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.
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