“The Shadow Kingdom” (Kull and his Pictish ally, Brule, battle the secret serpent-race in lost Atlantis).
“Beyond the Black Biver” (The best portrayal of the Picts in the age of Conan).
“The Valley of the Worm” (A tale of racial memory of an indefinite past, in which Picts battle the Aryan migration into a land haunted by a gigantic worm).
“The Hyborian Age” (Howard’s own “history” of his mythical prehistoric age-contradicts much of the history of the Picts as related in “Men of the Shadows”).
Most of these can be found reprinted in Skullface & Others or The Dark Man & Others, although for some you’ll need to seek out other reprint volumes or the obscure magazines of original publication. This may be difficult, but then you wouldn’t have read this far if you weren’t a hard-core Robert E. Howard fan. It is worth the effort both as a study of Howard’s development-and because the majority of these are among Howard’s best tales. Maybe Baen Books will oblige us by collecting these in a single volume.
Karl Edward Wagner
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
March 1976