Browsed by
Category: Robert E. Howard

A Master of his Art: Rattle of Bones and Other Terrifying Tales by Robert E. Howard

A Master of his Art: Rattle of Bones and Other Terrifying Tales by Robert E. Howard

Comments 3 comments


Rattle of Bones and Other Terrifying Tales (Clover Press, October 20, 2020). Cover by Gabriel Rodriguez

“Damned be the dark ends of the earth where old horrors live again.”
— Robert E. Howard

Some of the finest gifts are from your buddy, a kindred spirit and dog brother in REH fandom, such as that damnable reprobate, Levi Combs. At Gamehole Con this year, Levi gifted me with this beautiful copy of Rattle of Bones and Other Terrifying Tales, by Robert E. Howard. And what a treasure it is!

This collection contains some of REH’s finest horror yarns, such as “In the Forest of Villefère,” “Wolfshead,” “Sea Curse,” “Rattle of Bones,” “The Touch of Death,” “Dig Me No Grave,” “People of the Dark,” and “The House of Arabu.” It was published by Clover Press and features beautiful art by Gabriel Rodriguez. It also features an afterword by horror master Steve Niles, perhaps best known for 30 Days of Night.

…

Read More Read More

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: REH’s Swords of Shahrazar

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: REH’s Swords of Shahrazar

Comments 6 comments

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Back in 2022, I covered three different Pulp genres of Robert E. Howard. The third looked at one of my REH favorites – the Adventure Pulps. I talked about Kirby O’Donnell’s “Gold from Tartary.” You can read that here.

Howard had created El Borak as teen, and refined him years later, with “The Daughter of Erlik Khan” appearing in December of 1934. El Borak is his best-known ‘Cowboy of the East,’ and rivals Conan as my favorite REH character. But Howard found it impossible to break into the higher-paying Adventure pulps, and only four of his seven El Borak stories saw print during his lifetime. Two were published not long after his suicide, while the other two lay unpublished for decades.

Kirby O’Donnell was a similar character to El Borak, and he saw print first, with “Swords of Shahrazar in the October, 1934 issue of Top-Notch Magazine. I talked about that publication in my prior essay. Curiously, “Swords” was actually a direct sequel to “Gold from Tartary,” which appeared after “Swords,” in the January, 1935 issue of Thrilling Adventures.

“Swords” was about twice as long as “Gold,” and maybe that played into the decision to pass on it. But it certainly flows smoother to read “Gold,” then “Swords.”

I mentioned in “Gold” that Howard starts thing off FAST. Here, O’Donnell had awoken to a stealthy footstep near his room in the palace of forgotten Shahrazar. And in paragraph four, there was “a great black body hurtling at him from the shadows, the gleam of a plunging knife.”

…

Read More Read More

An Essential Purchase: The Weird Tales Boys by Stephen Jones

An Essential Purchase: The Weird Tales Boys by Stephen Jones

Comments 2 comments


The Weird Tales Boys (PS Publishing, September 2023). Cover by Les Edwards

How could I not purchase The Weird Tales Boys, by Stephen Jones? It focuses on the three authors whose work has most inspired me for decades: Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith.

In fact, I created a small business whose core product, the Hyperborea RPG, is inspired by the works of these three iconic giants of weird fiction, horror, fantasy, and sci-fi.

…

Read More Read More

Conan Well Captured: Conan: City of the Dead by John C. Hocking

Conan Well Captured: Conan: City of the Dead by John C. Hocking

Comments 9 comments


Conan: City of the Dead (Titan Books, June 18, 2024). Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love

John C. Hocking’s (1960 -) Conan and the Emerald Lotus came along in 1995, near the end of the Tor Conan pastiche series of books. I’d read a lot of pastiches early but by ’95 was burned out on them and stopped picking up the new ones. So I never read Hocking’s entry. Until now.

In 2024, Titan Books published Conan City of the Dead, by Hocking. It contained Conan and the Emerald Lotus, and a second pastiche called Conan and the Living Plague. Hocking had written Living Plague under contract with Conan Properties, but when the ownership changed hands, the book fell into a limbo that lasted some 25 years.

The wait must have been agonizing for Hocking, but the result was a very nice hardcover printing of both his books together, with some neat interior illustrations by Richard Pace. The cover art is uncredited.

…

Read More Read More

Quatro-Decadal Review: Weird Tales, November 1989, edited by John Betancourt, George H. Scithers, and Darrell Schweitzer

Quatro-Decadal Review: Weird Tales, November 1989, edited by John Betancourt, George H. Scithers, and Darrell Schweitzer

Comments 15 comments

Weird Tales, Fall 1989 (Terminus Publishing). Cover by J.K. Potter

There has been quite the gap in my reviews. I’ve been high-centered on Weird Tales. Many factors played a role in this — mostly that it is not a small magazine by any stretch. Then there is the fact that I read it in early 2023, got distracted by other things, and had to re-read it to write about it.

As readers of these reviews know, I don’t hold back re: spoilers for 35-year old stories. New readers, be warned!

Frequent readers will also recall that I often hypothesize on the thoughts and drives of the editors, but in this case I don’t have to hypothesize — my friends, we live in the future and I was able to get the straight dope right from The Grey Eminence himself: Darrell Schweitzer.

…

Read More Read More

Hither Came Scott Oden: The Shadow of Vengeance, a Sequel Robert E. Howard SHOULD have Written

Hither Came Scott Oden: The Shadow of Vengeance, a Sequel Robert E. Howard SHOULD have Written

Comments 6 comments

Conan: The Shadow of Vengeance (Titan Books, January 30, 2024)

Octavia tore her gaze from the grisly noose. Hope fluttered in her breast, for through the guttering smoke from scores of torches she saw the Cimmerian astride his mighty stallion. He stood motionless, a statue hewn from whalebone and gristle — save for his eyes. Even with the breadth of the Red Brotherhood between them, Octavia recognized the death fires kindled in those cold blue orbs.

There is a magic to some writer’s prose; it pulses and pounds, like Robert E. Howard writing about Conan, or has a clever, articulate subliminity in which a bright man finds himself feeling the fool in a genius’s shadow (Doyle’s Watson writing about Holmes), that infuses a character and their canon.

This is part of what makes pastiche such a tricky business to evaluate and review. Some hate the idea of pastiche, in which case, any review is pointless. On the other hand, pastiche — the continuation of an author’s characters in new adventures is a long-established tradition that reaches back to the tales of the pre-Classical world and continues on the reams of unlicensed fan-fic. So, let’s leave that debate for elsewhere, and just assume that you are this far because you love Robert E. Howard, you love Conan, and you want that pulse-pounding, blood-and-thunder sense of adventure you experienced long ago.

…

Read More Read More

The Best of Bob – 2023

The Best of Bob – 2023

Comments 0 Comment

Happy 2024! Let’s kick butt for another year. Or at least, limp to the finish in 52 weeks. I take what I can get.

One of my greatest talents as a blogger, is finding folks more talented than I, to write my weekly column for me. Hey – the reader gets a better end product, so they win, right? I brought Talking Tolkien to Black Gate in 2023. And I had some great help yet again for A (Black) Gat in the Hand.

So some of you Black Gaters may be surprised that I occasionally actually write my own essays for the Monday morning slot. John O’Neill is too savvy an editor for me to completely fool him for almost ten years.

So here are what I thought were ten of my better efforts in 2023. Hopefully you saw them back when I first posted them. But if not, maybe you’ll check out a few now. Ranking them seemed a bit egotistical, so they’re in chronological order. Let’s go!

Don’t Panic! We’ve Got Douglas Adams Covered Here at Black Gate (January 2, 2023)

If I do say so myself, things absolutely started off strong, the second day of the new year! Black Gate has a bunch of Douglas Adams fans. This was my eighth Adams-related post, and I included links to five prior posts by Black Gaters (Steven H Silver, and M. Harold Page).

Thirteen posts about Douglas Adams. SURELY you can find something interesting. This current post included me fooling around with a new entry for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I think it’s pretty funny. And if you’re not familiar with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, that’s actually my favorite Adams book. Click on this one and get a larf.

 

…

Read More Read More

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Paul Bishop on The Fists of Robert E. Howard

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Paul Bishop on The Fists of Robert E. Howard

Comments 9 comments

I am currently working on a couple essays. A very positive one about The Caine Mutiny as a book, big screen movie, TV movie, stage play,  and radio play.  And a friend called the latest Hercule Poirot movie, A Haunting in Venice, “amazingly good.” That’s exactly the opposite of what it is. I’ll be expressing my disappointment with that one soon.

I’ve already re-shared a couple of the excellent Pulp-related essays that were a part of Black Gate’s terrific Discovering Robert E. Howard series. Knowing I was completely unqualified to write one on REH’s boxing stories, I contacted the current czar of boxing fiction, Paul Bishop of Fight Card Books.

Fight Card is a Pulp style series of boxing tales.  See what Paul has to say about Howard’s boxing works. And if you get a chance to visit Howard Days in Cross Plains, TX, make sure you attend the boxing lecture at the old ice house, co-hosted by Mark Finn and Chris Gruber. It’s a real highlight.

The minute I stepped ashore from the Sea Girl, merchantman, I had a hunch that there would be trouble. This hunch was caused by seeing some of the crew of the Dauntless. The men on the Dauntless have disliked the Sea Girl’s crew ever since our skipper took their captain to a cleaning on the wharfs of Zanzibar – them being narrow-minded that way. They claimed that the old man had a knuckle-duster on his right, which is ridiculous and a dirty lie. He had it on his left.
~ Robert E. Howard, “The Pit of the Serpent”

Although best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, and other sword and sorcery characters, Robert E. Howard had a lifelong interest in boxing, attending fights and avidly following the careers of his favorite fighters. Even though as a child he was bookish and intellectual, in his teen years he took up bodybuilding and eventually entered the ring as an amateur boxer.

…

Read More Read More

The Complete Version of John C. Hocking’s Conan: Black Starlight is Now Available

The Complete Version of John C. Hocking’s Conan: Black Starlight is Now Available

Comments 5 comments

Conan: Black Starlight (Titan Books, October 17, 2023)

The name John C. Hocking is well known to long-time Black Gate readers. He published several terrific stories in the print version of the magazine, including two tales in his Brand the Viking series, and the opening stories in his popular Archivist series, “A River Through Darkness and Light” and “Vestments of Pestilence,” which was continued in Skelos and Weirdbook. He’s also launched a brand new series, the King’s Blade tales, in Tales From the Magician’s Skull, edited by Howard Andrew Jones.

I was delighted to see that John had been commissioned to write a serialized novella for Marvel’s high-profile relaunch of Conan The Barbarian in 2019. Conan: Black Starlight was published in installments in the first twelve issues of the comic, and now the entire story has been collected by Titan in a single handsome volume.

…

Read More Read More

Ten Things I Think I Think: October 2023

Ten Things I Think I Think: October 2023

Comments 13 comments

A (Black) Gat in the Hand takes a week off for a somewhat Robert E. Howard-centric installment of Ten Things I Think I Think. Books, television, movies, and even a computer RPG are in the mix today.

1) Jules De Grandin is a new favorite

Being a Robert E. Howard guy, I am familiar with Weird Tales – home to much of his best work, including Conan, Kull, historical fiction, and Solomon Kane, among much more. But not being into horror, I don’t really read anyone else from ‘The Unique Magazine.’

But I recently bought the audiobook for The Horror on the Links. It is Volume One of The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin. A few stories have been a bit much for me in the macabre category, but Seabury Quinn’s doctor-former Surete policeman is an Occult Detective version of Hercule Poirot. I am absolutely loving the mix. I’m nearing the end of this collection, and I’ll be listening to Volume Two next.

De Grandin is a French transplant to fictional Harrisonville, New Jersey. His Watson is Dr. Trowbridge, and they investigate both cases that have natural, as well as supernatural, solutions. Each audiobook is about 25 hours long, which is a lot of entertainment. Paul Woodson does a great de Grandin. There are over 90  stories – including one serialized novel. As a Poirot fan, I’m totally in on these. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a de Grandin/Nero Wolfe crossover.

 

2) “The Horror from the Mound” is Quite a Story

Sticking with horror, I was hoping to have an essay ready today for Robert E. Howard’s “The Horror from the Mound.” It’s a (then) contemporary Weird Western which also appeared in Weird Tales. I’d read it before, and with one foot in ‘today’ and one firmly in the mid 1600s, may be my favorite REH horror story. Still working on the essay.

…

Read More Read More