I thought I might read R.E. Howard’s six ‘Lovecraft influenced’ stories, for Halloween. As best I can make out from twenty minutes of cursory research, the R.E. Howard Lovecraftian-ish tales are…
* The best two:
“The Black Stone”
“The Children of the Night”
* Lesser two:
“The Cairn on the Headland”
“The Thing on the Roof”
* Two tangential stories:
“Worms of the Earth” (Generally said to be the best Bran Mak Morn story, with a few Lovecraftian bits and bobs mentioned?)
“The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Reportedly, only the ending is relevant?)
All six are available in the audio book form in the collection The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard [on Amazon USA], read by veteran audio-book reader Robertson Dean. “The Black Stone” is also available for free as a less memorable audio reading.
It’s been quite a long time since I read Howard’s Conan et al, and it’ll be interesting to see what the original Howard experience is like in polished audio-book form. I read Howard as a boy, at about the same time I first read Lovecraft, via the UK Panther paperback collections: Skull-face; The Valley of the Worm; and The Shadow Kingdom. From there I went to the UK Sphere King Kull collection, Tigers of the Sea (Cormac mac Art in the UK paperback), then into the numerous UK Sphere Conan paperbacks (one or two of which were quite rare at that time, and it was difficult to gather a full set) and the Solomon Kane stories (possibly via a tatty import copy of the U.S. Centaur Books paperback). More recently I read one of his werewolf stories, but that’s been it until now.
There are actually two different versions of “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” — both are good, however.
The results:
* “The Black Stone” (1931): Somewhat predictable. A bit cliched now. But vivid, brisk, and quite fun. The best parts are: the bibliophiliac preamble; the beautifully described and hair-raising walk through the night woods; the deft stagecraft used to present a number of minor and off-stage characters; and the neat linkage with supposed historical ‘facts’ toward the end.
* “The Children of the Night” (1931): A delicious bibliophilic opening. Lovecraft’s personality appears to have been split fictionally here. Between John Conrad who is an occult book collector/savant, and Ketrick. Ketrick has a facial birth defect plus…
The learned discussions among the characters brings up a mention of Boaz’s skull plasticity surveys (for more on this and Lovecraft, see my book Walking with Cthulhu, p.132). Howard has a character state…
…which suggests Lovecraft would — by reading “The Children of the Night” — have been at least nominally made aware of this aspect of Boas’s work, even if he didn’t also hear of it in detail during the first year of the Howard-Lovecraft correspondence.
The atmosphere of the gentlemanly study evaporates immediately on entering a Conan-like flashback episode. The vigorous swordplay is very gripping, but the adversaries fail to convince. For that reason they also fail to evoke any real frisson of horror.
A section shortly before the end becomes rather convoluted, since it has to expound a hazy race migration theory — yet Howard has left himself only one narrator for this, and has thrown overboard the learned study setting which might have made it more palatable.
Overall, not bad — but the deliciously Lovecraftian opening isn’t sustained.
* “The Cairn on the Headland” (1933): Rather poor. Set in Ireland, the opening rather unfortunately throws the reader straight into a rant on Howard’s race theories. He does manage to set the scene, but he also telegraphs a hint of the ending. A story that’s Lovecraftian only in the sense that it borrows an idea or two from “The Hound”, and that the ending might vaguely resemble “The Call of Cthulhu”. I imagine Lovecraft would have handled and structured it very differently. Hard to believe this was written a year after “Worms of the Earth”. He must have just been gunning the typewriter for the money.
* “The Thing on the Roof” (1932): Quite Lovecraftian, and one could almost imagine that this is a lesser Lovecraft story. Brisk and short. Enjoyable partly because there’s another bibliophiliac start, which this time is eased naturally into the body of the story. There are several enjoyable little links made to Howard’s earlier story “The Black Stone”. But as with “Children of the Night”, the unconvincing nature of the creature disappoints and so fails to horrify. A lot of the dialogue also creaks, at least in the first half.
* “Worms of the Earth” (1932): The last and best Bran Mak Morn story. Very finely written, and beautifully constructed. Linked tangentially to both “The Black Stone” and “The Children of the Night”. The creatures of the latter story make a far more convincing appearance here. The Lovecraftian elements, however, are incredibly slight. Basically these are: a curse that refers to “Black gods of R’lyeh”; the name Dagons Mere [a lake]; and the name Dagon’s Barrow [a mound, covered with “fungoid” grass].