The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (2 page)

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.