Category Archives: Robert E. Howard

Ambrose Bierce’s Birthday, with a Guest Appearance by Robert E. Howard

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What follows is a guest post from John Bullard. – KW

Ambrose Bierce

Today, June 24th, is the birthday of writer, reporter, and Civil War veteran, Ambrose Bierce. He became famous for his reporting, his fiction writing and his satires. He disappeared while down in Mexico covering the Mexican Revolution around 1914. His work is readily available. An online site that has most of his fiction, including all of the stories mentioned in this piece, and some of his non-fiction is here:

http://www.ambrosebierce.org/works.html

So, why on Bierce’s birthday am I going to talk as much about Robert E. Howard as the birthday boy? Simple: Ambrose Bierce had a big influence on some of Howard’s weird western stories. Continue reading →

Not Exactly Howard Days

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If things had gone the way the were supposed to, instead of writing this post, I would be at Howard Days enjoying a nice dinner, listening to Roy Thomas giving his Guest of Honor speech, and wondering if I would win all my bids in the silent auction. But as you are probably aware, nothing this year has gone the way it was supposed to. Continue reading →

“Beyond the Black River: Is It Really “Beyond the Brazos River”? Part 3

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This is the third of a three part series of guest posts by John Bullard. Before I turn the blog over to John, I would like to take a moment and thank him for all the work he has done not only researching and writing this series, but his editing of the Howard letters for the next edition of the collected letters.  It’s this type of behind the scenes efforts that often go unacknowledged.  So John, on behalf of Howard fans and scholars everywhere, thank you.

Click the links to read Part 1 and Part 2.  Be advised there are spoilers.

Now here’s John.

In Part 2, we saw some of the historical Texans and their stories that Howard used to base incidents in his story “Beyond the Black River” on, hereinafter referred to as BBR. We also saw that Howard’s life-long love of talking to and learning these stories from old people he would meet saturated his thoughts and dreams, leading him to create other incidents and characters in the story. In this final part, we will see the one story that influenced Howard the most in writing BBR, and then his use of historical people that his ancestors interacted with from family histories which he used to flesh out his story. Finally, we’ll see his use of a famous incident in Texas history to bring BBR to an end, clearly showing that BBR was indeed a story about the settlement of Texas, and not a story taken from the American Colonial wars with the Eastern First Nations. Continue reading →

“Beyond the Black River”: Is It Really “Beyond the Brazos River”? Part 2

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What follows is a guest post by John Bullard.  Take it away, John.  And by the way, there are spoilers.  You have been warned.

In Part One, we began to examine the historical incidents and people from Texas history that Howard used in creating his story, “Beyond the Black River”, hereinafter abbreviated as BBR, grounding the tale as a story about the settling of Texas and not about the American Colonists fighting with the Eastern First Nations. We saw that Howard was particularly interested in the history of the settlement of Comanche lands in Central and North Central Texas by Anglo settlers, and started using the long years of conflict as the foundation for his creating his Conan story of “Beyond the Black River”. He used the general geography of the Texas lands bounded by the Trinity and Brazos rivers and transposed it into the woodland setting of the story bounded by the Thunder and Black rivers. Finally, it was shown that Howard used the actual incident of the destruction of Fort Parker by the Comanche and Kiowa in 1836 as the destruction of the fictional Fort Tuscelan in “Beyond the Black River”. Now, we will look at some of the peoples and stories of Texans fighting for survival against the Comanches who were waging their own war to keep their lands. Continue reading →

“Beyond the Black River”: Is it Really “Beyond the Brazos River”? Part 1

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What follows is a guest post by John Bullard.  It is the first of three parts and contains spoilers for Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”.

Weird Tales, May 1935, first installment of “Beyond the Black River”

Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “Beyond the Black River” is considered to be one of his best stories by his fans. It tells of an attack by Howard’s favorite historical peoples, the Picts, against the encroaching colonization of the Aquilonians on the Picts’ deeply forested land between the Thunder River to the East, and the Black River to the west in his fictional Hyborian world setting. It is well-known that Robert E. Howard used historical events, people, places, and the stories of people he knew to help inspire his writing, giving his stories a grounding in realism that stories just made up from whole cloth may sometimes lack. In “Beyond the Black River”, Howard used his knowledge of Texas’s history and people, as well as his family’s history, to make the story as realistic as possible in a fantasy setting. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, Novalyne

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Robert E. Howard’s girlfriend, Novalyne Price Ellis, was born on this date, March 9 in 1908.  She passed away on March 30, 1999.

Her memoir, One Who Walked Alone, detailing her relationship with Howard, is one of the major sources of information about Bob’s life. Howard fans and scholars owe her a debt of gratitude for writing it.

If’ you’ve never read the book, I suggest you get your hands on a copy. It’s well worth your time.

One Who Walked Alone was the basis of the film The Whole Wide World, which starred Vincent D’Onofrio and an unknown-at-the-time actress named Renee Zellweger.  (It was released a few months before Jerry McGuire.) It’s a fairly faithful adaptation and worth watching.

There have been two editions of One Who Walked Alone, the second published to coincide with the film and having a picture of Zellweger on the cover.  The first edition is the one shown to the left. Both editions were published by Donald M. Grant.

Howard in “The House of Arabu”

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Today, January 22, marks the birth of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). In observance, I’m going to look at “The House of Arabu”. I read it in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. It will be reprinted in Renegade Swords from DMR Books later this year. Look for it. I’ll have an announcement when more details about Renegade Swords are released, details such as the publication date.

I don’t know when “The House of Arabu” was written. It wasn’t published until 1952 in The Avon Fantasy Reader #18 under the title “The Witch From Hell’s Kitchen”. I like Howard’s original title much better. The story has been reprinted several times, but it isn’t as well known as much of Howard’s other sword and sorcery. I did notice that the version reprinted in The Ultimate Triumph had a slightly different closing line than the version in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. Continue reading →

Pierre Louys’s Birthday

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Pierre Louys (no, I don’t know how to get WordPress to put the oomlaut or whatever its called over the “y”) was born on this date, December 10, 1870.

The reason he is remembered much today is that Robert E. Howard gave his girlfriend Novalyne Price a copy of his collected works for Christmas in 1934.  Much of the book (I have a copy but haven’t read it) is erotic in nature.  Novalyne called it pornography. Howard strongly disagreed.

So just for giggles I thought I would do a birthday post on ol’ Pierre.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “Pigeons From Hell”

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“Pigeons From Hell”
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Originally published in Weird Tales, May 1938

And so we come to what is arguably the greatest horror story of Robert E. Howard.  Although it wasn’t published until nearly two years after his death, “Pigeons From Hell” has remained one of Howard’s most popular nonseries stories.

It’s a Southern Gothic that contains some truly chilling scenes. I’ve read it at least twice before, but it’s been probably a decade since the last time. It had lost none of its power when I reread it earlier this evening. Continue reading →

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “The Dwellers Under the Tomb”

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“The Dwellers Under the Tomb”
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
Paper $20.00
Ebook $7.99

This is another story that wasn’t published during Howard’s lifetime, but it’s a stronger work than “Dermod’s Bane“.  “The Dwellers Under the Tomb” was first published in 1976 in Lost Fantasies.  It follows a similar pattern to stories such as “The Noseless Thing”, “Dig Me No Grave“, “The Children of the Night”, and “The Haunter of  the Ring”.

The narrator is a man named O’Donnell who is staying with his friend Gordon, who may be the same Gordon as appears in the stories listed above.  They are awakened by a pounding on the door.  It’s Job Kiles, who is in a state of panic, because he saw the face of his dead brother at his window.  The brother had died a few days earlier, but not before swearing he would return from the grave to take vengeance on Job.  The brother had spent his portion of the family fortune, and Job wouldn’t let the brother spend his.  Job has come to Gordon for help.

Mild spoilers below the fold. Continue reading →