The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

Here are Howard’s greatest horror tales, all in their original, definitive versions. Some of Howard’s best-known characters–Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and sailor Steve Costigan among them–roam the forbidding locales of the author’s fevered imagination, from the swamps and bayous of the Deep South to the fiend-haunted woods outside Paris to remote jungles in Africa.

The collection includes Howard’s masterpiece “Pigeons from Hell,” which Stephen King calls “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century,” a tale of two travelers who stumble upon the ruins of a Southern plantation–and into the maw of its fatal secret. In “Black Canaan” even the best warrior has little chance of taking down the evil voodoo man with unholy powers–and none at all against his wily mistress, the diabolical High Priestess of Damballah. In these and other lavishly illustrated classics, such as the revenge nightmare “Worms of the Earth” and “The Cairn on the Headland,” Howard spins tales of unrelenting terror, the legacy of one of the world’s great masters of the macabre.

"Robert E. Howard, renowned creator of Conan the Barbarian, was also a master at conjuring tales of hair-raising horror. In a career spanning only twelve years, Howard wrote more than a hundred stories, with his most celebrated work appearing in Weird Tales, the preeminent pulp magazine of the era." This book contains Howard's greatest horror tales, all in their original, definitive versions. Some of Howard's best-known characters - Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and sailor Steve Costigan among them - roam the forbidding locales of the author's fevered imagination, from the swamps and bayous of the Deep South to the fiend-haunted woods outside Paris to remote jungles in Africa.

Jonathan Pearce - Library Journal

Generously illustrated with artist Staples's mood-enhancing black-and-white drawings, and including many of the author's poems serving the same purpose, this first-ever collection of 60 stories and sketches of terror represent most of the styles employed by the young dean (1906-36) of American horror, who also created Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and Conan the Barbarian. Originally published in pulp magazines, these tales are often beautifully literate, the energy of Howard's writing nearly palpable. Vocabulary and language structure transport the reader in time and place, as exemplified in the medieval opener, "In the Forest of Villefere." The horrors include warped humans, monsters, werewolves, and fantastic beasts in period pieces, along with ordinary people in unusual modern circumstances, as in "The Touch of Death." The stories are not all horror. "The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux" is in effect a thrilling and inspirational, if now politically incorrect (through its use of dated language), sports fantasy. Recommended for all libraries.

Robert E. Howard's (1906–1936) tales of heroic and supernatural fantasy won him a huge audience across the world and influenced a whole generation of writers, from Robert Jordan to Raymond E. Feist.