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.