Like Conan, REH truly hit his stride with the creation of Breck Elkins. And like Conan, REH wrote over 20 Breck Elkins stories. He also wrote a Breck Elkins novel for a British publisher by combining the first nine Breck Elkins stories from Action Stories, reordering and rewriting them slightly to add a common thread, and adding some additional material. Eighteen Breck Elkins stories first appeared in Action Stories. The later nine have been reprinted in the Grant hardback editions of Pride of Bear Creek and Mayhem on Bear Creek, as well as the subsequent rare Ace paperback Heroes of Bear Creek (though all italics were removed from these publications, per Don Grant’s choice). The first nine Breck Elkins stories in this volume have never been reprinted except in one newspaper and one chapbook.
Breck Elkins stories are a very different type of story in many respects, and allowed REH to explore a number of personal topics that he could not address elsewhere. Most REH barbaric heroes have no family to speak of, at most vaguely referenced in a sentence. But the Breck Elkins stories are all about family and friends, and Breck interacting with them. So here you get to see Breck dealing with his father, aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, and brothers (though never his mother, hmmm). Breck trying to help out friends constantly gets him in trouble. You also get to see REH deal with topics more direct to his life. Two of the most interesting topics are falling in love, especially with a schoolteacher (REH’s One True Love was Novalyne Price Ellis, a schoolteacher he dated but then later broke up with), and suicide. Indeed, the last story, Sharp’s Gun Serenade, is chilling to read, and makes one wander if the secondary character of Jack Sprague is suppose to be REH himself, waiting to be saved from suicide by the schoolteacher’s love, as Jack was in the story.
All stories in this book are being presented in their original order as published. They include all 23 stories that appeared in Action Stories from 1931 to 1937. The artwork is that which originally appeared with each story in Action Stories. Certainly some interesting interpretations of Breckinridge Elkins.
As is typical of writings of this era, some word usage and attitudes are not PC, fair warning.
I have tried to minimize the editing, and leave the works as much as possible as they first appeared. I have cleaned up obvious typos, of which there were few, and tried to create some consistency from inconsistent usages and words. The biggest change may be the consistent italicizing of the sound effect words, such as bam, crack, smash, etc., something that was not handled consistently in the original publications.
REH also had a real problem with compound words. Though I think the average person would never notice in reading the stories, REH quite often got the structure wrong (one word, two words, or hyphenated). I saw the same types of errors in The Yellow Jacket pieces, and do not know if it was intentional or not, but I doubt it was. More likely he considered himself a good speller, and didn’t bother to look up every word, he was paid by the word and had to get stories done and out, and then later no one else caught it in the editing. I have only changed those that are most readily apparent, or that he changed from one story to the next, to create consistency in this volume.
I hope you enjoy this book. I think there is a wealth of insight into REH to be gained by reading these stories. Any comments, corrections or suggestions for later printings are welcome, at paul.herman@halliburton.com.
—Paul Herman
An abiding mystery of Robert E. Howard’s volcanic career as a writer for the wood pulp fiction magazines remains: Why he didn’t smoke the keys on his Underwood with one hard-boiled detective story after another?
Howard had the speed, the influences, the personal interest in guns and boxing and other hallmarks of the tough guy crime tale. He hit his professional stride in exactly the right era. Among the vast hosts of his fellow fictioneers, Howard was one of the few to create an enduring icon of the hard-boiled attitude of his age with his most popular creation, Conan: a character and a mood, tougher than tough.
Nailed to the cross in “A Witch Shall be Born,” the Cimmerian emerges triumphant from the ordeal, a quintessential image torn from the heart of the Great Depression. If the American readership of Weird Tales, from young teens on up, needed reassurance that adversity could be met, Howard gave it to them in mythic terms told in emotionally immediate prose. You want a tough guy who can survive anything thrown at him, here’s your tough guy.
Of course, most Weird Tales readers probably weren’t looking at the story with quite those ideas in mind. It usually takes a little time for this kind of evaluation to shake out. When the Dime Novels of the 1800s were trying on various character types, looking for The Hero whose exploits would sell copy after copy, it wasn’t evident immediately that The Cowboy was the archetype which would survive and dominate much of American pop culture in the Twentieth Century.
You cannot say with certainty that Howard himself had a single clue that he had created The Barbarian, not merely a few characters in a fairly large group of stories, but yet another archetype that would ease out into world culture over the next half-century. Yet Robert E. Howard and no one else created The Barbarian in the same era in which another new archetype came along to give The Cowboy a serious challenge as America’s dominant pop culture hero. Both The Barbarian and The Private Eye were born in the wood pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s.
Howard came so close to the tone, setting and concerns of the hard-boiled Private Eye story, it is astonishing that he managed to keep to his own path and carve out a new genre of fiction with his tales of Sword-and-Sorcery. The scenes with Shevatas the thief in the Conan yarn “Black Colossus” or with Conan himself as a young thief in “The Tower of the Elephant” play with the materials of the pulp crime story. Without any need for qualification, “Rogues in the House” is one of the best hard-boiled stories of the era, featuring terrific moments such as the jailer who “had become careless in his dealings with the underworld” or Conan tossing “his punk” who had betrayed him into a cesspool. Especially hard-boiled is the casual thought, when the barbarian “decided it was time for him to kill Nabonidus.”
So close, yet only a month before his death by suicide in June 1936, Howard would tell H. P. Lovecraft in a letter that he could “scarcely endure to read” a detective story, “much less write one.”
In 1935 the Texan briefed Clark Ashton Smith, another of his peers in the pages of Weird Tales, on the creation of Conan: “It may sound fantastic to link the term ''realism’ with Conan; but as a matter of fact—his supernatural adventures aside—he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known. . . . Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.” Gunmen and gamblers, bootleggers and prize-fighters—the solid stuff of hard-boiled fiction.
Howard’s taste in movies underlines his innate attraction to the form: “Give me a rough, tough brutal story, quick action and a gang of hard-boiled hairy chested eggs: George Bancroft; Mathew Betz; Lionel Barrymore; Vic Maclaglen, who once fought Jack Johnson. . . .” If any writer was participating in the cultural moment, that writer was Robert E. Howard.
The first World War brought literature and film to the boil, although other forces had set out simmering fires earlier. The rise of literary naturalism in the late Nineteenth Century paved the way for a brand of tough-minded realism, and one of Howard’s favorite authors, Jack London, dead at age forty in 1916, was a significant factor in popularizing what would become known as “tough guy” writing. But it took a world actually going to war to set in motion the social and economic forces that would bring the detective story up to speed. Edgar Allan Poe had inaugurated the detective and mystery genre with “Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s private investigator Sherlock Holmes the most enduringly popular figure to emerge from the hundreds of fictional detectives to trail in Poe’s wake. Still, before the war, crime fiction lacked a convincing sense of what was realistic.
The realistic hard-boiled form exploded out of the postwar pulps, specifically The Black Mask, which began publication in 1920, though it wasn’t until October 1922 that the significant creative fires were lit. In that issue you find “The Road Home,” the first detective story by Dashiell Hammett, the unquestioned modern master, as well as “The False Burton Combs” by Carroll John Daly, a lesser figure but nonetheless a major influence on later writers such as Mickey Spillane. Daly rapidly produced more stories featuring tough-talking private eyes, but we can look back now and see that it was in 1923 when the hard-boiled detective arrived to stay. That year Hammett began his long series of short stories, novelettes and novels about the exploits of an unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency with a tale called “Arson Plus.” By 1928, when Hammett began writing his novel The Maltese Falcon, few had any doubts that something new, something great, had come to literature.
Robert E. Howard’s major market for fiction, Weird Tales, also was born in 1923, and the teenaged Howard managed to place three stories with that magazine by 1924. He came into the fiction magazine scene virtually on Hammett’s heels. It’s interesting to note that the next major hard-boiled crime writer after Hammett, Raymond Chandler, first appeared in the pages of Black Mask in the December 1933 issue with “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.” By that time Howard himself was a full-fledged professional writer; he had created Conan in 1932.
In that specific period in the pulps, from no earlier than 1922, with no need to go any later than 1936, the year of Howard’s death, a number of writers following Hammett’s lead hard-boiled the detective story. While they did that, Howard single-handed performed the same job for the fantastic tale, imbuing his stories with the tough realism of the day, adding a new dimension to otherworldly fantasy.
If some hardcore Howard enthusiasts may be experiencing a strong sense of deja vu by this point, perhaps it’s because I have made this argument at length before, some twenty years ago. In 1984 for The Dark Barbarian, a critical anthology about Howard’s writing I edited, I wrote an essay on this theme entitled “Robert E. Howard: Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist.” Since I also wrote the essay “The Dark Barbarian” for that book, I decided to disguise the hard-boiled section a bit by using the nom-de-plume “George Knight.” In part I did that for fun, and the fact was that in 1984 you didn’t have Robert E. Howard critics falling out of the trees—not like today. If I wanted that essay, and I did, then I had to write it myself.
So, you can see that I’ve been intrigued by the problem of Howard largely missing out on the most fecund and significant era of the hard-boiled detective story for quite a long time. As a big fan of both Hammett and Howard, this situation gnaws at me. What if? Why didn’t it happen? Wonderful questions.
This collection demonstrates, however, that Howard did not miss his chance completely. A working professional, willing to try any marketplace to make a living, he swallowed his aversion to the detective formula and wrote these tales during the years he chronicled the adventures of Conan. At the same time, he was writing his boxing stories and becoming increasingly interested in Westerns, both serious sage-brushers and his popular burlesques featuring such Tall Tale heroes as Breckinridge Elkins. If he had lived—another always arresting What If—surely Howard would have done more detective stories. And if these stories aren’t on a par with the best of Hammett and Chandler, they’re not much worse than many other yarns published in that heyday of the hard-boiled—I’ve actually met people who like Carroll John Daly’s stories, for some reason.
Howard clearly sensed how to shape his backdrop, although he didn’t do quite enough with detective tales to start filling it all in. You have a private eye named Steve Harrison—or more than one private eye named Steve Harrison—and you have a mysterious locale called River Street: “It was absurd to suppose that the dead Mongol fiend was behind these murderous attacks, yet—Harrison’s flesh crawled along his spine at the memory of things that had taken place in River Street—things he had never reported, because he did not wish to be thought either a liar or a madman. The dead do not return—but what seems absurd on Thirty-ninth Boulevard takes on a different aspect among the haunted labyrinths of the Oriental quarter.” Yeah, that River Street setting, where “three unsolved murders in a week are not so unusual,” could have been a real hotbed for some hard-boiled detective action.
The least stories here perhaps are “Black Talons” and “Fangs of Gold,” replete with virulent racism and xenophobia, but then racism and xenophobia were common in that era and pulp marketplace. If ethically deplorable, an equally strong objection may be made that Howard doesn’t make these stories stand up and rock—which he does with much the same material in his horror story “Black Canaan.”
“Names in the Black Book” impresses me as being equal to several of the escapades Howard wrote about El Borak, adventuring in the wild, rocky hills of Afghanistan. Paul Herman, the editor for this collection, feels that Howard was starting to hit his stride with “Graveyard Rats.” I must agree—he reaches a fever pitch of fear that places this one on a par with the story of the same title by Henry Kuttner, while playing fair with the conventions of the crime story.
And may I point out that a quick glance at the content’s page will remind you of the fact that Howard often used the word “black” (and “dark,” as well) in his titles—as I was saying twenty years ago in “The Dark Barbarian,” that’s because these words represent Howard’s content and themes, not for any lack of inventiveness on his part.
If Howard did not do much with the detective story, he left us with at least this much—and in the larger hard-boiled arena of his day, he was a giant figure. I’d place his Conan saga against Hammett’s Continental Op series any day—both have a few weaker entries, yet both have one story after another that still burn with that same white-hot fire that shrouded the pages as they rolled off the typewriter. Against such poetic masterpieces as Chandler’s “Red Wind” you might pit Howard’s “Worms of the Earth.” Hammett, Howard, Chandler—they are among the finest writers to emerge from the pulps.
And if it’s too damn bad that Howard never managed to get going with hard-boiled detective tales, I have another thought: wouldn’t it have been fascinating if Dashiell Hammett had tried his hand at the Sword-and-Sorcery tale? Great, bad, indifferent, but enough to fill a book of this size?
—Don Herron
Fantasy and adventure fans were once advised not to plumb Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories for “hidden philosophical meanings.” Why not? Because “they aren’t there,” pioneer Conan enthusiast John D. Clark told us with fervid but misguided certainty. I don’t know if this same opinion colored Dr. Clark’s perspective on Howard’s other fiction, but I suspect it did.
And then there was L. Sprague de Camp, who said with equally heartfelt but short-sighted critical acumen that it was easy to rewrite some of Howard’s then-unpublished historical adventure yarns into Conan stories in the 1950s. Why? Because “Howard’s heroes were mostly cut from the same cloth,” he declared.
De Camp and Clark were influential in the movement that returned Howard to print in the ’50s and ’60s, leading to the tremendous popularity that stamped Howard’s name onto millions of paperback covers in the 1970s. As a result, their opinions carried weight with readers, editors, and critics. Thus was fostered an unfortunate misperception that still persists, even though some aficionados more recently have tried to sway the argument with a fairer assessment. According to the misperception, Howard’s fiction, being empty of “meanings,” was bereft of literary value, and was characterized by hard-muscled but thick-headed, mindlessly macho protagonists who all looked and thought alike, at least as far as the act of drawing and wielding a sword might constitute a mental process.
As you will soon see once you begin to read the stories in this collection, de Camp and Clark were both wrong. At his best—and story for story, the tales gathered in this volume show the author working at the top of his form—Howard rivals virtually any other U.S. fiction writer of the 20th Century for literary quality. As for the allegations that his works were lacking in “philosophical meanings” (for the sake of argument, I will infer that the charge implies an absence of substance and artistry) and that his protagonists were more or less interchangeable—well, let’s review the evidence.
“Red Blades of Black Cathay” finds a 12th Century Norman Crusader on the Eastern frontiers of the world as it was known to his European contemporaries, rallying a rich but militarily weak splinter kingdom against the invading hordes of Genghis Khan. Disillusioned and violent, Godric de Villehard recognizes that greed and exploitation underpin the lofty ideals of the Crusade; he learns that the empire of Prester John, which he seeks, is “a dream and a fantasy.” Nevertheless, he comes to the chivalric defense of Black Cathay and its requisitely beautiful princess. Some critics have found the ending of the story improbable (I won’t spoil it by going into details here). As is often the case, the critics are wrong. The denouement flows logically from the situation and the personalities of the characters; Howard is not guilty of slipshod plotting—the critics are guilty of not reading the story closely enough.
The next two stories in this volume revolve around another hard-bitten knight, the half-Irish Cormac FitzGeoffrey. In “Hawks of Outremer,” as in “Red Blades of Black Cathay,” Howard sets his protagonist on a collision course with an actual historical character, in this case the Islamic hero Saladin who commanded the Moslem armies in the Third Crusade. Howard’s portrayal of Saladin perhaps reflects the influence of Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman, and whereas in “Red Blades” the treachery and double-dealing of the European Crusaders are alluded to, in this story they are vividly dramatized. In “Blood of Belshazzar,” Howard drops Cormac into a bandit stronghold where outlaws scheme against each other for a fabulous jewel. This was a favorite plot device of Howard’s; outnumbered and surrounded by enemies, his hero must survive and prevail. Here, the means of survival is somewhat arbitrary, and one senses that Howard was still mastering his craft. Later, in similar straits in “The Black Stranger,” under Howard’s more experienced hand, Conan of Cimmeria would engineer his own victory.
Howard once told a correspondent that Cormac was “the most somber character I have yet attempted,” but then he trumped himself with Donald McDeesa, a wandering Highland Scot who exacts bloody revenge against two towering tyrants of history in “Lord of Samarcand.” This story is a marvel of compression, packing into a few thousand words what most writers would spin into a couple of bloated novels. The mood that Howard conveys is so bleak, so comfortless, that the novelette almost begs to be taken with an anti-depressant. One error mars the tale—or does it? McDeesa makes fateful use of a pistol a century before handguns were developed. Critics who get upset over anachronisms may cry carelessness, but I think Howard knew exactly what he was doing; read the story carefully for Howard’s ironies and see if you don’t agree.
“The Sowers of the Thunder” pits two evenly matched characters against one another; in fact, they are mirror images of each other in many ways. The Crusader Red Cahal is an exiled Irish prince who has been cheated out of kingship. The red-haired Baibars the Panther is a former slave who will one day seize a throne. Figuratively, one man will be the death of the other, and in a sense this is Howard’s version of Poe’s classic “William Wilson,” played out against the turbulent background of the 13th Century in which the Holy Land is savaged by warring Europeans, Moslems, and nomads from the distant steppes. The spirit of Scott manifests itself in the presence of a mysterious Masked Knight who rides through the story, identity hidden until the end, like the Black Knight in Ivanhoe.
In “The Lion of Tiberias,” two storylines diverge and then converge. In one, a gigantic British Dane named John Norwald is sent to the galleys by the warlord Zenghi, there to toil for more than twenty years as a cold, hard core of hate keeps him alive. The other storyline concerns Miles Du Courcey, a Crusader who invades Zenghi’s stronghold to rescue his kidnapped sweetheart. Again, the story bears close study to appreciate its dramatic unity as one storyline reflects and enriches the other. Do you think that Howard was a brutish purveyor of simple-minded blood ’n’ guts, as he has been stereotyped by the mavens of popular culture? Then read the brief, wrenching passage where he reflects on the devastating effects of abused power, as Miles flees from Zenghi’s camp with his traumatized sweetheart: “So through the night they rode, the broken woman and the embittered man, handiworks of the Lion who dealt in swords and souls and human hearts, and whose victims, living and dead, filled the land like a blight of sorrow, agony, and despair.” Many names in the story—Irak, Bagdad, Mosul, Ousama—remind us that history’s catastrophes tend to repeat themselves endlessly.
“The Shadow of the Vulture” and “Gates of Empire” reveal a lighter side of Howard; yet here too, darkness lurks underneath the light. Although “The Shadow of the Vulture” is best known as the story in which Howard introduced Red Sonya of Rogatino, the prototype for Roy Thomas’ Red Sonja of the comics and Sam Raimi’s Xena, Warrior Princess, the male protagonist is Gottfried Von Kalmbach, a dauntless but somewhat oblivious German knight. Gottfried’s behavior, from scene to scene, causes the reader to wonder if he’s dumb like a fox, or simply dumb and dumber. Giles Hobson in “Gates of Empire” is an even unlikelier hero, a corpulent drunkard whom Howard surely modeled on Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff. Enjoy Howard’s jokes but don’t overlook the serious themes that give dramatic weight to both stories—the elegiac lament implicit in the scene in which Gottfried in “rusty chain mail” watches a “newer, brighter generation” of gun-toting infantry march past—Giles’ instinctive plea to an enemy to redeem their baser natures, his cowardice and his enemy’s consuming hate, when their sword-arms are needed to bolster a last stand of the Crusaders against an overwhelming force of Saracens.
Historical fiction tends to have a limited shelf life. Who today reads the charming but long-winded epics of Rafael Sabatini, or those ponderous bestsellers of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation, Prince of Foxes and Captain from Castile? To be commercially successful as historical fiction, the trappings of the past must be “translated into the manners as well as the language of the age we live in,” as the redoubtable Walter Scott once observed. Consequently, as reading tastes change, so wanes the popularity of those authors who try too strenuously to appeal to the fashion of the day.
Robert E. Howard was fortunate, perhaps—or more likely, instinctively prescient—in capturing a certain American mood of cynicism and despair that has never quite gone out of style since the sombrous days of the Great Depression, when the stories in this volume first appeared in Oriental Stories and Golden Fleece. Writing about political expediency, tarnished honor, and physical violence with unflinching realism and irony, he anticipates the Samurai epics of Kurosawa and Kobayashi (Donald McDeesa’s fate prefigures that of Tatsuya Nakadai’s vengeful ronin in Kobayashi’s 1962 drama Harakiri), the westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, and the nihilistic carnage of today’s extreme video games. Let's hope that this reprinting of his Crusader masterpieces, containing the unedited texts of the original magazine stories, furthers a greater appreciation of Howard’s genius.
—Fred Blosser
Movement is vital in the work of Robert E. Howard. In many stories he deals with racial drift and the unceasing—but not necessarily admirable—advance of civilizations and cultures. However, on a smaller but no less important scale, Howard is one of the most American of all writers because his characters are always on the move. Howard’s characters are going somewhere, doing something, seldom standing still. Even when they’re talking, they are often engaged in some other activity. Life never comes to a complete stop, and with seemingly boundless vitality, neither do the people who inhabit Robert E. Howard’s stories.
Howard’s most famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian, is a perfect example of this quality, traveling all over the known world of the Hyborian Age in which he lives—and even quite a few of the unknown places. Though Howard writes eloquently of Conan’s homeland in the poem “Cimmeria,” none of the Conan stories actually takes place there. Howard gives us glimpses of Conan’s life in Cimmeria, but other than that Conan is the prototypical stranger in a strange land, always wandering, always seeking new places and new adventures. This is true as well of another well-known Howard character, Solomon Kane, that dour Puritan who travels far from his native England to explore the wild, dangerous hills and jungles of Africa.
This volume features stories of other Howard characters who are no less prone to wander, and not surprisingly, their travels take them to some far-off, exotic lands and involve them in plenty of peril and excitement.
One situation which Howard liked to use was the American hero in the Middle East. In the opening paragraph of “Treasures of Tartary,” it is Kirby O’Donnell who finds himself plunging into the middle of a battle in a dark alley in Shahrazar. Though O’Donnell is an American, he dresses like an Arab, is fluent in their languages, and is burned so dark by the sun that he can pass for a native, which he does in this story. None of the other characters are aware of his true identity. Yet Howard frequently refers to O’Donnell as “the American,” reminding the reader that O’Donnell is an outsider, someone who despite his appearance will always be a Westerner and not truly a part of the surroundings in which he finds himself.
This is not necessarily the way O’Donnell wants things to be. He loves the Middle East; Howard even tells us that the region has “stolen his heart and led him to wander afar from his own people.” In the heat of battle he curses in the Kurdish tongue, not in English. He is “the first Westerner ever to set foot in Forbidden Shahrazar”. But even so, as Howard points out, O’Donnell is still a Westerner.
So is Francis Xavier Gordon, known to most of the inhabitants of the Middle East as El Borak. More specifically, Gordon is a Texan, a former gunfighter who had more than his share of adventures in the American West before he ever ventured into the Middle East. (Howard does no more than drop intriguing hints about these adventures in some of the El Borak stories; we never get the details of them.)
El Borak is a contemporary of T.E. Lawrence, and Lawrence is mentioned several times in the story “Son of the White Wolf,” setting this tale firmly during World War I. Gordon is well-known to the Arabs; the name El Borak is used to strike fear into the hearts of children. Although, like Kirby O’Donnell, Gordon speaks the languages of the region like a native, he doesn’t try to disguise himself as one. He wears a mixture of Western and Eastern clothing and carries a rifle and pistols like the former American gunfighter that he is.
Howard plays up this blending of East and West by comparing the chivalry of the Arab tribesmen to the rough code of honor of the American frontiersmen. When Gordon is being pursued by these tribesmen in a running gun battle, Howard likens his strength and stamina to that of an Apache Indian. In a way, though the setting is different, it is as if Gordon has brought something of the American West to the Middle East with him.
In “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance,” we find more references to American Indians, even though the story is set on the Pacific coast of South America in the Sixteenth Century. Like many another Howard hero, Black Terence Vulmea has wandered far from home, which in his case is Ireland. As master of the pirate ship Cockatoo, Vulmea raids English and Spanish shipping off the South American coast until he is captured and finds himself in an on-shore adventure with a hated English enemy from times past, when Vulmea was still a young man in Ireland.
Vulmea is not the only wanderer in this story. John Wentyard, the English captain, is just as far from home, and he is just as fascinating a character as the pirate, if not more so, as he struggles not only to survive the dangers of a South American wilderness but also to come to grips with the dark deeds of his own past. Vulmea has an advantage on him when it comes to survival, because, as the pirate puts it, he has “lived with the red men of North America and learned their woodcraft”. Howard tells us no more than this—although the reader may yearn to know just what adventures took place during the years that pass between Vulmea’s boyhood in Ireland and his career as a pirate in the Pacific.
Again, as with Kirby O’Donnell, Howard frequently refers to Vulmea as “the Irishman” and Wentyard as “the Englishman,” pointing up not only their differences but also their shared alien-ness in their current surroundings.
“Boot-Hill Payoff” is one of Howard’s relatively few traditional Western stories. It’s packed with the action that the Western pulps demanded, but it also showcases a variation on the theme of the wandering hero. In this case, Buck Laramie, the only surviving member of a family of outlaw brothers, has been away from his home for a long time, but when he returns to the Texas cattletown of San Leon where he was raised, hoping to redeem himself and the memory of his brothers, he immediately finds almost every hand against him. “You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe said, and for a while, as the bullets fly around his head, Buck Laramie is living proof of that. Well, you can go home, but in Buck’s case, you may find yourself framed for a crime you didn’t commit and dodging lead and hangropes.
“The Vultures of Wahpeton” is Howard’s longest, most complex, and best traditional Western. It’s the story of Steve Corcoran, a Texas gunslinger who finds himself far from home in a mining boomtown, probably in either Idaho or Montana (Howard never really pins down Wahpeton’s location). Just as in the other stories, Howard uses the device of referring to Corcoran’s home, often calling him “the Texan”.
Corcoran has done quite a bit of wandering. He has been in Kansas and California, he tells a man he meets on the trail, and has drifted to the northern gold fields, but he is a cowboy at heart, not a miner, and wants to go back to Texas. Sudden death gets in his way, and he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy by a gang of outlaws intent on taking over the town of Wahpeton. Though much about the mining camp is distasteful to Corcoran—it has too much of civilization about it, unlike the wilder but somehow cleaner frontier towns of Texas—he winds up on the side of law and order.
“The Vultures of Wahpeton” is not only an important Robert E. Howard story, it’s important as well in the overall history of Western pulp fiction. Its moral complexity, especially in the hero, Steve Corcoran, puts the story in the forefront of a movement away from what pulp editors called the “gun-dummy” story and toward more realistic Western fiction. In later years, authors such as H.A. De Rosso and Gordon D. Shirreffs would mine this vein of realism for some very good stories, but Robert E. Howard was there first.
It’s easy to speculate about why a sense of wanderlust was so important to Howard that he instilled it in so many of his characters. Despite the fact that his family moved around quite a bit before finally settling in Cross Plains, Texas, those moves were generally from one small, drab community to another, locations that were practically interchangeable. Only later, during trips to New Orleans, San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and Lincoln County, New Mexico, did Howard get to travel and see truly different sights. From his letters about these trips, we know they meant a great deal to him. With family responsibilities keeping him close to home for most of his life, it’s certainly possible that Howard’s yearning to travel came out in his fiction, which was set all over the world and often featured a wandering hero. In his mind, was Howard himself “the Texan” or “the American,” packing two guns and walking unafraid into danger? Maybe. Or maybe it was just a handy set-up for his stories, more yarns to get out to market in hopes that they would sell.
The good thing is that either way we have the stories themselves, wonderfully exciting tales filled with action and color and intriguing characters. These are some of Howard’s best.
—James Reasoner
One of Robert E. Howard’s favorite and most successful characters during his lifetime was Breckinridge Elkins. And his success with this type of humorous, burlesque Western grew over time. In the latter part of his life, REH saw two potentially important expansions of his markets for these stories.
The first came about because the editor of Fight Stories and Action Stories, Jack Byrne, moved to Argosy, and contacted REH and asked him to provide stories featuring a character similar to Breck Elkins. REH quickly complied with a character named Pike Bearfield and began writing several of those stories. Argosy bought three of these and published them in three separate issues in October 1936. This could have doubtlessly turned into a very lucrative market for REH, what with Argosy publishing its magazine weekly, instead of monthly like most pulps. And indeed, REH wrote several more Pike Bearfield stories, though they never got published in Argosy, for some reason. A couple of these unpublished stories were eventually published in the 1940’s and 1950’s, through the efforts of REH’s agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, who rewrote them to be based on the better known character Breck Elkins.
The second expansion was into the market of hardback novels. REH had tried several times to interest various publishers in hardback books, either novel-length stories, or collections of various types. None of these ever came to fruition during REH’s lifetime, either because the publisher turned him down, or the publisher agreed to publish it, then got into financial problems and couldn’t publish the book. The first REH hardback to see publication was A Gent from Bear Creek, a Breck Elkins book, created by stringing together a number of his Breck Elkins short stories from Action Stories, along with some new chapters and some tying paragraphs. REH had made this deal, but the book didn’t get published until after his death, in 1937. The original book is now not only one of the most highly sought after REH collectables, but also one of the most sought after and expensive first editions of the 20th century, period, with less than a dozen copies known to exist.
This collection you now hold features three Breck Elkins stories. Two of these are Kline rewrites of Pike Bearfield stories; the other is the novel A Gent from Bear Creek. The two short stories, “While Smoke Rolled” and “Texas John Alden,” are presented here as first published, and both are relatively rare stories to see print. This presentation of A Gent from Bear Creek is as it first appeared, edited back to the original publication’s pages, including such things as all the italics restored that Grant and subsequent publishers had removed.
It is hoped this collection will elicit the chuckles and grins REH meant these stories to. They really are fun.
--Paul Herman
I have been a professional illustrator for nearly twenty years and was inspired, like many artists, by the work of Frank Frazetta. I first saw his Conan paintings when I was eight years old, and I can still remember where I stood and what the furniture in my neighbor’s house looked like at the time—and twenty years later, Howard’s writing still has the same effect. Howard is a master of atmosphere and detail, and when I read his stories, I am in them; I can see the buttons on the costumes, smell the dank air, and feel the foreboding. So, although illustrating his work has been a dream project, it has not been an easy one! For doing such a master justice is no small task—but, nevertheless, it’s incredibly rewarding. To follow in the footsteps of the mighty Frazetta is one thing, but to follow in Howard’s is quite another.
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed illustrating it.
Greg Staples
2008
He was almost alone in his ability to create real emotions of fear and of dread suspense. . . . For stark, living fear . . . the actual smell and feel and darkness and brooding horror and impending doom that inhere in that nighted, moss-hung jungle . . . what other writer is even in the running with REH?
—H. P. Lovercraft
In 1923 a new magazine appeared on the newsstands of America, proclaiming itself “The Unique Magazine”: Weird Tales. It was intended by its publishers to be a market for the sort of “off-trail” stories that other magazines would not publish, but while it did become the first professional magazine to publish H. P. Lovecraft, its first editor showed perhaps too great a fondness for traditional ghost stories. Following a shaky first year, though, a new editor, Farnsworth Wright, took the reins, adding to the masthead “A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual.” He would quickly make good on that claim, and among his first accomplishments was acceptance, in the fall of 1924, of a story of prehistoric adventure by an eighteen-year-old Texan named Robert E. Howard.
Howard and Weird Tales would remain closely associated for the next dozen years, until the author took his own life at the age of thirty. During that period, forty-eight stories and twenty-one poems by Robert E. Howard appeared in the magazine, and he became one of its most popular writers, along with Lovecraft and Seabury Quinn. His fame rests largely on the fantasy adventures of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and Turlogh O’Brien, stories in which he created a new subgenre that has come to be known as sword and sorcery, blending together elements of heroic adventure and horror. As the stories in this volume will demonstrate, he was also a master of horror, who brought to it a strong dash of adventure.
Though a great admirer of the “cosmic horror” of Lovecraft and the imaginative sweep of Clark Ashton Smith, Howard was by nature an adventure writer, and his concerns were human, not cosmic. “It is the individual mainly which draws me—the struggling, blundering, passionate insect vainly striving against the river of Life and seeking to divert the channel of events to suit himself—breaking his fangs on the iron collar of Fate and sinking into final defeat with the froth of a curse on his lips,” he wrote to Lovecraft. Where Lovecraft’s characters frequently are driven to madness by what they have seen, Howard’s will more frequently be provoked into action. Howard’s characters, as a general rule, refuse to give up or to run away, no matter how heavily the odds are stacked against them. Howard also brings to his work a gift of poetry, a talent for creating moody or atmospheric effects with just a few broad strokes, and a strong emotionalism that heightens the dramatic effects.
As with many naturally gifted storytellers, Howard’s earliest works are marked by a creative exuberance that is sometimes only barely under control. “Wolfshead,” for example, demonstrates that the young writer is not afraid to play with conventions of the horror genre, in this case the werewolf. On the other hand, the author recognized that he had perhaps gotten carried away with himself, writing to a friend, “After reading it, I’m not altogether sure I wasn’t off my noodler when I wrote it. I sure mixed slavers, duelists, harlots, drunkards, maniacs and cannibals reckless. The narrator is a libertine and a Middle Ages fop; the leading lady is a harlot, the hero is a lunatic, one of the main characters is a slave trader, one a pervert, one a drunkard, no they’re all drunkards, but one is a gambler, one a duelist and one a cannibal slave.”
Farnsworth Wright, however, thought well enough of the tale not only to buy it, but to make it the cover story for the April 1926 issue, and therein is an interesting story itself. In January of that year, Wright wrote to Howard asking if he had a carbon copy of the story: the artist assigned to provide the cover painting and interior pen-and-ink illustration had not returned the manuscript, and there was no time to lose in typesetting if the story was to make it into the April issue. Howard, at this stage in his career, had not developed the habit of making carbon copies. So the young writer sat down, rewrote the story from memory, and sent it off. Shortly thereafter he learned that the manuscript had been found, missing the first page, which was taken from his rewrite.
Howard’s elation at making an extra ten dollars for his efforts (on top of the forty dollars he’d already been promised) was short-lived. As he later told a correspondent, he “one day got the advance pages of Wolfshead which was about to be published. Reading it over I was so depressed and discouraged that I went and got a job jerking soda in a drug-store.”
Readers reacted to the story much more positively than the author. While it was not voted the most popular tale in the April issue (Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” won that honor), it placed a very respectable third. Years later, writing about Howard to E. Hoffmann Price, Lovecraft said, “I first became conscious of him as a coming leader just a decade ago—when I read Wolfshead . . . I saw that WT had landed a big-timer.”
Most young writers are, of course, inclined to emulate other writers whom they admire or respect, and Howard was no exception. Sometimes the influences are quite apparent, as in “The Little People,” based on the work of Welsh master Arthur Machen (who is mentioned in Howard’s tale, along with his story “The Shining Pyramid”), a prelude to what will become an important motif in some of Howard’s finest stories (“The Children of the Night,” “People of the Dark,” “Worms of the Earth,” “The Valley of the Lost,” etc.). Less explicit are influences like Ambrose Bierce (whose “A Watcher by the Dead” must surely have inspired “The Touch of Death”) and Jack London (if indeed the Faring Town tales may be said to owe something to Howard’s favorite writer). Undoubtedly Howard was occasionally influenced by something he’d read in the magazines. Sometimes stories came from his own dreams (as he claimed was the case with “The Dream Snake”).
Yet Howard is never entirely derivative. Always there is something in his work that marks it as his. As Lovecraft would later recognize, “Seldom if ever did he set down a lifeless stock character or situation and leave it as such. Before he concluded with it, it always took on some tinge of vitality and reality . . . always drew something from his own experience and knowledge of life instead of from the sterile herbarium of dessicated pulpish standbys.” As with his werewolves, other Howard creations do not seem to follow traditional guidelines: the merman of “Out of the Deep” seems not so much a creature of the sea as an embodiment of the cold, cruel sea itself; his ghosts take varied forms in such tales as “The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux” and “The Shadow of the Beast.” The Tavern of the poem is “like a monster”—no mere building, but a sinister life form. To my mind, though, his most effective accomplishment is the way he can make fear, or guilt, or hate, or other intense psychological states assume almost tangible form. Howard was a very emotional writer, and it adds a heightened sense of urgency to his tales and poems. “The Touch of Death,” “The Fear that Follows,” and “The Dead Slavers’ Tale” are but three examples—almost all the stories herein will illustrate the point as well.
In the fall of 1927 Howard wrote a story about an Elizabethan-era swordsman who pursues a trail of vengeance into Darkest Africa, where he meets with sorcery and witnesses a bestial retribution. He’d intended to send it to Weird Tales, still at that time the only magazine that had accepted any of his stories. However, on a whim he sent it to Argosy, one of the better pulp magazines, instead, and was rewarded with a personal letter from an associate editor who, while rejecting it, said “You seem to have caught the knack of writing good action & plenty of it into your stories.” Considerably buoyed, Howard wrote to his friend Clyde Smith, “So, if a despised weird tale, whose whole minor tone is occultism, can create that much interest with a magazine which never publishes straight weird stuff, I don’t feel so much discouraged.” He sent the story without modification to Weird Tales, which published it in the August 1928 issue as “Red Shadows,” the first of Howard’s tales of the swashbuckling Puritan Solomon Kane, and the first of his many successful heroic fantasy series.
All of Howard’s sword-and-sorcery stories include elements of horror, but the Kane series in particular is every bit as much horror as it is adventure. Some of these are set in England or Continental Europe: we have selected here “Rattle of Bones,” in which a chance encounter in the Black Forest leads Kane to a confrontation with evil in a lonely tavern. Others are set in Darkest Africa, that fictional continent so beloved of the adventure writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a mysterious land of jungles teeming with life inimical to man, of strange peoples and cults, bizarre flora and fauna, a land largely unexplored, in which might lie lost cities or civilizations from remotest antiquity. Howard certainly was not the first, nor the last, writer to make use of the possibilities of Darkest Africa, but as Lovecraft said, he brought to “the shadow-haunted ruins of unknown and primordial cities in the African jungle . . . an aura of pre-human fear and necromancy which no other writer could duplicate.” In “Hills of the Dead,” Kane enlists the aid of his blood brother, the shaman N’Longa (and what is a God-fearing Puritan doing with a shaman blood brother, anyway?), in combatting an ancient race of walking dead. Again we find Howard challenging the traditions: What are these creatures? Kane calls them vampires, but they are not the blood drinkers of Dracula and its imitators. There is a host of them swarming the hills, and Kane finds he must fight demons with demonry.
In 1930, Howard and Lovecraft at last began that correspondence that has come to be recognized as perhaps the greatest in fantasy circles. The two discussed and debated myriad topics, and inevitably the ideas found their way into each author’s work. Howard perhaps shows the influences more directly and openly, at least at first. The early stages of the epistolary friendship inspired the younger writer to experiment with stories in the Lovecraftian vein, producing “The Children of the Night,” “The Black Stone” (thought by many to be the finest Cthulhu Mythos story not written by Lovecraft), “The Thing on the Roof,” and the last of his Solomon Kane stories, “The Footsteps Within,” within a matter of months. Because Howard was—consciously or unconsciously—emulating the Lovecraft style, and making use of terms or concepts from Lovecraft, these stories are frequently thought of as belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos. A word about this is in order.
The Cthulhu Mythos refers to a sort of pseudomythology that originated in the work of Lovecraft, many of whose stories are loosely linked by being set in a fictional New England (with the towns of Arkham, Kingsport, Dunwich, and Innsmouth, among others), and by their references to various cosmic entities that are entirely indifferent to man but nevertheless are worshipped as gods by some cultists (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlethotep, etc.). Lovecraft inserted glancing references to these entities in some of the work he revised for other authors, like Adolphe de Castro and Zelia Bishop, and a few people noticed, including Robert E. Howard. In one of his early letters to Lovecraft, Howard inquired about these entities:
“I have noted in your stories you refer to Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, R’lyeh, Yuggoth etc. Adolph de Castro, I note, mentions these gods, places, or whatever they are, only the spelling is different, as Cthulutl, Yog Sototl. Both you and he, I believe, have used the phrase fhtaghn. . . . Would it be asking too-much to ask you to tell me the significance of the above mentioned names or terms? And the Arab Alhazred, and the Necronomicon. The mention of these things in your superb stories have whetted my interest immensely. I would extremely appreciate any information you would give me regarding them.”
Lovecraft was quick to disabuse Howard of the idea that there was some body of esoteric lore that his scholarship had missed:
“Regarding the solemnly cited myth-cycle of Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Nug, Yeb, Shub-Niggurath, etc., etc.—let me confess that this is all a synthetic concoction of my own, like the populous and varied pantheon of Lord Dunsany’s “Pagana.” The reason for its echoes in Dr. de Castro’s work is that the latter gentleman is a revision-client of mine—into whose tales I have stuck these glancing references for sheer fun. If any other clients of mine get work placed in W.T., you will perhaps find a still-wider spread of the cult of Azathoth, Cthulhu, and the Great Old Ones! The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is likewise something which must yet be written in order to possess objective reality. . . . Long has alluded to the Necronomicon in some things of his—in fact, I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation.” Lovecraft mentioned that Clark Ashton Smith was beginning a similar pseudomythology involving “the furry toad-god Tsathoggua,” and suggested that he might incorporate Howard’s Kathulos (from “Skull-Face”) into some future tale.
Howard was not long in joining the fun. Within two months of receiving Lovecraft’s reply, he had submitted “The Children of the Night” and it had been accepted by Weird Tales. In it he had referred to Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” as one of the three “master horror-tales” (the others being Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Machen’s The Novel of the Black Seal) and had made his own first contribution to the Mythos, in the form of the German scholar Von Junzt and his forbidden tome, Nameless Cults. He would soon make other contributions, such as the mad poet Justin Geoffrey and the alien entity Gol-goroth. Other of his creations, such as the serpent men of Valusia (from the Kull series), Bran Mak Morn, and, indeed, Kathulos, would be adopted by Lovecraft and others in their own tales. But we must draw an important distinction here between the use of these names or concepts as “general background-material” (in Lovecraft’s words), as opposed to their being the central conceit or plot driver of a story. As David Schultz and others have noted, neither Lovecraft nor his friends made any effort to codify any of this, seeing it more as something fun, something to give a flavor of real myth and legend to the background of their stories, than as a serious attempt to create a mythos. (Lovecraft himself used the tongue-in-cheek term “Yog-Sothothery”). Thus, Howard may occasionally refer to one of Lovecraft’s cosmic entities or allude to the Necronomicon or R’lyeh, but these mentions are usually incidental to the actual story. While it is fun to play the Mythos game, it should not lead the reader to assume that Howard (or others of Lovecraft’s peers) were consciously attempting to write Mythos stories.
One story, for example, in which glancing Mythos references are found, but which is wholly a Robert E. Howard story, is “Worms of the Earth,” featuring another of Howard’s great heroic fantasy characters, the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn: last in a line of kings stretching back into mankind’s dawn, born to lead a savage, degenerated people in a last-ditch effort to prevent the legions of Roman Britain from overrunning their northern homeland, knowing that the fight will ultimately be lost but refusing to surrender. The “hideous and compelling power” that Lovecraft found in the story does not come from monsters or a sense of cosmic despair: it comes from watching the terrible consequences that flow from an all-too-human paroxysm of anger and desire for revenge. The story is considered by many Howard fans and scholars to be his finest tale; it works not only as an extraordinary heroic fantasy, but as a grim and atmospheric work of horror, and is perhaps his most effective use of the “little people” motif.
Howard’s letters to Lovecraft frequently included tales of the old West, or of current conditions and events in Texas, and Lovecraft, himself an ardent regionalist (most of his stories being set in a fictional New England), encouraged Howard to make greater use of his native Southwest and its traditions in his fiction. This encouragement eventually prodded him into the creation of several of his finest and most distinctive works of horror or the supernatural, with tales set in the Southwest or in the “piney woods” of the Texas-Arkansas borderlands.
The first of these “regional” works to appear in print was “The Horror from the Mound,” set in West Texas and featuring a young cowpuncher who laments his decision to give up his life as a cowboy to buy a farm. The story reflects two threads from Howard’s letters to Lovecraft: his considerable sympathy for farmers, who were struggling mightily as the Depression began to settle over the land; and his interest in the legends of lost Spanish treasures, which have been popular in Texas since before the Spanish left. Most important, of course, Howard shows he is still interested in taking on tropes of the horror genre—here, the vampire again—and giving them an unusual treatment. Too unusual for one poor Weird Tales reader, who complained that “The Horror from the Mound” [contained] no less than four flagrant breaches of accepted vampire tradition.” As we have seen, Howard was no respecter of literary traditions. In fact, it might be said that, with this story, Howard had finally succeeded in bringing together all three of his favorite genres—western, adventure, and the weird—to create the first “weird western.”
Following “The Horror from the Mound,” Howard turned increasingly to his native environs for other tales of horror and the supernatural. “The Valley of the Lost” makes use of the theme of little people, essentially transferring elements of “The Children of the Night” and “Worms of the Earth” to the Southwest and giving the story an ending we might more expect of Lovecraft than of Howard. “The Man on the Ground” is a very short tale but a gripping meditation on the power of hate, a crystallization of all Howard had learned in his study of Texas feuds. It is a fine example of that ability we noted earlier to lend almost tangible form to an abstract emotion. “Old Garfield’s Heart,” in which early Texas Indian fights and legends play a prominent part, is about as close to home as Howard gets in a story: Lost Knob is his fictional counterpart to his hometown of Cross Plains. The dark magic of “The Dead Remember” is all the darker when set against the authentic backdrop of a cattle drive. These stories, along with his increasingly confident handling of westerns, convinced Lovecraft that “in time he would have made his mark . . . with some folk-epic of his beloved southwest.”
The story generally considered Howard’s finest horror tale, though, was not set in the Southwest, but in the South. Texas straddles both geographic regions, and Howard explained to Lovecraft that a dividing line ran between Dallas, which was in East Texas and looked to the south, and Fort Worth, which was, as its slogan goes, “Where the West Begins.” Bagwell, where the Howards lived when Robert was about eight years old, is east of Dallas, on the fringes of the Piney Woods area that takes in parts of southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, and East Texas. And it is in Bagwell that we find the genesis of “Pigeons from Hell.”
“I well remember the tales I listened to and shivered at, when a child in the ‘piney woods’ of East Texas, where Red River marks the Arkansaw and Texas boundaries,” Howard wrote to Lovecraft (using the phonetic spelling for his father’s native state). “There were quite a number of old slave darkies still living then. The one to whom I listened most was the cook, old Aunt Mary Bohannon. . . . Another tale she told that I have often met with in negro-lore. The setting, time and circumstances are changed by telling, but the tale remains basically the same. Two or three men—usually negroes—are travelling in a wagon through some isolated district—usually a broad, deserted river-bottom. They come on to the ruins of a once thriving plantation at dusk, and decide to spend the night in the deserted plantation house. This house is always huge, brooding and forbidding, and always, as the men approach the high columned verandah, through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away. The men sleep in the big front-room with its crumbling fire-place, and in the night they are awakened by a jangling of chains, weird noises and groans from upstairs. Sometimes footsteps descend the stairs with no visible cause. Then a terrible apparition appears to the men who flee in terror. This monster, in all the tales I have heard, is invariably a headless giant, naked or clad in shapeless sort of garment, and is sometimes armed with a broad-axe. This motif appears over and over in negro-lore.”
Just how familiar Howard might have been with “negro-lore” must remain a matter of some conjecture (he lived most of his life, other than that short period in Bagwell and a few weeks in New Orleans, in communities in which there were few, if any, African Americans), but certainly he used what he did know to good effect. Critical consensus seems to concur with Stephen King’s remark that “Pigeons from Hell” is “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century.” It was later adapted for television’s Thriller!, an anthology series hosted by Boris Karloff, and is widely regarded as the best episode of that series, “one of the most truly frightening journeys into small-screen fantasy.”
“Pigeons from Hell” and other of the piney woods stories (such as “The Shadow of the Beast” and “Black Canaan”) contain some language and attitudes that many readers will find uncomfortable or offensive. Not to put too fine a point on it, Howard was a product of his time and place, the early-twentieth-century South and Southwest, and casually racist attitudes went along with it. In addition, he was writing for the pulp magazines, and stereotyping of ethnic groups served as a kind of shorthand for the writers and readers of this form of popular fiction: Asians, Native Americans, Latins, Irish, Swedes, Eastern Europeans, and others are frequently not treated any better in pulp stories than blacks, whether African or African American, are. But in “Pigeons from Hell,” “Black Canaan,” “The Dead Remember,” and other tales, Howard also displays his considerable gifts for narrative and invention, and his extraordinary talent for creating that atmosphere of “fear and dread suspense” that Lovecraft noted; and I believe that a closer look at the stories reveals considerable sympathy with the downtrodden.
In “The Dead Remember,” for instance, it is clear that Howard’s sympathies lie with Joel and Jezebel, rather than with the cowboy who murders them in a drunken rage, and in “Pigeons from Hell,” it seems equally clear that his sympathies lie with the “mulatto” maid Joan and not with her white tormentor, Celia Blassenville. Howard’s own extreme sensitivity to authority (“Life’s not worth living if somebody thinks he’s in authority over you,” he told one correspondent) may have been at the root of his discomfort with mistreatment of slaves (“Thank God the slaves on my ancestors’ plantations were never so misused”), and this, along with pride in his Southern heritage, may be why he chose to make the Blassenvilles Creoles from the West Indies rather than Southerners. In “Black Canaan,” it is true that the villains are Saul Stark, the conjure man, and his “quadroon” accomplice, the Bride of Damballah, but here I believe Howard’s sympathies lie as much with the swamp blacks, over whom Stark holds sway not so much by holding out the promise of liberation as through fear of being “put in the swamp,” as with the white inhabitants of the town. In fact, when he names the white town Grimesville, the black settlement Goshen, and the region in which both are found Canaan, I think he may be subtly—perhaps unconsciously—displaying his sympathies with the oppressed.
We have appended to this volume four fragmentary tales that, so far as can be learned, Howard never completed. Two of these will fall into the Cthulhu Mythos: “The House” concerns Justin Geoffrey, and provides a tantalizing hint of where his madness began; the “Untitled Fragment” that begins “Beneath the glare of the sun . . .” explicitly links the Conan series to the Mythos, through discussion of Conan’s Hyborian Age in Nameless Cults. (The title Unaussprechlichen Kulten, used here by Howard for the only time, was actually coined by August Derleth, at the request of Lovecraft, who had wanted a title that would serve as the original German. Lovecraft ardently promoted the use of Derleth’s version because of its “sinister, mouth-filling rhythm.”) The other two fragments employ, in my view, some very interesting concepts. “Golnor the Ape,” with its protagonist who had “lived in two worlds” and who is yet able to see and converse with beings of that mysterious “other” world, and “Spectres in the Dark,” in which men seem to be driven mad by things that move in the shadows but cannot be seen, offer intriguing glimpses into the fertile imagination of Robert E. Howard.
Settle back in your chair and let that imagination sweep you into worlds of mystery, adventure, and terror. You might first want to be sure there are no deep shadows in the room.
Rusty Burke
February 2008