Beyond Conan: The Horror Literature of Robert E. Howard

Michael Wood returns fresh from his lecture on pseudo-archaeology for our course on H.P. Lovecraft to take on one of HPL’s contemporaries and most frequent correspondents, Robert E. Howard. Despite his enormous influence on popular culture, Howard’s name is barely recognizable as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and master of the sword and sorcery genre. But the troubled author also produced a significant body of work that was an inventive blend of dark fantasy and horror in tales like Red Nails (first serialized in 1936 in Weird Tales) and “Pigeons from Hell,” the latter tale adapted for an episode of the Boris Karloff-hosted 60s horror TV series, Thriller. Howard also created horror-adventurer, Solomon Kane, in a series of tales that inspired a recent film adaptation, and he produced (upon Lovecraft’s encouragement) numerous tales inspired by Lovecraft’s fictional topography, which helped to generate an intertextual body of fiction that is now dubbed the “Cthulhu Mythos.”