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

"Pigeons From Hell" (Jan 26, 2005) Scary stuff! This is Robert E. Howard's most famous horror story and it's pretty potent. "Pigeons From Hell" was written in 1934 but not published in WEIRD TALES until the May 1938 issue. It has been reprinted many times and deservedly so. The story was also made into a June 1961 episode of THRILLER, in my opinion the creepiest horror series ever shown on TV. THRILLER, by the way, seriously needs to be brought out on DVD; Boris Karloff was the host and he starred in occasionally extra-creepy episodes like "The Incredible Dr Markeson" (*eek*) I know I'd snatch those DVDs up in a heartbeat. Howard was not a subtle writer who could turn out polished satires on modern life or bittersweet romances, but when you wanted either gruesome terror or violent adventure, he always delivered. His own obssessions and fears came out so strongly in his stories that I think they must have had a cathertic effect for him. "Pigeons From Hell" tells the ordeal of Griswell, a young man from New England who is roaming the South on vacation with his best friend. Tired and achy from driving the bumpy backroads, they decide to camp for the night in a long-abandoned, weed-overgrown antebellum mansion. (Horror fans, does this seem like a good idea to you?) It's getting dark and a flock of pigeons take off from the house and thunder away. Rolled up in blankets by the old fireplace, Griswell suffers unnerving nightmares about three bodies hanging in a dark room and wakes to hear a weird, whistling sort of noise from upstairs. Someone is in the house? His buddy John Branner gets up in a daze and slowly clumps up the staircase. There's a bloodcurdling scream, and while Griswell shivers in a paralyzed funk, his friend comes back down the stairs even more slowly than he went up - and with good reason. "The figure had moved into the bar of moonlight now, and Griswell recognized it. Then he saw Branner's face, and a shriek burst from Griswell's lips. Branner's face was bloodless, corpse-like; gouts of blood dripped darkly down it; his eyes were glassy and set, and blood oozed from the great gash which cleft the crown of his head!" Seeing the gruesome corpse of his friend coming forward, wielding the same gory hatchet which had killed him, Griswell takes off running. But he doesn't know the worst is yet to come... Before it's all over, Griswell has joined up with tough-minded local Sheriff Buckner, who fills him in on the history of the local haunted house. That old plantation manor belonged to the Blassenvilles, a family both prouder and crueller than your average Southern dynasty. Even after the slaves were freed, the Blassenvilles still abused their workers, to the point of public floggings with a horsewhip. As the family declined and almost became extinct, the worst of their clan turned up from the West Indies, Miss Celia. It was Celia's sadistic tortures that finally led to the Blassenvilles' downfall. She mistreated a beautiful mulatto maid named Joan so badly that the girl went to the local voodoo practitioner, an ancient houngan named Jacob Blount. Questioned by Buckner and Griswell, the ninety-year-old Jacob reluctantly admits that, yes he did indeed make a potion for Celia. This was the infamous Black Brew, which could transform a living woman into a Zuvembie. A What? Well, we all know what zombies are but frankly, Zuvembies are much worse. They are a type of supernatural creature that live indefinitely, can summon darkness to blot out light and which derive great pleasure only from killing people. (Thanks, Jacob, you're a pal!) These monsters can also control the corpses of their victims for a while, so Zuvembies can make zombies of their own to command. Buckner is pretty sure that what is lurking in the dilapidated Blassenville house is the Zuvembie which was once the abused servant Joan, who took the forbidden potion and sacrificed her humanity to get revenge on her tormentors. Dragging the unenthusiastic Griswell along, Buckner loads his pistol and heads back to the house. The pigeons are there again, and Buckner remarks, "They say the pigeons are the souls of the Blassenvilles, let out of hell at sunset." As much as I enjoyed this story, the phrase "like a pigeon out of hell" just doesn't have the ring to it that familiar "bat" phrase does. But even as the two apprehensive men wait for nightfall, they don't realize that the full truth has not been revealed yet. The story has a jarring last line, one of those unexpected revelations that make a frightening story even worse as you realize what was really going on all this time. There are some interesting undertones to the yarn. It's no surprise to pulp fans that plenty of racially offensive terms are tossed around. The word "nigger" is used so often and so casually that it seems clear the characters have no idea anyone could possibly object to it, and the author didn't think so either. Now, Robert E. Howard was born and raised in Texas in the first decades of the 20th Century, and although he had a lot of strong feelings about Southern culture and history, he doesn't seem to have kept many illusions about its less idealized reality. Griswell (a New Englander) reflects, "He had thought of the South as a sunny, lazy land washed by soft breezes laden with spice and warm blossoms, where life ran tranquilly to the rhythmn of black folk singing in sun-bathed cottonfields. But now he had discovered another, unsuspected side - a dark, brooding, fear-haunted side, and the discovery repelled him."

"The Pit of the Serpent" (Dec 10, 2005) From the July 1929 issue of FIGHT STORIES, this was the first of the Sailor Steve Costigan stories by Robert E Howard. There were to be almost thirty of these in FIGHT STORIES and ACTION STORIES. In addition, ten Costigan stories were slightly rewritten to form the Dennis Dorgan series (of which only one appeared in MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE before the darn rag folded, such were the misfortunes of writing for the pulps). Now the sailor with the scarred knuckles and careless way of using them was called Steve Costigan but he is not at all the same character as the Stephen Costigan who was the hero of the novel SKULL-FACE. (It's like the way the football star Jim Brown should not be confused with the singer James Brown.) Sometimes I think Bob Howard got names stuck in his head and felt he had to use them three or four times before he got his money's worth out of them.... all those O'Briens and Buckners and Kirbys and O'Donnells. The Steve Costigan (and Dennis Dorgan) series is a lot of fun as long as you don't read more than a few at a clip, a certain repetition being evident. These stories are told in the first person by an uneducated but often poetic Able-Bodied Seaman, not terribly perceptive about people but as ferocious a fighter as a wolverine on angel dust. They seem to be mostly wandering the oceans on their respective ships (Costigan on THE SEA GIRL and Dorgan on THE PYTHON), accompanied by their bloodthirsty white bulldogs (Mike and Spike, they look alike). Every chance they get, Costigan and Dorgan go ashore to get befuddled with booze and get into brawls. Since these guys look rather like gorillas which have been cleaned up a bit, and are able to both survive and hand out enormous physical abuse, they make most of their money in illegal fights staged in waterfront dives. It's a good life. To me, the most enjoyable aspect of these stories is the slapstick nature of both the violence and the situations. These guys live in a Jack Kirby world where men whale away at each other without much provocation, and all the broken bones, busted noses and cerebral hemorraghes are all taken in stride. The way Costigan and Dorgan relate their atrocities is hilarious; you don't know if they're exaggerating or just relating things they way they remember it through the haze of all those concussions. Actually, "The Pit of the Serpent" has less of the burlesque effect than the later stories would. (By the time we get to the Dorgan stories, it's an almost innocent fantasy of huge brutes beating up entire crowds.) This first exploit is much more a straightforward boxing story. Most of the wordage is concerned with detailing the blow-by-blow account of Steve Costigan slugging it out bare-knuckled with a tricky opponent called Bat Slade ("champion box fighter of THE DAUNTLESS"). This match takes place in Manila, in a pit dug seven feet deep in the floor of an abandoned mansion (the mad Spaniard who had lived in the house had once staged snake fights there, hence "the pit of the serpent"... serpent also referring to the slippery and unprincipled opponent Costigan is trading blows with.) The action is less over the top than it would later become, less colorful and also more sketchily described. (But then, Bob Howard was only twenty-two or so when he wrote this and had a lot of refining his style ahead). It reads almost like a straightforward account of a genuine match. Howard was wildly enthusiastic about boxing, his letters mentioning his many sparring bouts with friends and his following the careers of famous fighters. This particular story doesn't quite showcase what Howard would develop in a sort of porn-violence, where he went into fascinated detail about the pain and damage his heroes gave and received. But there are early touches of it ("My fist just cleared the top of his skull and crashed against the concrete wall. I heard the bones shatter and a dark tide of agony surged up my arm, which dropped helpless at my side.") As usual, there is a opening and closing frame around the action, this time involving a beautiful young thing named Raquel La Costa (you can tell she's a furriner because she pronounces "th" as "z"), whom Slade and Costigan have decided will spend time with the winner of the bout. She herself might not agree with this plan, but once the testosterone starts to gush, a fight is inevitable. Every now and then, a hint of Howard's rather blunt humor emerges to give the carnage some charm ("They claimed that the old man had a knuckle-duster on his right, which is ridiculous and a dirty lie. He had it on his left.") Without the funny asides, though, I don't think I'd enjoy the Costigan stories as much as Howard's other series. The Sailor Steve Costigan stories have been collected in the book WATERFRONT FISTS (available from Wildside Press), although I was working from the 1976 Zebra THE BOOK OF ROBERT E. HOWARD (Volume 1). Dorgan's saga is in the 1975 Zebra book THE INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES OF DENNIS DORGAN (which, with its Jeff Jones illustration of a suit of Asian armor with a snake crawling down is a shamelessly misleading cover).

"She Devil" (Sep 11, 2005) Man, I would love to see this as a half-hour episode of a new TV series, TALES OF WILD BILL. The phone lines would be glowing red at the surge of protesting calls, the darn thing is so Incorrect (in a fun way). At one point, the hero's plan is to be "headin' for the Solomons for a load of niggers for Queensland!" I think he's the first pulp hero I've noticed indulging in actual slave-trading. "She Devil" first appeared in the April 1936 issue of SPICY ADVENTURE STORIES, the first of the five Will Bill Clanton epics by Robert E Howard. (They were published under the byline "Sam Walser.") Clanton is visually identical to most of Howard's heroes, "a broad-shouldered, clean-waisted, heavy-armed man with wetly plastered black hair, blue eyes that blazed with the joy of mayhem and lips that grinned savagely."Of course, he's also deeply tanned and I imagine at some point, we'll find out his face is scarred. I'm certain he's an American of Irish descent, and probably from Texas, too. Like Steve Costigan and Dennis Dorgan (who were originally the same character, after all), Clanton is a sailor who operates in the Pacific. He's notorious enough ("She had heard of him; who in the South Seas had not? A wild adventurer roaring on a turbulent career that included everything from pearl-diving to piracy, he was a man at least...."). But unlike, Costigan and Dorgan, who were good-hearted simple-minded brutes relating their misadventures in the first person, Clanton is much more a straightforward thug. Even though his saga appears in one of the "Spicy" pulps, he doesn't get to fondle any naked breasts or engage in actual sex between paragraphs (although he does tell the heroine that he understands she comes along with the ship he's taken over, so "I want to see you in the cap'n's cabin, right away!"). Clanton is kind of a generic Howard protagonist. "She Devil" is just as much the story of the luscious Irish-Spanish vixen Raquel O'Shane, who is quite a handful however you look at her. Originally a "dancer" at a Water Street honky-tonk on the Barbary Coast, she was on the run from the police after "knifin' a Wop" and begged to be taken aboard the ship SAUCY WENCH for refuge. Her relationship with the beefy red-haired simian Captain Harrigan seems made up mostly of furious screaming matches and temper tantrums, and all the implied beatings haven't begun to tame her. She can take it and dish it out right back at him. As the story starts, she throws the captain's treasure map out of the porthole during one of their deafening conversations, going just that one step too far this time. Before she can meet her demise, everything is interrupted by the uninvited arrival of Wild Bill Clanton. He had been thrown off another ship, set adrift in a leaking lifeboat and had come aboard just in time to avoid drowning. He pauses in the water because a shark attacks and "he kicked its brains out or bit it in the neck, or done something atrocious to it." Immediately, he pounces on the first mate (they have a long-standing grudge) and they proceed to pound each other like Popeye and Bluto. They don't quite produce the swirling "fight cloud" from which heads and fists emerge at times, but they come close. Howard really seems more interested in the fights than the sex. His "Spicy" tales include nudity and caresses and hot burning toe-curling kisses, but Howard's main impulse is to spend his creative energy on the men whaling each other into intensive care. Some of his boxing stories dwell so much and so happily on the extreme damage the hero endures that it seems a bit perverse. (Sometimes, I wonder if Bob Howard would have liked being around in the post World War II years, when the biker gangs started appearing. The actual experience of surviving a few drunken beatings from big tough guys might have been a lot less rewarding than he imagined.) After thrashing the first mate, Clanton saves himself from being tossed back in the Pacific by calmly announcing he knows where the island lies which was on the now-lost map. Supposedly, a barrel of ambergris is hidden there, and the captain can't afford to pass a chance on collecting the fortune that whale-intestine product (*ack*) represents. Of course, Clanton has never actually heard of such an island... Before too many paragraphs have rushed by, Clanton has guzzled down the captain's booze, won over the affection (or lust, at least) of Raquel and managed to run the ship aground on an island. As he and the She Devil are racing for their lives from the enraged crew, still more difficulties arise; the island is inhabited by the cannibal Kanakas. Despite all his superior fighting skill and courage, Clanton is overwhelmed. He and Raquel are tortured horribly, killed and eaten by the Kanakas. Heh, just seeing if you're paying attention. That would be an unexpected plot twist, though. As in other Howard stories, the hero has two different ferocious groups chasing him, and it'll take some cunning and quick footwork to get out of this pickle. Nearly everything Robert E Howard wrote has been reprinted somewhere or other, in different degrees of accessibility. All the Wild Bill Clanton stories were collected in a 1983 Ace paperback titled SHE-DEVIL. I'm not much for pristine quality, or mint condition in my books, since they usually end in a back pocket or under the seat of my car anyway.... finding a used copy at a reasonable price shouldn't be that difficult today.

"The Thunder-Rider" Unpublished during Howard's lifetime (it can be found in the collection MARCHERS OF VALHALLA and the more recent THE BLACK STRANGER), this tells of John Garfield, a modern, college-educated Comanche who works in an office building but who has increasing restlessness and violent urges (which he blames on his ancestry). Before he can wig out and go on a killing spree, he turns for help to a shrivelled old medicine man. This wise elder puts him through a grueling Sun Dance-type ritual which gives him the ability to relive his previous incarnations and so find a vicarious outlet for his present-day violent urges. I would guess that this story was written by Howard around the same time he was whipping out the James Allison tales. He only sold one of these, "The Valley of the Worm" to WEIRD TALES but the premise of them all is similar. Allison is a young Texan who lost a leg at an early age and is slowly dying of some unspecified illness. (Post-Traumatic Bitter Speeches would be my diagnosis.) Allison finds comfort in his visions of earlier lives as well. The difference is that Allison's previous incarnations ranged all over the antedeluvian world, while the Comanche's were limited to those of his immediate ancestors in the Old West (so his stories might be a bit more limited in possible scope.) But in "Marchers of Valhalla", one of the better Allison stories, Howard introduces us to a sinister pre-Toltec civilization that flourished ages ago in "Old Texas"... that is, part of what is the modern state but which slid off into the Gulf of Mexico in a disaster comparable to Atlantis or Mu sinking. I love these concepts, they offer so many possibilities for a writer with Howard's love of fabulous ancient lands and the lore of the Southwest. We meet a similar (and equally ominous) lost race in "The Thunder-Rider." Okay, so we open with John Garfield, seemingly successful and respected in his career (not a screen star, by the way) but troubled by increasingly bloodthirsty thoughts and dreams of the great plains. ("My mind began to turn red. The shadow of a dripping tomahawk began to take shape, to hover over me.") Like many other Howard protagonists (such as Esau Cairn of ALMURIC), Garfield blames his murderous impulses and sudden rages on his ancestry smoldering just under the surface. (I suspect this might be similar to Howard explaining away his own deep-seated anger and quasi-paranoia by claiming it's just the black Irish blood bubbling away, not his fault at all.) Not wishing to go berserk and end up doing the rope dance, Garfield turns for help to a withered old shaman called Eagle Feather, who lives alone in the mountains; and Eagle Feather offers him release through a brutal ceremony which frees Garfield's ancestral memories so he can experience them in a cathartic way. Surviving the ritual, Garfield finds himself now to be "Iron Heart, the Scalp-Taker, the Avenger, the Thunder-Rider." He's a Comanche warhawk back around 1575, roaming the Southwest in constant battles with apparently every other tribe in the area. Being chased by a horde of Tonkewa cannibals and their Wichita allies, Iron Heart's warparty rides smack into a group of Apaches! Don't you hate it when that happens? Only five of Iron Heart's squad survive, drifting with empty quivers and rumbling stomachs across an unseen Line into the Darkening Land of legend. Here things get seriously creepy in a hurry. This silent, misty realm contains the undecayed bodies of the giant Terrible People; there's a dozen Pawnees in warpaint led by Conchita, a vicious Spanish woman raised among the Indians; and then there are the people of the Feathered Serpent. As it turns out, these are Pueblo Indians who were enslaved by a sorcerer calling himself Tezcatlipoca. He was from "an ancient, ancient kingdom which had been declining even before the barbaric Toltecs wandered into it" and had come north to set up his own little realm. As the surviving Comanches are taken away one by one to face unbearable tortures, Iron Heart's only hope of escape is to join forces with Conchita... but she hates him with a vengeance, too. Doesn't look good. There are many surprising aspects to this story. With all the well-founded racism charges that have been laid against his writing, Howard shows complete identification with both the modern John Garfield and the long-gone Thunder-Rider. Howard thought the Indian nations, like the African tribes, to be hopelessly savage and bloodthirsty... however, to him, this was a good thing and so he always had a grudging admiration for the various non-white opponents his Aryan heroes fought. (Especially the Picts.) "The Thunder-Rider" is packed with information about the Indians that only listening to old tales and dedicated research could produce. Howard travelled all over Texas, visiting historical sites and scenes of battles. It's interesting too that Howard occasionally admits that the civilized societies he so heavily scorns did not invent vice and that savages were not completely noble paragons. "Barbarism has its vices, its sophistries, no less than civilization.. If our virtues were unspoiled as a newborn tiger cub, our sins were older than Nineveh." But I don't know how today's readers would take to the scene where Iron Heart beats a woman so thoroughly that the fiery spirit goes out of her and she meekly follows him. It would be okay if she whaled the tar out of him to get him in line, of course, that would be "empowering." "The Thunder-Rider" seems to have touched something in Howard and the poetry always in his writing is strong here ("...always a bronzed, naked warrior against a background of storm and cloud and fire and thunder, riding like a centaur, with war-bonnet streaming and and the lurid light flashing on the point of a lifted lance.") I would have liked to see Howard write more stories set in the days before the Europeans arrived. Today, when we are so saturated with visualizations of Native Americans as pure, gentle "free spirits", singing to little birdies by the waterfall and living as Nature planned, it's refreshing to be reminded that the real picture was (as always) more complex and many-sided. Long before the wagon trains were even built, Utes and Sioux and Crow were waging large-scale wars against each other, and many nations were wiped out long before the pioneers arrived to record their names (and also getting a chance to mow them down themselves).

SKULL-FACE (Dec 20, 2001) From 1929, this appeared as a serial in WEIRD TALES for October, November and December. It's essentially a Robert E Howard version of a Fu Manchu story. Now, at that time, there had been no new book about the genuine Devil Doctor since 1917, so Howard wasn't exactly competing with Sax Rohmer for the audience but the similarities are so thorough that it wouldn't take much to re-write SKULL-FACE as a genuine Fu Manchu novel.   We have John Gordon, a lean, bronzed Scotland Yard inspector with a roving commission. Stand him alongside Sir Denis Nayland Smith and you'd have to wait until Smith tugged at his left ear to pick him out. Instead of the love-smitten and slightly dim Dr Petrie, the story is narrated by Stephen Costigan-- a real Howard hero. Costigan is an American of Irish descent, abnormally strong and prone to violence, over-reacting to almost everything. First becoming involved with the villain's schemes through his hasish addiction (our hero seems to reside in a London opium den), Costigan is given an elixir that frees him of his drug habit but which also binds him to the fiend's service, because now he can't survive without the serum.  The Howard touch shows as the elixir temporarily stimulates its user to heightened awareness and superhuman strength. At a crucial moment, when everything is at stake, Costigan drinks a huge dose of the stuff and turns into a door-smashing neck-breaking monster that sweeps all obstacles aside. Howard's heroes don't usually rely on subtle strategy or contingency plans-- swift and devastating action is their way.   As an aside, it seems clear that Howard had not the vaguest clue about hard drugs. The way he describes hashish hallucinations is just colorfully vague gibberish, and it seems odd that a sword-wielding assassin would load up on heroin (of all things) to become ready to fight.   The saving grace of the story is the villain, Skull-Face himself, who goes beyond even the origins which Sax Rohmer gave to Fu Manchu. The sorceror Kathulos is actually a living mummy from Atlantis, released from his undead slumber beneath the ocean as his coffin floated to the surface. Like the Devil Doctor, Kathulos is working to unite all the third world nations to overthrow the empires of Europe and the United States, but he has something even worse as his ultimate goal. "Under the green seas they lie, the ancient masters, in their lacquered cases, dead as men reckon death, but only sleeping." Yes, the horrible wizard intends to resurrect the ancient Atlanteans and put the modern world under their control. EEK!  The image of the undead sleeping horrors, seaweed growing on their caskets, in the dark cold city at the bottom of the ocean clearly owes a lot to Robert E Howard's penpal and WEIRD TALES colleague, H.P. Lovecraft. I don't know if the name 'Kathulos' is meant to remind the reader of 'Cthulhu' but it certainly does. The undertones of horror as our heroes explore secret tunnels that extend under London like a black honeycomb are genuinely unsettling.  There's a certain amount of understated racism in the story, not just in the basic premise of all the world's races getting together to overthrow the white nations (not entirely impossible, as empires do rise and fall), but in a few remarks like the observation that most of the black people in London are voodoo worshippers at heart-- or that of "Orientals" only Jews are more despised than Egyptians. Sheesh. Still, as offensive as the comments sound, I would never want to see published books re-written to suit current sensibilities. You start doing that, and before you know it, "Romeo and Juliet" has a happy ending and Captain Ahab becomes friends with Moby Dick. Maybe a cautionary foreword to any future reprints would help prepare readers.  Howard also used the name 'Stephen Costigan' for his fighting sailor stories, but they were sometimes renamed as "Dennis Dorgan', and there was a sequel to SKULL-FACE where Stephen Costigan became Steve Harrison and Kathulos was Erlik Khan...but I'm getting loopy just trying to keep it straight.

THE VULTURES OF WHAPETON (May 6, 2003) From the December 1936 issue of SMASHING NOVELS MAGAZINE, this was actually written in 1934. In the final years of his short life, Robert E. Howard was turning away from fantasy toward straight Westerns, which had more markets at the time and at which he could have made a good living. This is an example of what he might have become famous for if he had lived to write for another thirty years and his earlier Conan and Solomon Kane stories had become obscured by decades of Western books.   (As an aside, the 1976 Zebra paperback has the most shamelessly misleading cover art and blurbs I have seen in quite some time. A nice Jeff Jones painting of a skeleton on a rearing horse, a vulture perched on one bony arm, the phrase "fantasy/adventure by the creator of CONAN " in bigger letters than the title or the authors name, and a blurb on the back which trickily makes you think you're buying a supernatural epic... feh! The stories are good enough that they don't need false presentation.)  THE VULTURES OF WHAPETON has a fairly standard genre plot. A tough gunfighter is brought in to clean up a lawless town, and mayhem breaks loose. What gives this short book its punch is the energy and intensity that Howard brought to all his writing. There's seldom anything false or sophisticated about the man's work; you often feel he would have liked to throw the typewriter aside and start shooting people in the story himself, he got so obviously worked up.  A gang of outlaws calling themselves the Vultures have been preying on the gold rush town of Whapeton Gulch, killing and robbing anyone who tries to leave the area with gold. The reign of terror hasn't been opposed by the vigilante reactions you might expect from the miners because greed for the gold has kept them from organizing and the secret leader of the Vultures has gathered a fortune to be hauled away at the right time. The sheriff, John Middleton, has been losing his deputies at a brisk rate to the Vultures' ambushes and he finally hires Steve Corcoran, a Texan gunman, to clean things up. It's not really much of a surprise that Middleton himself is the Vulture chief, that he has hired the gunslinger to help him thin out the Vultures in preparation for the getaway with the loot, and that much carnage is in store. What is unexpected is the tough Corcoran has his chivalrous instincts revived by a trusting dancehall gal named Glory and he starts to get heroic impulses.    Howard was a student of Western lore and knew a lot about genuine outlaws like John Wesley Hardin and their ways. "A real gunfighter was not merely a man whose eye was truer, whose muscles were quicker than other men; he was a practical psychologist, a srudent of human nature, whose life depended on the correctness of his conclusions." Howard's skill at describing fights extended to gunplay. He really conveys the split second bursts of action as one man goes for his gun and the other is already sending a bullet his way. The colorful desriptions and vivid language work just as well for gunplay as they did for swordfights in the earlier stories.  Do I even need to describe what Corcoran looks like? Tall, wide shouldered, slim hipped, black hair and furious blue eyes, he looks pretty much like nine out of ten Howard heroes, all idealized versions of himself. We do learn that Texas produces the deadliest gunfighters because it was "that hot, turbulent country where racial traits met and clashed, and the traditions of the Old South mingled with those of the untamed West." So watch it.  One odd detail is that Corcoran figures Glory is safe from the Vultures because "the thought of them actually harming her never entered his mind. He came from a country where not even the worst of scoundrels would ever dream of hurting a woman." This is emphasized several times to point out how a woman's honor and safety were inviolate. Sadly, the gunfighter learns better but it's strange how, as cynical and bloodthirsty all the characters in the story are, that Howard and his hero had such an idealistic illusion left. The story ends with one of the most haunting lines Howard wrote, as the Texas gunslinger rides away, empty handed and miserable, from the battling town. "... But the night was full of haunting shadows, and within him grew a strange pain, like a revelation; perhaps it was his soul, at last awakening."