I spotted a scholarly ebook that’s new to me, Brian Leno’s Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation (2015). The title essay originally appeared in The Cimmerian, noting some of the concepts and ideas that Robert E. Howard absorbed during his Lovecraft correspondence, and then deftly wove into his fiction. It goes on to suggest that Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell” (written late 1934) was a story intended as a semi-satire and one-upmanship of HPL’s themes…

“Pigeons From Hell” was surely meant to be Howard’s response to HPL’s claims that New England was the setting for horror. By recalling his earlier exchanges with Lovecraft, he set out to prove that an old southern house, peopled with his distinctly southern imagination, can become much more terrifying than Lovecraft’s New England home in “The Picture in the House,” with its not-so-scary occupant’s ramblings about cannibalism.”

I’m fairly sure I read this essay some years ago, when it was free on The Cimmerian. I thought it broadly plausible — but rather doubted the strong suggestions that Lovecraft would have been ‘offended’ by reading the story. Amused and itchily tickled to occasional laughter, more likely.

I’ll pass on the book’s middle essay, on Howard’s comedic westerns. But the third and last essay has some interest, examining the possible sources of Howard’s “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”. My forthcoming book on some of Tolkien’s earliest sources has led me deep into such northern materials.

According to the blurb for Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation there’s also discussion in the book on “Did he [R.E. Howard] or did he not see the 1933 film King Kong before his death in 1936?”, but I can’t see that on the contents page on Amazon ‘Look Inside’. Presumably it emerges as part of one of the essays?

Also of note, in recent Howard ebooks, is Don Herron’s 630-page The Dark Barbarian That Towers Over All. I see that was released on the cusp of 2014/15. This packages the former essay books The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph — both on Robert E. Howard of course — as a new $5 ebook. For good measure there are also another half dozen or so new essays. It looks promising.