Dr Hermes Reviews - ROBERT E HOWARD Back to our Contents Page

ALMURIC (Nov 21, 2002) From three 1939 issues of WEIRD TALES, this short novel was written by Robert E. Howard in 1936, the final troubled year of his life. It was never polished or revised by him, and its rough state adds to its disturbing power. ALMURIC is one of the most macho books I have ever read; if you wrung the manuscript, I think testosterone would drip out of the paper. It's Robert E. Howard's vision of the perfect afterlife he fantasized which might make him happy. On the most basic level, this book is Howard doing his version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter stories (just as his SKULL-FACE was derived from Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books). We have an adventurous Earthman abruptly transported to another planet, where he fights against tremendous obstacles, both human and monsters, wins the love of a beautiful woman. and eventually ends up as top dog in the pack. The difference here is in Howard's going completely overboard is in his obssession with sheer muscle and violence. Literally the entire story is page after page describing the godlike strength and endurance of his hero as he smashes everything in front of him. He suffers enough broken bones, blood loss, deep gashes and skull fractures to place an actual human being in ICU with the doctors shaking their heads sadly, but because he is just so dang tough, he simply heals and quickly is at it again. Even in his early life on his native planet, Esau Cairn is a man of superhuman strength and a touchy disposition which makes him unfit for normal society. (Yes, he has black hair and blue eyes, how did you guess?) Because he takes offense easily and is so powerful, he can't play football or box without crippling his opponents, Cairn inevitably ends up on the run, with the police after him for crushing a crooked politician's skull. Well, by an extremely fortunate (you might even say unlikely) happenstance. Cairn crashes in on a scientist who just happens to have discovered a means to transport a man to another planet; and this planet, Almuric, just happens to be able to support human life; and it just happens to be packed to the gills with monstrous winged harpies, brutal Neanderthal barbarians, dogheaded monsters and huge predators which are just what Cairn needs to make his life complete. Man! What are the odds? What if Cairn had happened to land on a tranquil planet populated only by fuzzy little Smurfs? Oh, well.... Elements from Burroughs' Tarzan stories also are included, as Howard makes his Almuric natives resemble the dichotomous Oparians. The women are slender, lovely dainty little maidens, while the men are hulking, hairy cavemen. He explains this as the result of the men doing all the fighting and hunting while the women are pampered poodles. Somehow I don't think genetics would work to produce a population like this, but it suits the fantasy. After living in the mountains by himself for months, getting even more robust and hardened until he practically can crack walnuts with his eyelids, Cairns fights his way into membership in the brutal clain of the Guras. Then the real trouble starts..... There is an odd, unsettling moment when Cairn rescues the delicate little Altha from the monsters. He has been happily chugging ale and getting in brawls with the apelike Guras and apparently the fact that there are also lovely available women in the stone city has made no impression on him. After he has boldly saved Altha from not only the winged Yagas but the Dogheads and a spider the size of an ox, he pauses to catch his breath and looks down at her. ("Her dark hair fell in thick glossy clusters about her alabaster shoulders, a strap of her tunic, slipped down, revealed her firm, pink-tipped young breasts. I was aware of a vague unrest that was almost a pain.") A vague unrest? After a year first living alone in the wilderness and then merrily boozing and wrestling with hairy cavemen, the sight of a half naked young woman gives him a vague unrest? You have to wonder if Esau Cairn has a few glands hooked up funny. Edgar Rice Burroughs would have had Cairn and Altha at least flirting or more likely tumbling for each other right away, but Howard seems to regard the introduction of sex into his stories as a nuisance he might as well get over with. The most interesting element comes fairly late in the book as Cairn tangles with the Yagas, black skinned nonhuman creatures with huge batlike wings. Cruel torturers and cannibals, they are almost identical with the harpies that Solomon Kane obliterated in the much earlier story, "Wings In the Night." These creatures are vividly presented, especially their sadistic queen Yasmeena, and they make great villains. They remind me a bit of the winged tormentors Ray Harryhausen animated in the classic film JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS... but much bigger, meaner and more deadly. With the introduction of the Yagas, the story really picks up speed and directon. For thousands of years, the winged monsters have been slaughtering the humans of Almuric and carrying off female prisoners to serve as slaves and food. Queen Yasmeena says their reign has lasted since the beginning of time and will endure forever, but she hasn't reckoned with the new element of Cairn. The transplanted Earthman escapes and returns to lead a vast army of Neanderthal brutes who are foaming at the mouth with rage, intent on rescuing their women. After that, the carnage is hard to describe. It's the essence of Robert E. Howard in a few pages. The very last page or two seem a bit weak, almost as if they had been finished by an editor, and in general the book has a lot of rough writing that would have benefitted by Howard doing a second draft. But for sheer vigor and enthusiasm in depicting physical action, ALMURIC is hard to match.

"Black Canaan" (Oct 10, 2003) From the June 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES this brutal story is Robert E. Howard at his most intense. There's a real sense of impending doom as the hero realizes that voodoo works and he can't fight it. There's an impressive villain (two of them, actually), some hard fighting and hard riding, men being turned into swamp monsters, an impending bloodbath, even a bit of unrequited lust. On the flip side, the story is also likely to offend just about everyone in one way or another. That's a drawback to reading 1930s pulp stories today. If you can get past casual cracks about "heathen yellow Chinese" or "greasy Dagoes" or "swamp niggers", you can find a huge amount of potent entertainment in the horror and adventure stories from that era. If ethnic slurs really bother you enough to spoil your reading pleasure (and I'm not defending them by any means), then pulps are a genre you might want to either skip or choose your selections carefully. There has been a lot of interesting debate on the topic; all I'm doing is pointing out that "Black Canaan" is a perfect example why most pulp stories would not receive the Captain Planet Politically Correct award for enlightened attitudes. Anyway, we find ourselves in 1870s Arkansas, a secluded area cut off by rivers from the outside world. This is Canaan, practically a seperate country that discourages outsiders and minds its own sullen business. It's populated by the descendants of the first white settlers and by the descendants of their slaves. Frankly, the place is a holocaust waiting to happen. There was a big slave uprising in 1845 that ended in mass slaughter and bloodshed and a similar outburst seems inevitable. ("Living in a powderkeg and giving off sparks.") The match to the fuse comes in the formidable figure of Saul Stark, a conjure man who arrives and sets about stirring up trouble. Stark is "the son of a Kongo witchfinder, and the greatest voodoo priest out of the Ancient Land". He has pretty big ambitions, planning to wipe out all the white folks and set himself up as king of Canaan. The black people from the towns and farms have gone into hiding out in the swamps, the white people are loading their guns and whetting their Bowie knives, and well, it looks like a massacre coming that no one might survive in any numbers. Our hero comes thundering in from New Orleans to take charge. Kirby Buckner is the unofficial leader of the area of independent backwoodsmen, a tough fighting man comfortable with a pair of big .44s or a knife or his own scarred knuckles. I don't see a description of him but heck, this is Robert E. Howard... you can be sure Kirby is big, lean, muscular, with volcanic blue eyes and tousled black hair. To Kirby's surprise and horror, he finds out that Saul Stark does indeed have magic juju powers which really work, that he is being drawn against his will to a sacrificial death by torture in the villain's stronghold and there's not much he can do about it. For some reason, this seems scarier than normal; perhaps because most Howard heroes are so toughminded and dogged that hypnotism doesn't affect them much and they usually just gut the evil wizard and get it over with. That's not the worst of it. Lurking in the bushes and splashing quietly in the dark waters are things. Men on all fours? Deformed alligators? Whatever they are, they're stalking people and pouncing on them with finality. And some of them seem awfully familiar.... Saul Stark himself is an imposing menace, "an awesome statue in black marble" with immense sorcerous powers and implacable hatred. He really deserved a full-length book to star in or else a series of ongoing appearances; I thought he had possibilities left undeveloped in this short story. Howard based him closely upon Kelly the Conjure-man, a figure out of Arkansas folklore. In a brief 1931 vignette, Howard (with grudging fascination) describes Kelly (evidently a real historical person) as being essentially the same intimidating figure that become Saul Stark in this story. Kelly mysteriously vanished in the 1870s, probably the time of "Black Canaan". Saul Stark's murderous high priestess of Damballah (who had a white father as opposed to the full-African mojo man), is gorgeous and catlike, both tempting and teasing. Sort of like Halle Berry giving a good performance for a surprise. Kirby Buckner gets all sweaty and bothered just meeting her, feeling a mixture of lust and repulsion that's pretty potent stuff. I can't recall any of Howard's protagonists having a halfway normal sex life. Either they're neuter about women (like Kull and Solomon Kane) or they're passionately obsessed with idealized maidens they never get to go under the covers with. Or, as here, they're strongly drawn to wicked temptresses who are either devils or from forbidden races. A lot of the feverish intensity in Robert E Howard's stories pretty clearly is fuelled by sexual frustration. [An exception to this is found in his stories for the "Spicy" pulps, which I hadn't read at the time of this review.] Altogether, "Black Canaan" is a pretty tense story that builds up to a dramatic finale and a haunting epitaph ("They will never know the shapes the black water of Tullaroosa hides. That is a secret I share with the cowed and terror-haunted black people of Goshen, and of it neither they nor I have ever spoken.")

"The Black Stone" (Aug 15, 2006) Some writers regard their work as a trade, and they are happy to turn out perfectly fine stories in whatever genre or style sells at the moment. Gothic romance, crude burlesque, Western action, military history; it's all okay with them as long as the check clears. But there are also those writers who are driven by inner demons and who are letting out their personal fears and desires onto the page. Here we get authors like Sax Rohmer, Ian Fleming, H.P. Lovecraft and of course Robert E. Howard. Now this group seems to keep going back to the same images and problems in their work. There's a familiar 'voice' that you come to recognize and even well, repetition. But this personal investment also gives their stories a special intensity that the versatile craftsman lacks... and these are the stories that tend to stick in your mind so that years later, something will bring a scene or a line of dialogue back with great vividness. In "The Black Stone" (WEIRD TALES, 1931), Howard tackles Lovecraft-style themes of ancient cosmic horrors still haunting the world in desolate places. He uses a number of Lovecraft's techniques and does a good job but some conventions of this genre seems to go against his natural storytelling instincts. The result is atmospheric and compelling but it also feels "off" in some respects. We start with our narrator telling us about yet another extremely rare book of horrifying secrets. This one is NAMELESS CULTS (UNAUSSPRECHLICHEN KULTEN in the original German) by the notorious Von Junzt. Howard has caught the trick that piling on specific dates and details lends an air of seeming authenticity. (Ian Fleming was a master of this, even when he got things way wrong.) So we are informed of the "cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in 1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin Press of New York in 1909." But our scholar of forbidden knowledge has the real collector's item, the original 1839 Dusseldorf edition and it is packed with so many mind-blowing revelations and traumatic hints that even Amazon won't carry it. As I recall Abdul Alhazred was consumed alive by an invisible Thing in broad daylight and the wizard who gave his name to the BOOK OF EIBON (in Clark Ashton Smith's stories) lived in prehistoric Hyperborea. Howard's Von Junzt met his grisly fate in a locked room, where "he was found dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat." Dipping into NAMELESS CULTS, our narrator gets his interest piqued by references to an enigmatic Black Stone in Hungary. Anyone who sleeps near the monolith will suffer appalling nightmares ever after and people who hang out there on MIdsummer Eve will go gibbering drooling mad, more likely than not. Soon he's digging through his library for more information, gets nowhere, and ends up travelling to the quaint little village of Stregoicavar. (Not far from Borgo Pass, I bet. "N0! You musn't go dare!") We discover that Howard's "mad poet" Justin Geoffrey (who appears in other stories) had spent an afternoon at the site ten years earlier and had written "The People of the Monolith" about his experience. Geoffrey had died screaming in a madhouse, but the visit to the Black Stone wasn't entirely to blame as he had been showing signs of insanity long before. (How much self-identification is there with this mad poet, Bob?) The way all these people suffer and perish after reading everything from THE KING IN YELLOW to DER VERMIS MYSTERIIS must subconsciously unnerve generations of fans reading stories supposedly based on these occult books. We then get huge sticky lumps of history dropped on us, but it's okay because Howard was obviously so deeply into the subject that he makes it come alive. It also increases the steadily growing sense of unease. The village was not always called Stregoicavar and the people living there now are not the original inhabitants. Once it was Xuthltan (?!) and the wild heathens who lived there were all slaughtered by the Turks. A good thing, too, everyone seems to agree, as the old-timers used to go down to the lowlands to carry off young women and liddle babies who were never seen again. ("Well that the Turks swept that foul valley with torch and cleanly steel!") All too soon, our scholar makes his way to the taboo hill where the Black Stone looms. A sixteen foot high pillar just a few feet thick, it seems completely foreign to the area and the half-eroded markings on its stained surface are illegible. As he later broods over the whole affair, he realizes that it's getting dark... and it's MIdsummer Night. The man hurries to get there by midnight! Whoa. Now I have more than my share of curiosity and have done a number of reckless things but this guy knows no caution. As he sits on a stone outcropping, cold terror holds him paralyzed as strange sinister figures start to assemble. Now Howard cuts loose and gives us page after page of the most lurid binge of sadistic sex, floggings and human sacrifice and depraved shenanigans. He's not as relatively restrained in his prose as Lovecraft, and instead of subtle hints, Howard slaps you in the face with just what the cultists are up to. And as you might expect, one of the Old Ones begins to make an appearance in the slimy flesh... What oddly undermines the full potential of the story is that Howard makes a point of telling us firmly that the monster of the Black Stone was decisively destroyed by the Turks centuries earlier (the Turks "slew it with flame and ancient steel blessed in old times by Muhammed, and with incantations that were old when Arabia was young.") Those sicko cultists were all exterminated and, if you don't rashly go out of your way to visit the Black Stone, you won't even have to experience this sort of hallucination or haunting. Howard has basically heroic view of life (although a rather fatalistic one). He liked to see humans stand up boldly to whatever the universe could throw at them. Even if we can't destroy the evil forces, we can put up a stiff fight and go down kicking and shouting defiance. The more usual Cthulhu Mythos sort of view (where the protagonist meekly submits to horrible knowledge and resigns himself to waiting for death) just seems counter to Howard's storytelling. The narrator here does not become a broken, nervous wreck either ("How my own reason held, I do not know." -- but hold it does.) The most unsettling punchline he comes up with is, "... what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the world?"

"Black Talons" (Aug 18, 2003) From the December 1933 issue of STRANGE DETECTIVE STORIES, this is (to be honest) one of Robert E. Howard's duds. He didn't like detective stories in the first place and to write one went against all his storytelling instincts. Rampaging action, crude slapstick, even creeping horror... Howard was great in these areas. Sensitive character studies, subtle parody, traditional crime thrillers...not his territory. Still, to make a living as a pulp writer during the Depression meant a guy had to develop new, different (and hopefully better-paying) markets. So Howard sighed and worked up a dozen stories intended for the detective pulps and in fact sold most of them (although several didn't see print because the magazines unobligingly folded). These stories aren't hopelessly awful by any means. They're a lot more readable than much of the stuff cranked out by other writers to fill all those thousands of pages each month, but they're much less exciting or surprising than the stories Howard enjoyed writing. Like the other stories in this little cluster, "Black Talons" (his title was "Talons in the Dark") is basically a weird menace tale with a few grudging concessions to the mystery genre. There's a detective in the cast, a few touches of a mystery involving an alleged phone call by the hero that he didn't make, even a small group of exotic suspects. Feh. The story Howard really wants to tell involves a man stalked by a cult of deformed Leopard Men killers from Africa (of COURSE he stole their treasure, even knowing they were a bunch of assassins), with plenty of bloody carnage and violence in the dark and shadowy figures in the open window. The hero is a scientist (not a biologist or chemist, just "scientist" is enough) named Joel Brill. He is "squarely built, with thick shoulders and the jaws and fists of a prize-fighter; low browed with a mane of tousled black hair contrasting with his cold blue eyes". Starting to see a pattern here. Doing research on West African rituals, he makes a phone call to an acquaintance but is told he had already called the man that night. Hmm. With the company of a detective named Buckley who had been idly lounging about the library of the Corinthian Club that night (?!), Brill storms out to his friend's place in the wilderness, only to find the lights out, the window screen ripped apart and a torn-up corpse in the bedroom. The most startling image occurs when the three "Oriental" servants have Brill tied down and are about to give him the ol' rat in the copper bowl treatment. This is actually pretty gruesome, involving an inverted metal bowl strapped down on the victim's stomach and then heating the bowl with white coals. Sounds painful. Did I mention there's a big live rat inside the bowl and his only way to escape the burning is to eat his way out? Grisly as this definitely is, it also had a tinge of deja vu to it, as Howard's appropriated the sport from George Eliot's classic tale "The Copper Bowl" which had appeared in the very same magazine back in December 1928. Well, maybe the three torturers were WEIRD TALES fans.... The killer turns out to be an Egbo, an assassin from a cult of leopard worshippers who "take a male infant and subject his head to pressure, to make it deformed" and bring him up believing he is possessed by a leopard spirit. These characters do their killing with a set of curved metal hooks strapped to protrude from their knuckles (much like that Wolverine guy) and they are highly feared, etc. Now, admittedly I'm not an anthropologist but from what I've read of the genuine leopard men cult, the members lead normal lives until summoned for a mission. So it's doubtful they have malformed heads where "... the forehead projected almost into a peak, while the back of the skull is unnaturaly flattened." What the heck, Howard's monstrous killers are more colorful and melodramatic. After the usual shenanigans, there's the wrap-up and explanation. Buckley explains in chagrin, "I had a sneaking suspicion that I'd bumped into a mastermind trying to put over the 'perfect crime.' I apologize. I've been reading too many detective stories lately." I like that. Leopard men with steel claws climbing in through the window, a Sikh and a Chinese and an Egyptian kidnapping a man to torture him to death, stolen gold from Africa...THESE are not hard to believe, but the detective apologizes for believing in something so far-fetched as a scheming crook plotting to get away with a murder.

"Black Wind Blowing" (April 3, 2005) From the June 1936 issue of THRILLING MYSTERY, this was one of the handful of "weird menace" stories that Robert E. Howard turned out. This genre is what most offended critics were thinking of when they fumed over excessive sex and violence in the pulps. And the "weird menace" tales delivered what the lurid covers promised, with all those naked screaming women (painted in careful detail) tied down and about to be tortured by slavering creatures or cackling madmen. Not something the PTA would like to see on the shelves of grade school libraries, that's for sure. (Their spiritual successors, the fondly remembered EC comics like TALES FROM THE CRYPT cut back on the nudity, but delivered all the gore and terror in four-colors for page after page,) In "Black Wind Blowing", Howard lays it on so thick I half suspected he was trying to do a spoof on the genre. But then, his normal storytelling was always full of bizarre images, hyperactive violence and heavy use of adjectives so this story is probably just an extreme example. It helps, too, that "Black Wind Blowing" has enough wild premises to build at least two or three effective horror stories on. If you're not moved by what's going on at the moment, by the next page the story has shifted gears in a weirder direction. Let's see. Emmett Glanton, a rugged young Texas rancher, is summoned to his landlord's house on a night that is so excessively dark and windy that Howard uses the word "black" in every other sentence. On his way there, Glanton stops to have a fistfight with a hulking raving lunatic named Joshua. Although he slugs the big galoot down the side of a mountain, Glanton suspects he has not seen the last of Joshua (and with good reason). "He could imagine the madman loping along the road after them, foam from his bared fangs dripping onto his bare, hairy breast." The darndest thing happens when Glanton gets to his landlord's house. Creepy old John Buckman offers the young Texan the mortgage to his ranch plus a thousand dollars if he will immediately marry Buckman's luscious young niece, Joan. (Geez, twist my arm, why don't you?) Of course, Glanton goes for it, a frantic ceremony is rushed through, and Buckman hustles the young couple out into the night as if they have a curse on them. Well, funny I should use those words. After Glanton brings his bewildered new bride to his humble house and introduces her to his faithful Mexican valet, horrible things start to happen quickly. The phone rings and an hysterical John Buckman's voice is cut off by a shriek of agony, and then an evil chuckle before the connection is broken. Suspecting something might be wrong (duh), Glanton goes hurrying back to Buckman's place. The young rancher is obliged to shoot a gruesome assassin dead and then finds Buckman nailed spread-eagle on the floor, brutally tortured and near the end. (His tongue has been stretched out and skewered to the floor, among other things.) Glanton learns that his former landlord had been a member of a vile satanic cult, the Black Brothers of Ahriman, which he had tried to flee. Only (as cults always manage to do in these kind of stories), the killers had tracked him here. (If these guys worship Ahriman, wouldn't they be Iranian?) The worst part is that the villains weren't after just old man Buckman for execution. The Black Brothers need a supple young babe to burn to ashes for their annual sacrifice and that would be Joan.. the lovely niece he had married off to Glanton less than an hour ago. Glanton leaps into his old Model T, six-shooter in his belt, and roars off for a confrontation that would give Jules de Grandin a few second thoughts. Even when he was not at his best, Robert E. Howard still showed a vivid imagination few pulp writers could beat and a natural storytelling knack for making events flow quickly after each other. There's a great moment when Glanton creeps into a darkened house, sees a hideous leering face with pointed teeth and opens fire at it. But it shatters. It was a mirror, and where you or I might blink in surprise, the Texan immediately wheels around and shoots the assassin who was lunging at him from behind. This story, like most of Howard's, has a number of startling sequences like that one. "Black WInd Blowing" certainly has a plot that has been done many times before and since. What makes it work is Bob Howard's raw energy and vitality; there's nothing polished or sophisticated about it, just death and fear and madness packed tightly together in a few pages. I'm not nuts about the way he gives the Ahriman cultists a Mad Science gadget toward the end. An unexplained black box that can charge ordinary rocks with a lethal jolt of electricity is a fine idea for a pulp story, but it seems jarringly out of place here. The other weak point is that Howard is just trying too hard in the first few pages to set an ominous mood. Once the brutal action starts, things are scary enough with a lot of preamble. Howard loved using sinister religious cults which sent their assassins to America to track down their renegades and traitors. It's hard to go wrong with a springboard like that for a weird adventure tale. These Ahriman goons are not actual Leopard Men like the ones in "Black Talons", but if anything they're even more flamboyant. ("He was black, but he was not a negro. He seemed to be stained with some sort of paint from his shaven crown to his finger tips. And the fingers of one hand were frightfully armed with steel hook that were hollow nearly to the points and slipped over the fingers, curving and razor sharp... The thick lips, drawn back, revealed teeth filed to points...") These guys would have a tough time fast talking their way out of a routine road check. I assume some of them are a bit more normal looking to make it easier to rent rooms and buy cars as they trail their victims.

"The Cairn On the Headland" (July 30, 2005) We find Robert E. Howard in the grip of Celtmania again, not a bad thing as it always gets him worked up enough to pour even more enthusiasm into his writing than usual. "The Cairn On the Headland" appeared in the January 1933 issue of STRANGE TALES, and I found it fascinating because of the negative way it presented Scandinavian mythology. For best results, first read "The Grey God Passes." This was never published in Howard's lifetime but is available in various anthologies. Both stories deal with the battle between Vikings and Irish at Clontarf. In "The Grey God Passes", Odin himself turns up at the carnage to mournfully watch his followers massacred and the peak of his worship fall, as followers of "The White Christ" triumph. At the end of that story, Conn and Turlough O'Brien see a chastened Odin fleeing into the clouds, but "The Cairn On the Headland" gives us a different version of what happened to the Lord of Asgard that day. Now, there was in fact a huge battle at Clontarf on Good Friday 1014, but Howard glamorizes it a bit in his Irish-manic fervor (not really a surprise, knowing him). The Gaels under King Brian Boru did wipe out vast numbers of Vikings and effectively ended their tyranny over the land, but they suffered enormous casualties themselves. In any case, the Vikings weren't exactly driven right out of Ireland, just back to their strongholds in Dublin and elsewhere until the Normans came to conquer in their turn , slaughtering everyone and taking over. (Reading history is sometimes a bit depressing, to be honest.) And it wasn't quite the clear-cut scene of the wonderful noble Irish thrashing those horrid Danes, either. There was actually an alliance of Celtic rebels joining up with the Northmen invaders, and Brian's forces had a large number of Viking mercenaries among them. (No wonder both sides were nearly wiped out, it must have been a confusing battle.) Not that any of this would matter to Howard or his characters, who see things in sharp black and white. ("For three hundred years the world had writhed under the heel of the Viking, and here on Clontarf that scourge was lifted forever... Here was Ragnarok, the fall of the Gods! Here in very truth Odin fell, for his religion was given its death blow.") Okay, back to the story. We find James O'Brien, a young Irish-American archaeologist, toiling resentfully under the thumb of a blackmailer named Ortali. (It seems O'Brien got in a brawl with a professor who insulted him and the guy sorta accidentally fell on his own dagger; Ortali saw the whole thing. Being a typical Howard hero, O'Brien is just seething with barely suppressed murderous rage at this Italian guy taking credit and rewards for his hard work.) They are mucking around the area by Clontarf where the famous battle was fought, and have found a huge cairn of neatly piled rocks. Ortali, being the smug obnoxious Latin that he is, decides they will start dismantling the cairn that night and seize whatever loot might be under there. O'Brien meanwhile has two unusual psychic experiences. First, he meets Meve McDonnal, a creepy stern-faced woman in antiquated clothing, who speaks archaic Gaelic and presents him with the legendary Cross of Saint Brandon the Blessed. (He later finds out that Meve has been dead and buried for three hundred years, a subtle clue that something strange might be going on.) Then, as if that wasn't weird enough, O'Brien falls asleep still clutching a piece of rock from the cairn (he was THAT CLOSE to smashing Ortali in the head with it) and he has a pyschometric dream of a past life. Yep, he's now ferocious Red Cumal back at that battle a thousand years ago. The fighting has died down as not many from either side are still alive, and Red Cumal stumbles upon a dying man in grey mail, "his sword lay broken near his right hand. His horned helmet had fallen from his head... Where one eye should have been was an empty socket, and the other eye glittered cold and grim as the North Sea..." Well, as you may have guessed, this is indeed Odin, the one-eyed Lord of Asgard, who had taken on mortal form to fight alongside his followers in this decisive clash. Assuming flesh and blood, though, means the Aesir also take on some of the limitations of mortality. Wounded by a spear with a cross cut in the blade, even the fierce All-Father is dying but (here's the trick) a touch of the sacred holly will free him from the earthly body. Even a tiny bit of holly will do the trick and Odin will be freed. Shaken and covered with cold sweat, James O'Brien wakes up in his hotel room back in the present. Yikes, it's all clear to him now just what horror lies imprisoned under that pile of rocks heaped up a thousand years earlier. Ortali, the dern fool, is probably even now blithely digging away at the cairn. And wouldn't you know it, O'Brien recalls that Ortali always wore a spring of holly in his lapel, "in defiance of Nordic superstition." Looks like things could start getting hairy... As much as I enjoyed this solid no-fooling little horror story, it's odd to see a Robert E. Howard yarn where the hero is so passive. Between the apparition of Meve MacDonnal and the convenient exposition of the past-life dream, everything is handed to O'Brien. (Although it's still up to him to be brave enough to rush out and confront what's going on at the cairn.) The main appeal for me, though, was seeing the king of the Norse gods presented as a monster, "the fiendish spirit of ice and frost and darkness that the sons of the North deified as Odin." There are many today reviving the pagan worship of the Aesir (a little Googling for "Asatru" will provide hours of interesting reading) but in a cleaned-up glamorized New Age sort of way. The original tales by his own worshippers showed Odin as a tricky, unscrupulous sort of deity whom was not above breaking an oath or betraying his own followers if it served his ends. To be fair, everything he did was with a view toward preparing for Ragnarok, and things like ethics or honesty could not be allowed to hinder him. He wanted to gather warriors for Valhalla, so he often maneuvered to have his bravest followers to be cut down in their prime. (Personally, if I had to choose a pagan deity as my patron and protector, I'd go with Athena; at least, she was a decent sort who usually did the right thing by mortals.)

"Children of the Night" (July 25, 2003) From the April-May 1931 issue of WEIRD TALES, this is one of the more effective horror stories which Robert E. Howard tried. It actually is scary, not least because I'm unsure how he meant us to take it. You could interpret "Children of the Night" as the tale of a modern man turning homicidal and delusional after a concussion or (and I suspect this is how the author was thinking) it could be read as a triumph of ancestral urges returning against ancient enemies. Either way, it's unsettling. This is one of the handful of stories Howard wrote involving his dabblers in the occult, Kirowan and Conrad. We learn next to nothing about these men; they're there mainly to provide a surrogate for the reader in experiencing supernatural events. Certainly, neither is a crusader like Jules de Grandin or Judge Pursuivant, and this makes them actually more effective. They're basically ordinary men reacting to horrifying situations. We start off with Professor Kirowan and five of his scholarly buddies engaged in a more than slightly outdated discussion of brachychepalic skulls turning up in a seperate Alpine race as opposed to the Nordic people with their typically long-headed craniums. This sort of stuff obviously got Howard excited but my eyes glaze over at it all, and I have to go back and read the paragraph again. Then we go through a barrage of the listing of classical works on the occult (a trick H.P. Lovecraft liked to pull), and there in the midst of the references is Howard's answer to the NECRONOMICON*, Von Junzt's NAMELESS CULTS. Names like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Gol-goroth are dropped casually in much the same way a Hollywood agent mentions his connections. And then we get into something interesting about one of Robert E. Howard's better creatiions. Bran Mak Morn, the last great king of the Picts (again, I should point out these are Howard's fictional dark little brutes, not genuine Pictish folks found in archeology or history). Although Bran died in a great battle driving the Romans back across the British Isles, his soul actually entered the stone of a statue carved in his likeness by a wizard (we actually meet this statue in the Turlogh O'Brien story "The Dark Man"; leave it to Bob Howard to have a statue pull a guest shot). Von Junzt mentions in his book that descendants of the Picts in modern times still belong to a cult which worships this idol, that every member of the cult makes a pilgrimage to see it once in his or her lifetime, and that they believe that at the crucial moment, the spirit of Bran will animate the stone and he will return to lead his people on conquest. Man! There's a story I wish Howard had written! All over the globe, men and women with Pictish blood change suddenly into bloodthirsty savages out to build a new empire, led by an invincible animated statue of Bran Mak Morn. Anyone want to write some fan fiction? Be that as it may, one of the chums in the study, a "non-Aryan" riff-raff named Kettrick starts fooling with a flint hammer of great antiquity found in the Welsh hills, the darn thing swerves to crack the narrator (another O'Donnel) on the old bean and our storyteller drifts out of the darkness to find himself WAY back in ancient times. Sure enough, he's in an earlier incarnation as Aryara, an enraged barbarian, one of the Sword People who has been on a war-party going after the loathsome, pointed-eared and slanted-eyed, hissing critters called the Children of the Night. (If these aren't the same galoots found in the Bran Mak Morn story, "Worms of the Earth", they're close cousins.) We learn that before even the notorious Picts entered the Isles with their allegedly Mediterannean traits, these snakelike Children of the Night were already there, living underground and going out of their way to be unloveable. There's a burst of the carnage and bloodspilling that Howard presented so vividly (and it's hard to think of another writer who conveys the sheer kinetic charge of violence as well as he did). Then O'Donnel is slain in the Wayback and he revives in the library where his colleagues have been reviving him. O'Donnel immediately makes a sincere attempt to strangle Kettrick, not becuse the guy smacked him in the head, but beause he has signs of being descended from the Children of the Nght. But he doesn't snap out of it. O'Donnel remains convinçed that he has a tribal duty to kill Kettrick and others like him. ("...the brand of the serpent is upon him and until he is destroyed there is no rest for me...They say the blow I received affected my mind; I know it but opened my eyes.") This is what gives this story a haunting ending, unusual for Robert E. Howard in leaving the tale partly untold, with the ominous promise of more violence to come. The final words really have the unnerving ring of some serial killer's confession: "Then they may take me and break my neck at the end of a rope if they will. I am not blind, if my friends are. And in the sight of the old Aryan god, if not in the blinded eyes of men, I will have kept faith with my tribe." Unfortunately, "Children of the Night" indulges in just a tad too much racial bashing to be read without a wince. As tolerant as I generally am about ethnic stereotypes and unenlightened comments found in stories from seventy years ago, it's just over the line when Howard strongly implies an Asian origin for these creatures, which explains their horrible nature; they allegedly are of a "Mongolian" type very low in the evolutionary scale. What the heck were you reading that gave you these concepts, Bob? If he had left it as giving the title varmints a pre-human origin and left it at that, I think the story would have been stronger for it. ____________ *The story in fact mentions Lovecraft and the NECRONOMICON, so it could be fairly added to the various lists of Chthulh Mythos tales which people have drawn up. That's another huge topic.