The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard is the latest volume in Del Rey’s expanding library of illustrated Howard anthologies, each accompanied by a contextualizing introduction and an appendix of notes on the original texts. With a solid selection and considered illustrations by Greg Staples (of Judge Dredd fame), Horror Stories is a worthy addition to the series, and the first of them to focus on work other than the famous Howard character franchises—Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn.
Howard was known by his contemporaries for a prolific imagination and a unique ability to render fear palpable. To them he was a horror writer first, and only incidentally one of the fathers of sword-and-sorcery. The stories collected here emerged in the dawn of the Weird Tales era of horror fiction, when Africa was still called the “dark continent,” when Howard, Lovecraft, and Bloch wrote their correspondences on theories of genre. Territory staked out by these authors was later claimed by Clive Barker and Tales from the Crypt.
The volume showcases the Howard horror work best praised for its rich, literate variety—classic horror, fantasy horror, ghost stories, Celtic myth, African myth, Southern and African-American myth, Native American myth, and so on. He has no fear of mixing his sources, either, or working in vastly different settings, or peopling tales of supernatural revenge with slavers, harlots, and madmen all at once. But each of these elements Howard reappropriates so that they are unmistakably his and seem fresh even today. His werewolf fiction, for example (notably “In the Forest of Villefére” and “Wolfshead”), are still more original and compelling than almost anyone else’s. Other gems include “The Dream Snake” (based, as the title suggests, on one of Howard’s nightmares), “The Valley of the Lost” (a story that connects Texas blood feuds with a demonic serpent called The Terrible Nameless One), and “The Black Stone,” one of the best non-Lovecraftian entries into the Cthulhu cycle. The unfortunate addition of Howard’s horror verses (scary poems to tell in the dark?) do not diminish this.
The poetry has, however, aged the worst in a collection of inescapably archaic fiction. The style is essentially the same as the ones he uses in fiction, but without the tempering requirements of prose, they seem overwrought. And they tell on a problem with his writing in general. Howard was receiving glowing praise from H.P. Lovecraft even as Lovecraft was proving that horror had to move past the worn-out Romantic denizens of Howard’s fiction—werewolves, mummies, etc. Academics often treat his writing as elevating and transcending pulp, as though the sheer force of his imagination and the breathless urgency of his diction made his work an enlightened experiment in transmuting primal emotions into words – but there is only some truth to this.
Influential though he is, contemporary readers will find he sounds like an only slightly more talented R.A. Salvatore. What can we make of passages like “…until the legions of darkness swirl from hell’s gate and the world flames to ruin, will never such fear again be known to men”? Percy Shelley would be pleased. For a writer raised on classicism and the Romantics, this is the most powerful language at his disposal. For a contemporary audience, the grandiosity gets in the way of immediacy, and the fear is ultimately lost. No surprise then that strongest audience for Howard’s work today are the readers of the many comic adaptations (”Pigeons from Hell,” a story in this volume, was released by Dark Horse in April 2008). They rarely ask for three-dimensional characters, and they do not have to contend with his prose.
Then there are Howard’s naked racial and sexual politics—so backward that we might first think them intended ironically (”But when, Messiuers, did woman ever use wisdom?”) And perhaps we would be partially correct, but these are still the imaginings of an 18-year-old Texan writing in the mid-1920s. Women are silly, minorities are stupid (or evil), and the protagonists are almost invariably white men. There might be some merit to the apologist cry that context excuses these social anachronisms, but if we are to excuse the work for the failings of pulp fiction, we can’t then give it a status above pulp. Even if it is the height of what pulp has to offer.
Which it most assuredly is. Howard, like Tolkien, exploded at least one genre. Today’s giants of horror justifiably namecheck his work with reverence and awe. Horror Stories, while it might not have the recognition pull of the Conan anthologies, is still rewarding to those who are willing to look past its archaisms and is perhaps a better testimony to his creative might than any collection that focuses on a single titular character.
And it makes a great ad for the upcoming comic releases.
To buy a copy of this book, click here
If you liked this book, check out:
Pigeons from Hell
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos