Conan

As I've indicated, Robert E. Howard's original Conan tales border on being horror stories. Some may fully qualify as such. Howard, as already mentioned seemed to have a horror of apes, and ape-like beings and entities, as these often haunt the pages of his fiction. The "Ghost-Ape" story, "Shadow of the Beast," has already been mentioned, though a number of such creatures turn up in his Conan tales. Among the most famous is "Queen of the Black Coast,"in which Conan and his mate, Belit, queen of  band of pirates, travel up the coast of Hyborian-age Africa (that continent is still mashed with Europe in Howard's fictional age). They encounter a brooding, eerie lost city, filled with treasure. The pirates fear the stash has some foul curse upon it, because of the strange winged shape seen haunting the ruins. They fear it is a "winged ape", and that it bodes ill for them all. But Belit is too greedy and plunders it anyway. But the slavering monstrosity who presides over the ruins seeks them out. At one point Conan is temporarily drugged into  unconsciousness by the perfume of the Black Lotus. Under its spell, he experiences visions of an advanced civilization of winged man-like beings who flourished at the dawn, and how they were somehow unable to leave their city once the jungle overtook it. The race devolved into squalling madness over the centuries, culminating in a single abhorrent shape which still lurks among the crumbling stones.

 Conan wakes to find Belit slain by the monster and hung by a jeweled necklace from the mast of the ship. Naturally, the barbarian is consumed by a rage for vengeance, which, this being a Howard Conan tale, he naturally accomplishes. In the his final showdown with the winged horror, the monstrosity nearly claims Conan's life, when Belit's ghost returns briefly from Arallu to fight by his side, distracting the brute, and allowing Conan to triumph. Some might recall a similar scene from the original Conan movie, with the warrior maid Valeria also returning the save Conan's life. The scene was lifted directly for "Queen of the Black Coast," just as the scene where a crucified Conan crushing a vulture to death with his teeth is taken directly from Howard's "A Witch Shall be Born."

     "Queen of the Black Coast," was adapted to wonderful effect back in the seventies by writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema, as the pictures can testify. Recently, Dark Horse had a go at it, but to a lesser effect, compared to the 70s adaptation.

     There is also the monstrous gray ape whom Conan battles in the dungeon in Hour of the Dragon, also called Conan the Conqueror, and the gray ape that nearly kills Conan in "Shadows in the Moonlight." Are these possibly the same species, a variety of ancient Hyborian flesh-eating ape-creature? Possibly they are, as these apes are particular to man-meat, as is the carnivorous ape in the non-Conan tale "Shadows in Zembabwe." The ape in this latter tale is described as having silver-gray fur, and a survival of the prehistoric ages, so perhaps it is a last survivor of Hyborian gray ape? In "Shadows in the Moonlight," Conan tells the rescued girl Olivia, after his near-fatal battle with the monstrous primate that "his kind dwell in the forests of the hills [on the mainland]...they are haunters of darkness and silent places."

    Perhaps more famously for Conan is the tale "Rogues In the House." This features an ape-like monster named Thak, who is the "pet" of a priest, Nebonidus, aka the "Red Priest." Nebonidus has raised Thack as a cub, but has an adult the man-ape has turned on him, and the wizard is now a prisoner within his own palace. Thack roams within the twisting, labyrinthine, halls of the mansion.. He is, as Nebonidus explains to Conan and his companions, not a true ape, and sort of evolutionary transition between ape and man. Modern science might classify him as Australopithicus Robustus, or perhaps Homo Habilus; in any event some of man's early ancestral forms seem to have survived up into the Hyborian age. Eerily, Thack seems of near-human intelligence, and mimics his former master, in that he now wears the scarlet hooded cloak of Nebonidus; it's the same red cloak artist Frank Frazetta depicts him wearing in the famous painting of the story's climactic battle. A very similar red-cloaked man-ape showed up in the hall of mirrors in the movie Conan the Destroyer. That beast might have been a creation of Thoth Amon's sorcery, but writers Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, though they wrote an entirely new story, were not above inserting some famous Howardian scenes.

   

 In addition to the apes and ape-monsters which shamble monstrously throughout Howard's tales, a number of giant serpent-monsters slither through their pages as well. Howard seems to have shared with a large portion of humanity a horror of snakes. The two short horror stories "The Dream Snake," and "The Cobra in the Dream," depict serpents as the instruments of a  character's demise, even when the victim is sound asleep. In the former tale, the narrator is found crushed by what seems to have been a gigantic phantom serpent, supposed until then to be a product of his imagination. Snakes of horrifying proportions also abound in the Conan tales. One type of monstrous serpent that turns up frequently is one Howard refers to in "Beyond the Black River" as "The Ghost Snake." This is a monstrous serpent of fifty feet plus, combining the worst aspects of the constrictor and the viper. The trunk of a ghost snake most resembles that of a monstrous python; but it also sprouts the venom-bearing fangs of its smaller, poisonous relatives. In "Black River," Conan aids some Aquilonian frontiersmen into the Pictish wilderness.

Deep within the vast oak forest, an Aquilonian man named Balthus is captured by the Picts and forced to witness their strange midnight ceremonies. A Pictish shaman conducts rituals that summon beasts from the depths of the forest. The Pictish wilderness, by the way, is a vast forested realm whose depths no man of the Hyborian "civilized" world has ever plumbed. The creatures summoned from their black depths are monstrous survivals from earlier times. The first monster summoned is a saber-tooth cat, or smilodon, which, eerily, Howard describes as having a pale, ghostly coloration. The smilodon kills and bears off a hapless forester tied to a stake, at the shaman's will.  Next, a gigantic white-colored "Ghost Snake" appears, summoned, apparently to swallow Baltus. But Conan manages to pierce the snake with an arrow, and it crushes several Pictish warriors in its death-throws.

A monstrous snake called Satha, which may well be a specimen of the Ghost Snake, makes an appearance to threaten Conan in "The Scarlet Citadel." The serpent is described by Howard as being a titanic eighty feet in length, with  a head the size of a horse's, and pale scales the color of hoarfrost. Another monstrous serpent, also called Satha, appears in the Howardian epic "Valley of the Worm." This Satha, which the hero Niord manages to slay to obtain his venom, is suggested to be a survival of prehistoric times, and might well be synonomous with the prehistoric titanoboa, if not for his poisonous fangs. "The valley of the Worm," features  Niord, (a prehistoric incarnation of invalid James Allison)a warrior of a nomadic warrior tribe, as they venture south into reeking southern jangles. Niord seeks revenge on the titular monstrosity, a Lovecraftian  monster that presides over a lost city, for the death of his tribe (Niord's people made the fatal mistake of staying the night in the city). The monster Niord must slay is summoned forth,by a hair-covered, vaguely ape-like being playing an eerie piping on a strange instrument.

   "Black Colossus" pits Conan against the sorcerer Thugra Khotan, who also has a bizarre, gibbering ape-like servitor, possibly a demonic entity, which is seldom glimpsed, save shambling into the wizard's tent at night, and driving the wizard's sorcerous chariot, which is pulled by a beast which appears to be a jet-black camel, but is really something otherworldly, as shown when the camel-beast sprouts wings in the distance, and soars into the sky.

   There are many of Howard's Conan (and non-Conan horror) tales featuring horrific monsters and entities, though one more I want to make note of here, for the hour grows late. It is the entity that  is the titular character in "The Black Stranger," which may be linked to the "dark man of the woods," also referenced in Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker," and (I think) at least one of Hawthorne's tales. The figure of the Dark Man is a form of the devil in Irving, and though Irving describes being his protagonist as "neither Negro nor Indian," he seems linked inexorably with American racism. In the story, Conan and a band of pirates are searching for the treasure of Tranicos on the shores of the Pictish wilderness. Among them is a nobleman, Count Valenzo Korzetta, a man with a troubled past. When an innocent slave-girl blurts out that she has seen a "black man," on a boat riding on blue flame, Korzetta goes berserk, nearly whipping the girl to death, screaming that she is lying. Later, Korzetta grows morose, mumbling that he is doomed. He eventually confesses to the identity of the "black man" : no  man at all, but a demon who he had summoned from beyond, and whom he later betrayed. Later, they hear a demonic drum pounding away in the deep of the forest, and storm soon ravages their encampment. The demon soon enters Korzetta's apartment, and has his revenge. When I first read this, it was in a greatly altered form, altered, in fact, by Conan anthologist L. Sprague DeCamp, who made it turn out that the "black man" was the sorcerer Thoth Amon, a character of his own, and fellow scribe Lin Carter's creation (you might know him form the comics and movies in particular). The original, which I was pleased to locate is MUCH darker, and very much more true to what Howard had in mind.  Another, perhaps earlier version the story, "Swords of the Red Brotherhood," certainly as terrifying, was written as a straight, historical pirate yarn, this time with a self-exiled French nobleman pursued by a demonic entity.  It was, perhaps later made into a Conan tale. UPDATE: The story "Swords of the Red Brotherhood," is, like all tales of Black Vulmea, set in historical times. This times, the "black man" IS human, an African sorcerer, who is betrayed, and sold into slavery by a greedy French nobleman. The tale plays out much like the Conan version, with the Frenchman meeting his end, and Vulmea securing the treasure, turning the feuding pirates against each other, and  rescuing the Frenchman's daughter and her young friends, the two innocents caught  up in this madness.

Back when I first discovered the real writings of the true Robert E. Howard, I was forced to search through paperback stores for years (and later, the New Howard reader and Donald Grant delux editions) to secure all of his weird fiction, Conan and otherwise. It's only now, years later that virtually all of his stuff, even the obscure fragments was made easily available  in  paper and hardback editions.

Horror

    Robert E. Howard wrote a number of horror stories, and it being Halloween time, I thought I'd post a blog on some of them. Robert E. Howard is an author I'd been familiar with only "second hand" back in my teen years, as the creator of Conan. I regularly bought the magazine Savage Sword of Conan back in the eighties and nineties, but I'd never actually read anything by him, until I picked up a book titled Cthulhu, Mythos and Kindred Horrors.

    Now, I know what you're thinking--Cthullu is a Lovecraft creation. True enough, but this was a collection Howard's stories in the Cthulhu Mythos vein. Both authors wrote for Wierd Tales after all, and corresponded with and influenced one another. But while Lovecraft's protagonists were brooding, intellectual misanthropes (a bit like himself), Howard's heroes, even in these tales were cast in the heroic mold.

    Howard turned out to be perhaps THE most terrifying author I'd ever read the, and perhaps since. Stephen King himself is quoted as praising Howard's "pigeons form Hell" as a horror masterpiece, and opining that the prose of REH "practically gives off sparks." King, BTW, was not the most terrifying author I'd ever read, in fact, I'd say that pure unadulterated terror is NOT what he does best. I didn't even like King back then, because the core of he wrote seemed to be human tragedy. In depressing and disturbing prose SK is certainly the master. But no one tops Howard for evoking the emotion of fear. That might seem a bit strange to those familiar with Howard as the prime writer of heroic sword and sorcery. But the actual truth is, once I'd had a chance to read the original Conan stories penned by the creator, they actually read more like horror stories. Certainly, they ought to at least qualify as dark fantasy. The Conan stories of the comics, good as some of them were, are just a different brand than vintage Howard.

    Here are some of Howard's most terriying fiction.






"Shadow of the Beast"

    This is perhaps the Howard's second most terrifying short work of fiction, "Pigeons form Hell" being the first. In it, the hero pursues a renegade through the rooms of an ancient, decaying antebelum mansion at night--only to find him dead of terror. Then, a the ghostly presence begins to stalk our hero, a terrible unseen thing that throws a half-human shadow on the walls, and leaves bestial footprints in the dust.

    Spoiler Ahead: Only at the end do we discover the unseen presence is the spirit of maltreated circus ape who took refuge in the house. He was killed and his spirit bound to the place. Interestingly, apes and ape-like beings frequeuntly haunt the pages of Howard's fiction. He seemed to find them intimately terrifying. As an intersting sidenote, Marvel Comics once did an adaptation of "Shadow of the Beast," but which did not feature the ghost of the dead ape, but a sorcorer who had infused his spirit into the body of a great hound,  which was then able to speak and walk upon its back legs. They changed Howard's tale, but the story has the same dark, eerie quality of a vintage Howard. Roy Thomas once wrote, in an editorial of Conan Saga,  a mag of Savage Sword reprints, that is was "difficult to re-create"Howard's concept of a hound standing upon it's hind legs." This was almost certainly an error, though it made me wonder if Howard DID write another version with the same title, about  wizard in the form of a hound. However, it was later suggested to me that I might have been thinking of another Howard story (which I was not confusing with SOTB) titled:


    "The Black Hound of Death"

      This tale, also set in the black pine woods of the deep south, involved a refugee who is fleeing from a former friend, a man named Grimm. The two men had originally been fellow adventurers in East Asia, when they had happened upon a lost Mongolian civilization. Grimm was captured but his friend betrayed him and escaped back to America. Grimm was tortured for years by the preists of the wierd cult, and later the man who escaped recieved a letter from Grimm and his picture. Grimm has literally been transformed into a monster by his time in the lost city, his faced surgically sculpted into the likeness of a canine's elonated fanged muzzle. The cowardly former friend flees deep into the pine barrens (another Southern Gothic setting. But Grimm dogs him, and captures the man's innocent young daughter, whom he captures and prepares to flay her alive before her father's horrifed gaze. This part of the story, is well, "grim", to say the least, and Grimm's overwhelmingly horrific (and unjust) intentions  make me nauseous typing this. However, the hero arrives in the nick of time and the girl is saved. Realizing he can only take one victim with him to the beyond, Grimm tears out his traitorous former friends' throat with his fangs. Yes, it's horrific in the extreme.

     "Usurp the Night"

     This is the story of a young man and his pretty fiance living in a peaceful suburban region, when strangely, the town's pets begin to disappear. This isn't given much concern at first, but next children begin to vanish, and finally adults. During this time, our hero makes the aquiantance of an eccentric old man who lives alone  a huge Gothic house. He fears for the  gentleman's safety, as the disappearances grow increasingly worse. During his visits, he begins to hear the sound of pattering in the attic upstairs. As time passes, the sounds of whatever lurks in the attic grow in volume, until at last they sound elephantine. The final twist of this tale may have been fresh back in the thirties, the hayday of Wierd Tales; these days, however, the reader can see it coming, almost from the start. The suspense is hair-trigger, though, and climax is harrowing, with the hero battling a slobbering, tenacled monstrosity form the Elder world with a sword n the blackness of the attic.


      "The Devils of Dark Lake"

     This one of REH's wierd fiction tales that I first managed to read in "The New Howard Reader," published in the nineties, and featuring unpublished and super-rare examples of his fiction. While much of this was lackluster to the horror fan, some real gems were to be found, this story being one of them. Another Southern tale of black magic, the reason for this tales's obscurity is likely because it's a rare example of Howard craming TOO MUCH phantasmagoria into a single story.It involves Juju sorcery, man-eating gators, deadly shroudweaving spiders, and shambling half-human beastmen as antagonists for the hero.


     "The Fearsome Touch of Death"

    Also called merely, "the Touch of Death," his story is (or was) also very obscure and was featured in the second issue of "The New Howard Reader." It, too, is a contender for REH's most terrifying fiction, after "Pigeons form Hell." It invloves a man who is called to spend the night wating over the corpse of a man who died. This fellow has terrible phobias about the dead coming to life, and in the dead of night, after the candle blows out, his fears take on fantastic proportions within his psyche. The strange thing  about is tthis story is that while the prose at one point is absolutely nail-bitingly riveting,

SEVERE SPOILERS AHEAD:

There is revealed to be no actual monster or supernatural monster in the story at all. It is literally a zombie tale in which the zombie is all in the protagonist's brain; yet Howard manages to make it one of the most terrifying tales of all time. This is quite an accomplishment.


     "Black Talons"

     This tale is set in the depths of the Congo, with white settlers fearing a native attack, and featuring a juju man who has been executed, and his macabre revenge. This was also published in "The New Howard Reader." There is an appropriately grusome finish to this; however, it seemed to me a re-hash of another Howard story, one of Solomon Cane, which ultiized a severed hand as an instrument of vengence. In "Black Talons," it's a severed head!

     "Pigeons From Hell"

    This is probably Howard's most riveting terror tale, of two men having to spend the night in a great old, decaying antebellum mansion. The horror begins when one of the men disappears upstairs, and returns as an animated corpse, blood and brains oozing through a cleft scalp, and gripping a blood-clotted ax, the weapon used to kill him. This begins the protagonist's descend into nightmare. But no, zombies are not the true horror of this tale; something MUCH worse, a thing able to make the dead walk, lurks the black maze of upper rooms. Howard delves into African voodoo for the origins of his monster in this tale. But while the term "zombie" is of voodoo origin, the concept of the creature called a "zuvembie," is uniquely Howard's own. However, the details he gives the reader on the powers and origins of the zuvembie are so vivid that it actually could have been drawn form folklore as well. As writer James Van Hise observed in his book, The Fantastic World's of Robert E. Howard, lamaeting that other authors of the time tended to reveal surpernatural goings on as fake, "Howard doesn't cheat,", when it comes to delivering an actual supernatural menace at the end. The final twist is one the reader might see coming, but it is effective nonetheless.

        "Under the Baobab Tree"

       This is interesting contrast to the tale above, becuase it is the one story I'm aware of in which Howard DOES "cheat," when it comes to delivering a true supernatural menace. It is a tale set in Africa, in which the protagnist a young warrior on his test of manhood. A "Ghost-fiend" of the dark appears to be stalking the tribe, evidenced by monstrous clawed footprints beneath a baobab tree. However, it turns out that the "monster," is actually the fraudulant creation of the villain, the local witchdoctor. This tale is also very obscure.



     There are many, many others, including all of the Solomon Cane stories, "Horror form the Mound," "Wolfshead," about a wolf that becomes a man, rather than the reverse, "Moon of Zembabwe," featuring a gigantic carnivorous ape with saber-like fangs and talons of a tiger, and number of tales about races of men driven underground where they evolved into a race of horrors.




    A near-complete list, and more thorough discussion of Robert E. Howard's horror can be found here:


http://medleyana.com/2015/10/26/the-short-horrors-of-robert-e-howard/


  There are some examples of Howard's weird fiction that became lost. Such is the case of stories such as "The Vulture's Roost," Valley of the Golden Web," "Wendigo! Wendigo!", and "the Crimson Line."
  If the story "Wendigo! Wendigo!" was about what it's title suggests, it might have been among Howard's best tales of terror. Other writers, most famously Algernon Blackwood, have written of the Wendigo, the monster of northern Canadian folklore; it would have been interesting to see what REH's take on it might have been.