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…<\/p>\n
* The best two:<\/p>\n
“The Black Stone”<\/p>\n
“The Children of the Night”<\/p>\n
* Lesser two:<\/p>\n
“The Cairn on the Headland”<\/p>\n
“The Thing on the Roof”<\/p>\n
* Two tangential stories:<\/p>\n
“Worms of the Earth” (Generally said to be the best Bran Mak Morn story, with a few Lovecraftian bits and bobs mentioned?)<\/p>\n
“The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Reportedly, only the ending is relevant?)<\/p>\n
All six are available in the audio book form in the collection The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard<\/a><\/em> [on Amazon USA<\/a>], read by veteran audio-book reader Robertson Dean. “The Black Stone” is also available for free<\/a> as a less memorable audio reading.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>; The Valley of the Worm<\/em>; and The Shadow Kingdom<\/em>. From there I went to the UK Sphere King Kull<\/em> collection, Tigers of the Sea<\/em> (Cormac mac Art in the UK paperback), then into the numerous UK Sphere Conan<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I thought I might read R.E. Howard’s six ‘Lovecraft influenced’ stories, for Halloween. As best I can make out from …<\/p>\n