Robert E Howard - Conan and Friends!

[j d worthington]

The Wildside Press set "The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard"? Just what it says on the tin. These are the stories Howard wrote in the weird/supernatural vein (including his heroic fantasies, horror, Lovecraftian pieces, etc.), arranged in their original order of publication. They also use the original magazine texts, rather than corrected texts... which can make a difference in the experience, at times. I don't have the last couple of volumes as of yet, but these may contain the unfinished tales, fragments, etc., as well.

At any rate, as these do contain all his weird works, there is bound to be overlap between them and a number of other collections of his stories as well....

As for Extollager's comment/question... I'd have to look the list over again, but I recall "People of the Black Circle" as being quite impressive... I would agree with Leiber that it could well fit in with some of the minor Elizabethans; there are things about "Rogues in the House" which also put it in that category for me, especially the Cimmerian's reaction to Thak's demise, not to mention the memorable scene where he confronts his former lover's new boyfriend; Howard's word portrait of Conan there is very striking indeed. I would also say "The Tower of the Elephant", despite some flaws, transcends the pulp level quite nicely.

"The Frost Giant's Daughter", for all its brevity and various flaws, has always seemed a very haunting story to me; dreamlike, poetic... yet savage, even brutal in a way, yet still filled with beauty, mystery, and (fittingly) the fragility of a snowflake, yet biting as an arctic wasteland. "Black Colossus", despite a somewhat anticlimactic ending, has much to recommend it, including many a memorable tableau and some lovely writing... and a truly memorable Howardian villain, not to mention being one of the best examples of Howard's ability to conjure up the feeling of truly ancient, forgotten cities hinting at a prehuman past. "A Witch Shall Be Born"... again, a rather anticlimactic final dispatch of the mysterious beastie, but otherwise a very memorable tale; Salome is one of Howard's best female characters, and the use of the epistolary technique during a crucial portion of the narrative is very well done indeed... and, of course, there is always the crucifixion scene with its mirror image at the end of the tale, providing about as grim and bleak an image of a fantasy world as has ever been put on paper.

"Red Nails" wobbles a bit, but is also quite memorable for its weirdness and perversity, as well as touches of Howard's broad humor... and the very darkness of the entire milieu. It also contains some of his strangest characters; and, of course, "Beyond the Black River", which is among the best of the Conan stories. The Hour of the Dragon vacillates between being a fine rip-snortin' adventure yarn and a first-rate atmospheric piece; several of the chapters, including the opening, being of the latter nature; but I'm not sure it is among the best of the Conan tales. And I think HPL may have been right when he thought the Kull stories, rather than the Conan tales, may have represented something of a weird peak for Howard, especially such stories as "The Shadow Kingdom", "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune", "The Skull of Silence", "The Striking of the Gong", and portions of "Delcardes' Cat", as well as the verse "The King and the Oak"... and the combined Kull/Bran Mak Morn tale, "Kings of the Night" deserves mention, too....

 

[dask]

If you're just trying to "flesh out" your collection and not struggling for completeness, stroll on down to your local used bookstore, find the REH section, pick out four or five copies that give you that book lover's rush, scrutinize the TOCs for overlap, and go find yourself the nearest Starbucks. That's my two penny's worth.

 

[Connavar]

I picked up the complete conan chronicles the big black gollancz edition last year. Also got the Wordsworth edition of the Solomon Kane stories. Plus the Wordsworth collection of Howards horror stories. Trying to a good coverage of everything else. Particularly some of the less well known characters he created. Does anyone know what the wildside press collections are like? The contents seem to be quite random and feature a lot of the stuff ive already got.

That Conan complete collection is NOT the right text versions and Del Rey is better versions.

I got Complete Conan chronicles too before i knew it was edited for political correctness reasons the stories of Conan. Del Rey is original weird tales,howard texts.

Del Rey books is the best way to read Conan,Solomon Kane and others. They are not expensive either. They are complete stories and the real words of Howard.

Dont make it complicated than it is. Start with Conan or Kane and then go to wildside press if you want Westerns collections,boxning collections etc

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

The Wandering Star / Del Rey collection is fantastic. Howard's fiction in 11 volumes with wonderful illustrations and essays throughout. I have the Del Rey paperbacks and they're great. I can't recommend them enough.

 

[GOLLUM]

The Wandering Star / Del Rey collection is fantastic. Howard's fiction in 11 volumes with wonderful illustrations and essays throughout. I have the Del Rey paperbacks and they're great. I can't recommend them enough.

Correct weight. The 3 Volume component of the Wandering Star collection is as definitive as you can get for Howard's Conan to my knowledge and a true collector's item. I decided not to go with the hefty price tag at the time but opted for the VG edn which is still pretty good (despite it not including REH's original text in all cases edited as these were prior to publication in Weird Tales) plus ALL of the recent Del Rey collections featuring a significant slice of Howard's oeuvre. I picked up a couple of other Bison edns, covering more of his Boxing tales and other Americana tales...so all in all I have a pretty decent collection of Two-Gun Bob's fiction...

 

[Extollager]

I think HPL may have been right when he thought the Kull stories, rather than the Conan tales, may have represented something of a weird peak for Howard, especially such stories as "The Shadow Kingdom", "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune", "The Skull of Silence", "The Striking of the Gong", and portions of "Delcardes' Cat", as well as the verse "The King and the Oak"... and the combined Kull/Bran Mak Morn tale, "Kings of the Night" deserves mention, too....

I think I may like the Kull stories more than the Conans, too. Offhand, I wonder if REH wasn't more concerned in the Kull stories with the evocation of a strange lost world, while in the Conan stories he is more concerned with putting a hero who is the Man he'd like to be through his paces in a world that can seem rather improvised for the needs of the occasion. What do you folks think?

 

[j d worthington]

I don't think I'd agree with that assessment of Conan's world, which is really quite consistent given Howard's own (quite forgivable) limitations due to youth, time, place, and education. I do think that, in the more fantastic Kull tales, he was perhaps more interested in the weirdness and poetic atmosphere; but other Kull tales (such as "By This Axe I Rule!", "Swords of the Purple Kingdom", etc.) are pure swashbuckling action and intrigue, with absolutely no fantastic element whatsoever, other than the "Pre-Cataclysmic Age" itself.

I think that an excellent example of how Howard captured such a feeling -- even when the scene itself may not be at all fantastic in incident -- is in the second chapter of "The Shadow Kingdom", where Kull is riding back to his palace from his first meeting with Ka-nu. It is nothing more than a description of Kull's impressions during that ride, but the atmosphere it conjures up gives it all the heightened coloring of his poetic imagination at its best:

Clang! clang! clang! sounded the silver hoofs on the broad, moon-flooded streets, but otherwise there was no sound. The age of the city, its incredible antiquity, was almost oppressive to the king; it was as if the great silent buildings laughed at him, noiselessly, with unguessable mockery. And what secrets did they hold?

"You are young," said the palaces and the temples and the shrines, "but we are old. The world was wild with youth when we were reared. You and your tribe shall pass, but we are invincible, indestructible. We towered above a strange world, ere Atlantis and Lemuria rose from the sea; we still shall reign when the green waters sigh for many a restless fathom above the spires of Lemuria and the hills of Atlantis and when the isles of the Western Men are the mountains of a strange land.

"How many kings have we watched ride down these streets before Kull of Atlantis was even a dream in the mind of Ka, bird of Creation? Ride on, Kull of Atlantis; greater shall follow you; greater came before you. They are dust; they are forgotten; we stand; we know; we are. Ride, ride on, Kull of Atlantis; Kull the king, Kull the fool!"

And it seemed to Kull that the clashing hoofs took up the silent refrain to beat it into the night with hollow re-echoing mockery:

"Kull -- the -- king! Kull -- the -- fool!"

Glow, moon; you light a king's way! Gleam, stars; you are torches in the train of an emperor! And clang, silver-shod hoofs; you herald that Kull rides through Valusia.

Ho! Awake, Valusia! It is Kull that rides; Kull the king!

"We have known many kings," said the silent halls of Valusia.

For all that the action is itself a mundane thing (and the writing, at times, shows the youth of the writer), the eeriness and feeling of alienage evoked here is quite powerful, and it is in such passages that Howard made his settings major characters, too... and this goes as well for the Conan tales, where the world he created, however mongrel in many ways, is nonetheless a presence felt throughout the series.

 

[Connavar]

I think I may like the Kull stories more than the Conans, too. Offhand, I wonder if REH wasn't more concerned in the Kull stories with the evocation of a strange lost world, while in the Conan stories he is more concerned with putting a hero who is the Man he'd like to be through his paces in a world that can seem rather improvised for the needs of the occasion. What do you folks think?

That is the opposite of the general view, acclaim for his works. Conan is frankly minor player and its the history, the connected world REH built for him that gets more respect by people who have read the stories. Every story of Conan use that world really well. Without that world Conan would not be popular and important S&S series. He would not have been King in the first story and pirate,rogue,merc in other stories.

Conan was my first Howard stories but im not in awe of him as character,hero anymore but i cant forget the huge world,history he created for Conan. Solomon Kane,El Borak i enjoy more of REH heroes but none of them has the great age,world he created for Conan.

It is Kull who is improvised more like since he was earlier creation before mature Howard who wrote great S&S. I have not read Kull so im not saying anything about those stories.

 

[Extollager]

That is the opposite of the general view, acclaim for his works. Conan is frankly minor player and its the history, the connected world REH built for him that gets more respect by people who have read the stories. Every story of Conan use that world really well.

Thanks, JD and Connavar. My thesis might not hold up very well. I may have been unduly influenced by impressions from the last or just about the last Conan story that I read, "The Slithering Shadow," which is one of the ones with a lost city conveniently plopped down where Conan and his current female companion can have an adventure. Another thing that contributes to the "improvised" or "ad hoc" impression of the Conan stories was Howard's practice therein of using place names with pre-existing associations, and monster names of the "Thag," "Thok" type that seem tossed off. I don't think he did this sort of thing so much in the Kull stories, did he? So you can remember some of the stories as having elements seemingly quickly put in, in order to provide background for the plot Howard wants to work with and the action scenes that he wants to write up. But you're right about REH having taken some care to develop at least some of the elements of the Hyborian world.

 

[Connavar]

Thanks, JD and Connavar. My thesis might not hold up very well. I may have been unduly influenced by impressions from the last or just about the last Conan story that I read, "The Slithering Shadow," which is one of the ones with a lost city conveniently plopped down where Conan and his current female companion can have an adventure. Another thing that contributes to the "improvised" or "ad hoc" impression of the Conan stories was Howard's practice therein of using place names with pre-existing associations, and monster names of the "Thag," "Thok" type that seem tossed off. I don't think he did this sort of thing so much in the Kull stories, did he? So you can remember some of the stories as having elements seemingly quickly put in, in order to provide background for the plot Howard wants to work with and the action scenes that he wants to write up. But you're right about REH having taken some care to develop at least some of the elements of the Hyborian world.

What you mention is the flaw of pulp era fiction. Howard like many other writers in weird tales used lost civilisation tropes, supernatural monsters,elements he like to re-use. The thrilling stereotypes people wanted to read. There is the same thing in Solomon Kane, Brak Mak Morn and all his other S&S.

That practice is the same in Kull i assume allthough JD can answer that unlike me who havent read that series yet. I assume the practice is there too because its true of 90% of his fantastic stories. Its something you remember only in his weaker stories. I can agree with you about this in weaker Conan stories.

 

[Extollager]

That practice is the same in Kull i assume allthough JD can answer that unlike me who havent read that series yet. I assume the practice is there too because its true of 90% of his fantastic stories. Its something you remember only in his weaker stories. I can agree with you about this in weaker Conan stories.

Herewith a public apology, ar at least caveat lector, -- especially to J. D. Worthington.

I have too often, at Chrons, offered critical opinions based on memories of stories that I haven't read for quite a while. I've made comments on Lovecraft, Borges, and even Howard that probably should have been made more tentatively. Yes, this is a place for fans of sf and fantasy to chat, not a scholarly forum, but too often I have insinuated slipshod writing when my own argument was a bit slipshod. I will try to bracket my opinions, when they are based on old impressions, with a bit more qualification.

I do think that there's a slipshod quality in some of Howard's writing and that he isn't held accountable for it sometimes. In fact, I identify with him as a writer: I well remember how, when I was reading him for the first time in my teens, I too cranked out a lot of fantasy (for an obscure fanzine called Endeavor, mostly), and especially how, even earlier, I drew my own comics -- and was often hurrying on to write or draw the next story without taking much care of the one at hand! And indeed I have a soft spot in my heart for writers like Sir Walter Scott, who I believe said of one of his novels something like "It isn't very good, but there are good things in it." Then also I tend to evaluate fantasists like Howard by contrast with the standard of the vest imaginary world writing -- especially Tolkien, who worked out his Middle-earth history and geography with an astonishing degree of integrity and thereby set the bar for everyone else. But to write such fantasy wasn't in accordance with Howard's personality, and perhaps at times we can sit back and enjoy the headlong, if even slapdash, quality of his work.

In other words I think I shall reread me some Howard.

 

[j d worthington]

First: "The Slithering Shadow" is, if memory serves, one of those examples of Howard somewhat cynically aiming for audience expectations; this is especially true in the female-on-female sadomasochistic aspects of that tale. On the other hand, it does have some memorable moments... but as a whole, your assessment is pretty much right on. (Even if Frazetta did choose a scene from it for his artwork.)

Yes, Howard could indeed be rather slipshod at times, given that he was writing madly to just stay afloat. However, he did, when possible, take more pains with his writing than he is usually given credit for; something we can see from different drafts of his work. This impression is, in part, of his own making, as he would make claims that he often wrote spontaneously and without a great deal of editing or revision. His reasons for that are many and complex, but in this at least he wasn't being entirely honest about his writing practices.

The overuse of such limited "monster names" as Thok, Thag, etc., was a shortcoming of Howard, as was his nomenclature in other respects. Both HPL and EHP argued and argued with him about the wisdom of using place (and character) names such as Extollager mentions, names from history with pre-existing associations; but Howard was stubborn on this count, and so we have the hodge-podge we have today. It is easy for the reader with limited historical associations to deal with, but can definitely irk those who do have such in their minds.

On the Kull... no, he didn't really overuse the abandoned ancient cities, nor such monsters; largely because the bulk of the Kull tales take place in and around Valusia itself. The few which occur elsewhere (save for the fragment which has usually been printed as "Exile of Atlantis") sometimes employ journeys (as in "Riders Beyond the Sunrise") and encounters with other civilizations, but he doesn't go into much detail about them, as Kull is passing through.

 

[Extollager]

On the Kull... no, he didn't really overuse the abandoned ancient cities, nor such monsters; largely because the bulk of the Kull tales take place in and around Valusia itself. The few which occur elsewhere (save for the fragment which has usually been printed as "Exile of Atlantis") sometimes employ journeys (as in "Riders Beyond the Sunrise") and encounters with other civilizations, but he doesn't go into much detail about them, as Kull is passing through.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to the Conan stories as overusing lost cities, not the Kulls. But that observation about the Conans is an impression. I could be mistaken. It seems that the barbarian stumbled on one or another lost city about every third or fourth story, in my memory.... so that these cities get to be rather too obvious a stock prop.

Incidentally, JD sets the bar for commentary here at Chrons!

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

Howard was definitely still coming into his own as a writer when he died. He was what 31-32 when he pulled the trigger. Given a longer life and the ability to write and grow more, I'm sure he would have a more respected place in sff literature.

 

[nomadman]

I quite liked The Slithering Shadow the first time I read it, and still do. It more or less accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do, and whilst lacking in some of the qualities that marked his more widely acclaimed tales, is nonetheless a fun piece of hokum, and one of the eerier pieces in the general canon.

Incidentally, I've never much cared for Beyond The Black River, despite its rep. The whole buckskins and log forts milieu never seemed to quite fit in with the rest of the Hyborean age; it was too consciously reminiscent of Last of the Mohicans and other frontier tales to allow me to suspend my disbelief, and Howard's choice of naming his thinly-veiled Red Indian menace 'Picts' is frankly bizarre.

I'm also not too keen on Hour of the Dragon, but then I'm not a big fan of epic fantasy in general, which Hour... is closer to in feel even though it lacks the vast sweep and intrigue of longer, later examples of the type. Aside from the main story, which is rather unmemorable, the story is too episodic to avoid a sameiness from creeping in by about the two thirds mark. I don't know if this was a result of Howard's need to rewrite the whole piece as installments for Weird Tales or if this was the original structure of the novel, but I definitely feel it lacks the balanced cohesiveness of something like Red Nails or People of the Black Circle, both of which I consider excellent.

 

[nomadman]

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to the Conan stories as overusing lost cities, not the Kulls. But that observation about the Conans is an impression. I could be mistaken. It seems that the barbarian stumbled on one or another lost city about every third or fourth story, in my memory.... so that these cities get to be rather too obvious a stock prop.

Incidentally, JD sets the bar for commentary here at Chrons!

From what I can recall, the lost/ancient cities motif pops up in the following stories:

The Devil in Iron
The Slithering Shadow
The Jewels of Gwalhur
Red Nails
Shadows in the Moonlight (more a ruined temple than a city)
Black Colossus
A Witch Shall be Born (not sure on this one, it's been a while since I read it)
Pool of the Black One
Queen of the Black Coast

So yes, it was quite a commonly recurring element in the tales.

 

[nomadman]

I think I may like the Kull stories more than the Conans, too. Offhand, I wonder if REH wasn't more concerned in the Kull stories with the evocation of a strange lost world, while in the Conan stories he is more concerned with putting a hero who is the Man he'd like to be through his paces in a world that can seem rather improvised for the needs of the occasion. What do you folks think?

I also prefer the more surreal and dreamlike pieces in Kull, many of which were unpublished in Howard's lifetime, to the more action-oriented Conan stories, though I understand they were both aiming for different things. With a lot of the Kull stories, Howard's focus seemed mainly to be on achieving a particular atmosphere of breathless unreality, whilst with Conan it seems to be on rip-roaring action tales with a weird twist.

There are overlaps of course, those these tend not to be the strongest of either series IMO. The Shadow Kingdom is one of the earliest S&S tales Howard, or indeed anyone, wrote, but is rather weak compared to the best of the Conan tales, lacking the briskness and general verve of something like People of the Black Circle, where the firmly grounded quasi-historical setting, though imaginary, works to paint vivid word pictures in the reader's mind and provide all sorts of background flavors that the more fantastical setting of the Kull stories doesn't tend to evoke. Likewise, a number of the earlier Conan stories went for a more otherworldly feel which tended to sit uncomfortably in the gritty and otherwise realistic Hyborian Age, especially since the later more developed Conan stories eschewed overtly alien elements for variations on nature, physical phenomena, etc.

 

[nomadman]

Thanks, JD and Connavar. My thesis might not hold up very well. I may have been unduly influenced by impressions from the last or just about the last Conan story that I read, "The Slithering Shadow," which is one of the ones with a lost city conveniently plopped down where Conan and his current female companion can have an adventure. Another thing that contributes to the "improvised" or "ad hoc" impression of the Conan stories was Howard's practice therein of using place names with pre-existing associations, and monster names of the "Thag," "Thok" type that seem tossed off. I don't think he did this sort of thing so much in the Kull stories, did he? So you can remember some of the stories as having elements seemingly quickly put in, in order to provide background for the plot Howard wants to work with and the action scenes that he wants to write up. But you're right about REH having taken some care to develop at least some of the elements of the Hyborian world.

Compared to, say, Middle Earth, I find the world of the Hyborian Age to be a bit of a hodge-podge but one which, overall, hangs together pretty well. On the few occasions it doesn't, it's generally because Howard got too much away from the old world feel that characterized the bulk of his other Conan pieces. Beyond the Black River and The Black Stranger, for example, both have more 'modern' settings which I just can't see existing organically within the melange of Sumerian/Roman/Viking/Mongol-inspired cultures, mainly because the cultures on which they were based (frontier-era America and 16th century Caribbean) involved firearms and other technologies that would have drastically changed the way combat was fought then. Even though these technologies don't exist within the tales, I can't help but feel that they should subconsciously be a part of the background, and thus find it hard to see either of these tales as part of the Conan oeuvre. Oddly, however, I have no problem with Red Nails, which is clearly based on South American civilizations, perhaps because it's sufficiently primitive to allow me to maintain my suspension of disbelief, providing a slight leap of imagination.

 

[j d worthington]

Yes, he did tend to use the megalithic cities trope a lot... not only in the Conan tales, but in several other fantasy pieces as well ("The Gods of Bal-Sagoth", "The Valley of the Worm", etc.); it was obviously something which fascinated him, and quite understandably so, especially given the sorts of things we were learning from archaeological finds during Howard's period and shortly before; history was being rewritten in major ways, especially when it came to such things as the Mesoamerican cultures... or such things as Easter Island....

Dale... I don't quite know how to react to a comment such as that. While I very much appreciate the compliment, such a thing always leaves me rather flabbergasted....

nomadman: I'd say the fault lay in the original construction of The Hour of the Dragon; none of Howard's novel-length pieces that I've seen are all that successful in toto; he was fine with short stories up through novelettes, but a full novel seems to have been something he never quite conquered. Which is not to say that they don't have a lot to recomment them, but they really aren't as cohesive as they could be, and The Hour of the Dragon is definitely on that list. Incidentally, in regard to that particular piece, I have a great deal of fondness for the little verse* which apparently went with it, but which (to my knowledge) never saw print until Glenn Lord included it in his The Howard Collector of Spring 1969....

*The heading included in the Berkley editions of the novel, which begins "The Lion banner sways and falls in the horror-haunted gloom"....

 

[Connavar]

Herewith a public apology, ar at least caveat lector, -- especially to J. D. Worthington.

I have too often, at Chrons, offered critical opinions based on memories of stories that I haven't read for quite a while. I've made comments on Lovecraft, Borges, and even Howard that probably should have been made more tentatively. Yes, this is a place for fans of sf and fantasy to chat, not a scholarly forum, but too often I have insinuated slipshod writing when my own argument was a bit slipshod. I will try to bracket my opinions, when they are based on old impressions, with a bit more qualification.

I do think that there's a slipshod quality in some of Howard's writing and that he isn't held accountable for it sometimes. In fact, I identify with him as a writer: I well remember how, when I was reading him for the first time in my teens, I too cranked out a lot of fantasy (for an obscure fanzine called Endeavor, mostly), and especially how, even earlier, I drew my own comics -- and was often hurrying on to write or draw the next story without taking much care of the one at hand! And indeed I have a soft spot in my heart for writers like Sir Walter Scott, who I believe said of one of his novels something like "It isn't very good, but there are good things in it." Then also I tend to evaluate fantasists like Howard by contrast with the standard of the vest imaginary world writing -- especially Tolkien, who worked out his Middle-earth history and geography with an astonishing degree of integrity and thereby set the bar for everyone else. But to write such fantasy wasn't in accordance with Howard's personality, and perhaps at times we can sit back and enjoy the headlong, if even slapdash, quality of his work.

In other words I think I shall reread me some Howard.

Im just glad to see any analyze,discussions about his works in thread about REH even about the weaker stories that is overlooked because of his better stories.

I have fresh memories of his stories that i have read and i think he is much better,more consistent prose great storyteller generally in his historical,adventure,horror,western stories. Best Kane,Worms of the Earth and very few of Conan stories i would rate among his best. The stories he wrote late in his career was more mature,finer writer. Why i have more respect more often for his other genres. They lack more often the slipshod qualities.

There is more inconsistent,weaker stories in his fantasy stories but im more surprised he had many good or better stories too. Like JD said above we all know he wrote tons of stories fast and re-used tropes because he was writing to not starve, to survive. I read Hammett was an artist who re-wrote stories often until he thought they were artistically good enough but that was a rare method for pulp market. Thats why its much worse being Hammett fan, he didnt write half as much as REH wrote in 5-7 years in his whole career.

Your views on Conan stories made this thread become much more interesting and as REH fan who have seen clearly his faults and strengths im just glad seeing the last few posts