The Dark Man
Robert E. Howard
Lancer Paperbacks
Original Price $0.95
So earlier this month I was in the mood for some Robert E. Howard. I am always in the mood for Howard at this time of year. It has to do with Howard Days. (This was about a week before the Fort McKavett excursion.)
The local comic shop has part of a wall devoted to used paperbacks, and they usually have about a dozen or more Robert E. Howard titles. I haven’t bought many there because whatever the book, I usually either have a copy or have all the stories in other books.
But I didn’t have a copy of the The Dark Man. The book was in almost pristine conditions. For three bucks, I couldn’t pass it up.
This was a bargain, even if the glue did start to separate from the spine. I read it as carefully as possible, but still, given that the book was published in 1971, that’s not surprising. This is a reprint of the 1963 Arkham House edition. It even included August Derleth’s introduction, which didn’t do a lot for me.
Contents include the title story, an inferior (IMO) sequel “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth”, the classic “Pigeons From Hell“, “The Dead Remember“, which John Bullard discussed a few days ago, and “Dig Me No Grave”. Also included were “The Children of the Night“, “The People of the Dark”, “Old Garfield’s Heart“, and “The Hyena”.
The Dark Man and Others contains 15 stories. They tend more towards horror than fantasy, but all of them are enjoyable. Most of the stories are available in other volumes, especially The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. Even so, I found reading this collection especially enjoyable. At the time it was published there wasn’t a lot of Howard’s short fiction readily available except the Conan collections and Lancer’s Kull collection. I tired to put myself in the frame of mind of a reader encountering these stories for the first, someone who had enjoyed Conan and Kull but hadn’t read any of the small press collections.
I enjoyed it so much that I am going to read a couple of more non-Conan Howard collections.
I think a lot of Howard’s best work is non-Conan: Pigeons from Hell, Wings in the Night. Not that I don’t love Conan.
Mark Finn insists that Conan was intentionally written to be commercial. I agree that much of his best work isn’t Conan.
Yeah, I like Conan but he wrote so much more. Like Arthur Conan Doyle he had a great many excellent works beyond his most famous character.
This was one of my favorite Howard books when I bought it back in 1975. Still have my copy somewhere. Best selection of horror stories up until the Del Rey Horror book, imo. I remember being gobsmacked realizing how he devolved the Picts from the Kull stories through the “People of the Dark”/”Children of the Night” stories.
I think a collection of Howard’s Pict stories, arranged in internal chronological order, would be a fascinating read. Representative Kull and Bran stories, followed by the “People of the Dark”/”Children of the Night” stories.
One of my favorite non-Conan Howard stories is “Worms of the Earth”.
That’s a great collection; I remember picking it up soon after it came out. It was my first look at Bran Mak Morn and my first reading of Pigeons from Hell. It made quite the impression.