Category Archives: REH

Solomon Kane and vampires

03 Friday May 2019

Posted by in Podcasts etc., REH

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I take no notice of ‘Awards’ these days, literary or otherwise, for the obvious reasons. But I’ll make an exception for the annual Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards.

Perusing the nominations led me to the short appreciation of an R. E. Howard vampire story, “Nosferatu Necronomica – Solomon Kane in the Hills of the Dead”.

This in turn led me to discover that Tantor has kindly given away a free and complete and unabridged reading of the same story, from their paid audiobook The Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane, in .MP3 download.

Archive.org also has the free Weird Tales, August 1930, with “Hills of the Dead” in full.

New: The Dark Man, Vol 9

20 Saturday Apr 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New books, REH, Scholarly works

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A new edition of The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Fiction Studies Vol. 9 (Feb 2019), now in Kindle on Amazon.

Of interest to Lovecraftian scholars is…

* “The Outside Scholar: Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Scholarly Identity. Part Two: A Complex and Baffling Question”, by Karen Joan Kohoutek.

This follows Part One in The Dark Man Vol. 8, No. 1 (2015), also in Kindle ebook format.

I also note an article in The Dark Man that I had overlooked, an article to be found in the Vol 7. No. 1 (December 2012) issue. This volume is not on Amazon in ebook, so far as I can tell, but is in ebook as an ePub from Lulu.com. The article is…

* “I ‘n’ I a-Liberate Zimbabwe: Motifs of Africa and Freedom in Howard’s The Grisly Horror”, by Patrick R. Burger.

This seems likely to be of interest to those writing about Lovecraft’s interest in and use of Zimbabwe (the remarkable hilltop fortification, not the nation).

New: Zothique #2

18 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

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Zothique #2 from Italy. 192 pages in Italian. Here’s the translated gist re: the non-fiction and new translations…

This second issue of Zothique begins with a theoretical essay on the horror fiction, but the highlight is a large and exclusive Dossier that takes stock of the writer Ambrose Bierce, of which five unpublished weird stories are also presented in Italian, as well as bibliographic guides and essays on this author and his stories.

We then move on to the Belgian Thomas Owen, one of ‘the fathers of the fantastic’, and after an introductory essay we present four of his stories which step between the surreal and the fantastic, also in first Italian translation.

Also the first part of a long essay dedicated to the poetry of Robert E. Howard.

New book: Cowboy Courage

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

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Here’s a new book that may be of interest to R.E. Howard scholars, who might want to see how well this author’s framework fits with Howard’s stories and the wider western pulp tradition. Cowboy Courage: Westerns and the Portrayal of Bravery examines the three types of bravery and courage to be found in the U.S. screen westerns made from 1946 to about 1964.

Judging by the free-sample introduction, the book is written by someone old enough to remember the original reception of the big screen westerns. He’s a psychologist but he doesn’t seem in thrall to the frameworks of the Jung/Freud psychoanalysis era, or mired in the tar-pits of modern leftist politics.

Preface
Introduction
1. The Quality of Courage
2. Redemption
3. Love, Friendship and Bonds to the Community
4. Justice
5. Temperance
6. Growing Up and Growing Old
7. Being Authentic
8. The Revisionist Western
9. Lonesome Dove
Conclusion
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Have a cow…

31 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Odd scratchings, REH, Scholarly works

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Lovecraft had cats. Robert E. Howard had a cow…

“Yes, there was a cow. I saw the critter. Her name was Delhi, and hump shouldered to suggest Indian blood—Asian-Indian, I mean.” — E. Hoffmann Price to L. Sprague de Camp, 11th Feb 1977.

Bobby Derie snaps on the rubber gloves, and investigates in depth.

I can add that Lovecraft also had a cow. Apparently it was kept by his grandfather on the vacant lot which lay directly west of the Phillips mansion, when Lovecraft was a young boy…

… the family cow — a beloved possession reminiscent of the prehistoric Greene days ere my grandfather became an urban dweller.” (letter to Kleiner)

From Howard to Barlow

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

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Yesterday Antiques & The Arts Weekly perused the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair 2019, and noted…

“Richard Meli, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., dealer […] Here was a typed manuscript by Conan creator Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) [for sale…] inscribed “To R.H. Barlow with the best wishes of Robert E. Howard.”

New Book: Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others

24 Sunday Mar 2019

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A new book from Bobby Derie, Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others, on pre-order now. Hippocampus has the full contents list. Lots of fascinating new essays, many from Bobby’s excellent blog, on R.E. Howard and also the wider Lovecraft Circle. Also deeper historical context such as an essay on “Fan Mail: Prohibition in ‘The Souk'”. Prohibition was the worthy but impractical and thus ill-fated U.S. ban on liquor (a ban Lovecraft approved of), and ‘The Souk’ was the letters page of the Weird Tales ‘clone’ magazine Oriental Stories, also edited by Farnsworth Wright.

Tolkien and Howard

23 Saturday Mar 2019

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DMR asks “Was Tolkien a Robert E. Howard Fan?” and digs out the slim evidence. It all boils down to what L. Sprague de Camp remembered in 1983 of a snatch of conversation had with Tolkien in a garage in 1967, so it’s pretty slim as evidence goes.

One can also find certain elements that are a good fit. I remember on my complete listen-through of Howard’s Conan in audiobook, a couple of years ago now, that I thought there were about four or five good points of close comparison between one of the really long Conan stories (the novel?) and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s personal reading habits did go in for the more popular easy-to-read end of things, presumably because he spent so much time professionally with more ponderous material. The publication dates / place of publication / date of composition dates all fit together nicely, I seem to remember. The ‘action style’ of writing more or less fits, so there could also have been some stylistic inspiration alongside plot-points.

But we shall never know, now, so it didn’t seem worth writing it up.