all of them are good stories, . the best IMO are "The Black Stone" and "The Fire Of Asshurbanipal" Thank Crom for "Pigeons From Hell, " This is a collection of tales from all across Mr Howard's career, The stories range from vignettes to fullblown thrillers spanning centuries and continents, But nothing really leaps out at you, They're readable and generally exciting but nothing feels really amazing, not like the Conan stories, or the really, really good Steve Costigan stories, Until you reach the final entry in this volume, the aforementioned Pigeons, which is a classic of the horror genre if ever I read one, It's the one story in this collection that raises it to the level of greatness, I know that "SkullFace" has its admirers, but, for me, it was far too much melodrama and too little actual plot, The reincarnation stories are individually quite gripping, but when they are presented so close to one another, you can't help but feel a sense of dejavu, and not in the way that Mr Howard intended.
The stories centring around The Black Stone have their moments but without warning that these were more stories about the same thing they felt a bit samey.
If there had been some separation in the contents pages about themes and characters, I might have felt differently, Even the mentions in the Introduction, helpful and informative though it was, gave only a hint of the thematic similarities between many of the tales, What I did enjoy was the display of range that these stories gave, but that's no good without readability or skill and while I'm interested in seeing how REH progressed as an author along his alltoobrief career, I would rather see a more exciting choice of stories.
.reviewed by Sandy: sitelink fantasyliterature. com/revi All this talk of "gritty fantasy" made me want to get back into some classic REH!
I read this slowly over the course of about five months and loved every second of it.
This is a surprisingly dense bookthin pages and small type, The stories range from the pretty good to the extraordinary, REH fans and anyone interested in classic pulp fiction are hereby assigned this book, Very well written and imaginative short story collection, Runs the gamut from detectives, vampires, werewolves, Lovecraftian cosmic horror cults and a lot of past life/ancestral regression, I will definitely check out Howards Conan The Barbarian books, by all accounts his central achievement, I was a little disappointed in this one, Far too many of the stories were nearly identical and Robert E, Howard liked the name Steve a little too muchnearly every story had a main character with that name and a little too "dime store pulp" for my taste.
Not that pulp is a bad thing, but in this case, it was pretty ham fisted i, e. overly expository dialogue
more than one story involving a burly detective shooting up an opium den or something, Overall, not a terrible collection, but one I expected a little more from, Barring a long and wordy review that Im not in the mood for entertaining and gripping, typically Howard style of storytelling laced to the fullest with a pulpfiction feel to it that personally I love.
But like all Howards work, the pulp style serves only to bring out and underscore the depth of his storytelling, filled with complex yet simple to understand characters and concepts.
All fans of R. E. H. should give this a shot, quite different from the stories he is usually associated with, more akin to his Soloman Kane stories then anything horror with some panache and at the same time an urgent rawness.
Though some of the stories in this collection are campy and uncomfortably racist, others are classics that rival the best of Lovecraft, Standouts include "Graveyard Rats," "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," and "Pigeons from Hell," which despite the terrible name is one of the greatest horror shorts I have read, period.
Definitely worth a read if you are like me and enjoy Lovecraftian horror, From the creator of Conan, a sublime book of understated horror and mystery, Lovecraftian tales, tales of mystery from the East, or set in cowboy country, there's far more to RE Howard than Conan, For short stories which were written betweenand, these, by and large, stand up exceedingly well, Some are a little overly straightforwards at times, but there's still plenty of unexpected delights, Just love Howard and these overlooked works come in a superbly edited edition shame it isn't in hardback A very long time ago, when I was still in high school, Texasborn Robert E.
Howard was one of my favorite authors, and this reader could not get enough of him, whether it was via such legendary characters as Conan the Cimmerian, King Kull, Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn.
Flash forward more years than Id care to admit, and one day I realized that I hadn't read a book of Howard's in all that intervening time.
Sure, I'd run across the occasional story of his now and then when your tastes run to vintage pulp fiction, as do mine, and you read a lot of old anthologies and Best of Weird Tales collections, the man is practically unavoidable.
But an entire book devoted to Howard, . . it had been eons, for me, Thus, the collection entitled "The Haunter of the Ring amp Other Tales"a big,page affair from Wordsworth Editions' economically priced Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural subdivision, which has rescued from oblivion dozens of writers of the macabrewas just too much for me to resist.
The book includes a scholarly essay on Howard by M, J. Elliott, followed by no less thanof Howard's best tales none of the stories deals with those four famous characters listed up top, conveniently arranged in chronological order so that the reader can better appreciate Howard's increasing skill as a wordsmith as he practiced his craft.
Fourteen of these stories have been culled from the pages of "Weird Tales" although the collection does not include his first story sold to the legendary magazine, "Spear and Fang," from the/issue and the rest from other competing pulp publications: "Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror," "Strange Detective Stories," "SuperDetective Stories" and "Thrilling Mystery.
" Chronologically, the tales span Howard's entire writing career, fromuntil the posthumously released "Pigeons From Hell" intwo years after Howard's suicide, at age, And, as it turns out, the book is a wonderful overview of REH's enormous oeuvre, I just ate this book up, and absolutely loved each and every story in it, Simply stated, this is one helluva collection,
As for the tales themselves, Howard wrote in many different genresalthough he almost singlehandedly created the genre now known as sword amp sorceryand many of his genres are represented here.
The collection kicks off with two tales dealing with a French werewolf named de Montour, "In the Forest of Villefore" serves as merely a short introduction, but its sequel, "Wolfshead" the cover story of the/"Weird Tales", is a tremendously exciting affair that transpires in East Africa, of all places, and gives the reader an explanation of how werewolves arose in the first place.
Howard was a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H, Rider Haggard, and his story "The Hyena" is surely reminiscent of those two great writers, He was also a fan of Fu Manchu creator Sax Rohmer, and in the novellalength "SkullFace," Howard does a Rohmer pastiche that is deadon, replacing the Chinese supervillain with Kathulos, a diabolical mastermind posing as an Egyptian, but who is ultimately revealed to be slight spoiler ahead a survivor of the lost continent of Atlantis! This pulpy tale, crudely written as it is it ran as a threepart serial in "Weird Tales" in late, is still wonderfully entertaining, and remarkably, features the destruction of/of London! Howard, of course, was also a fan of and penpals with his fellow "Weird Tales" contributor H.
P. Lovecraft, and his short tale "Sea Curse" is a very welldone homage, Howard was fond of referencing Lovecraft's Elder Gods such as Cthulhu in his own stories, as well as Lovecraft's dreaded book "The Necronomicon," and likewise, Lovecraft would repay the favor by mentioning Howard's imaginary evil tome "Nameless Cults" in his own tales.
The collection in question gives us two marvelous stories featuring Howard's infamous book: "The Black Stone," a marvelously written piece in which an ancient Hungarian monolith gives an explorer a glimpse of a horrible worship ceremony centuries ago, and its sequel of sorts, "The Thing on the Roof," in which another explorer in the Yucatan somehow arouses the wrath of a toadshaped monstrosity.
In three of the stories here, men are vouchsafed a vision of one of their previous lives, via a knock on the head or magical influence.
Thus, in "The Children of the Night," a man sees himself as a warrior battling the inhuman inhabitants of England who predated the Picts in this story, a character mentions that the three greatest horror stories ever written are Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Arthur Machen's "Black Seal".
. . and Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu"! in "People of the Dark," a man sees himself as Conan the Reaver NOT the same character that Howard is most famous for, battling a subterranean people, set against a love triangle dealing with a triple reincarnation ! and in the oftanthologized "The Cairn on the Headland," an Irishman flashes back to the time when he helped fight off the Vikings in the year.
And speaking of stories that have been anthologized often, and for good reason, the collection also includes the wonderful tale "The Thing From the Mound," a Western/vampire hybrid story, as well as the truly frightening horror masterpiece "Pigeons From Hell" this is the story that introduced readers to the female creature known as the "zuvembie," an even scarier proposition than a zombie, trust me! Continuing in the Western vein, the collection gives us "Black Wind Blowing," in which a modernday Texas cowboy goes up against the monstrous cult known as the Black Brothers of Ahriman.
Then there is the ubercreepy tale "The Fearsome Touch of Death" the title story, "The Haunter of the Ring," in which a pleasant young woman is somehow being compelled to make repeated murder attempts on her husband and "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," a tale very much in the sword amp sorcery vein the cover story of the/"Weird Tales", in which two modernday explorers in the Arabian desert discover a lost city, an invaluable gem.
. . and its hideous guardian .
Howard, to expand his market for selling stories, and on the advice of his agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, began, in, to write crime and detective fiction, but always included some grisly or macabre touch, of course.
This collection gives us four such detective tales, In "Black Talons," an historian and a private dick team up to battle a pantherish killer from Africa, Howard would writestories featuring River Street detective Steve Harrison, one of which is deemed lost forever, and the Wordsworth collection gives us three of these wonderful tales.
In the senselessly titled "Fangs of Gold," Harrison pursues a Chinese murderer to a Southern bayou, where he witnesses a shocking voodoo ceremony, In "Names in the Black Book," Harrison and his allies, including a remarkably tough Afghani, go up against another Fulike mastermind, Erlik Khan, and his criminal horde of Mongolians.
And in the amazingly grisly "Graveyard Rats," Harrison tries to discover who has been killing four brothers one by one, and almost gets eaten alive by the titular rodents in the process, leading to this wonderful paragraph, which practically typifies pulp fiction in a nutshell:
"In a murdered mans grave, his hand locked in the coffin of a headless corpse, with a thousand grey ghoulrats ready to tear the flesh from his living frame!"
These three Harrison stories are so much fun, incidentally, that this reader is tempted now to splurge for thehardcover "Steve Harrison Casebook," which includes all nine extant Harrison stories, and is currently available from the Robert E.
Howard Foundation.
Howard, of course, may not be everyone's cup of tea, and those readers who relish polished diction and meticulous prose a la the works of, say, Clark Ashton Smith, and who are easily put off by blood, torture, violence, grisly mayhem, monsters, battle carnage and suchlike, will probably have a tough time here.
Howard's style is very much masculine, rugged and nononsense, and his tales proceed with a virile drive and an emphasis on fastmoving plot, For many, though, including myself, the mans work is irresistibly fun, and this Wordsworth collection despite featuring more typographical errors than any book should be allowed to have proves to be a most excellent compendium of his legendary career.
How nice to reacquaint myself with my old high school pal! More than highly recommended!
This review, by the way, originally appeared on the Fantasy Literature websitesitelink fantasyliterature. com/ a most excellent destination for all fans of Robert E, Howard!.