first published in Crypt of Cthulhu, Roodmas 1985
Spectres in the Dark
first published in Cromlech, Spring 1985
The House
first published in The New Howard Reader, 2003
Untitled Fragment
first published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1967
Illustrations
Like a shadow it moved upon de Montour
"Sea fiend," I said in an unsteady voice
He halted, frozen
And about clustered the--Things
The sky was overcast with misty gray
He parried the bird-thing's stroke
Yar Ali fired point-blank from the hip with deadly effect
Foreword
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
Introduction
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. LOVECRAFT
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.