Like a Pigeon from Hell: The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

This week saw the 108th anniversary of the birth of the pulp king of sword and sorcery  and the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard. You probably already know this, but along with Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, he was a titan of the pulp era and his books have long been available in countless and now collectible paperback editions. Time was kind to the art of a man who committed suicide when he was 30 years old, unable to face a future without his beloved mother, who lie comatose and near death when he put a pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. 

When it comes to Howard's fiction, I have been mostly unfamiliar with it, preferring the horror/dark fantasy tales from HPL and CAS. But these two paperbacks - Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors (Baen Books, May 1987, cover by Steve Hickman) and Pigeons from Hell and Other Weird and Fantastic Adventures (Zebra Books, June 1976, cover by Jeff Jones) - feature mostly Howard's own brand of HPL-tinged horror/sword-and-sorcery/dark fantasy tales, all published in Weird Tales throughout the 1930s. You probably already knew this too, but there is some fantastic stuff here.

Sadly, both covers feature misleading - albeit spectacular! - imagery: neither Cthulhu nor dinosaurs truly appear in the stories. But they are threaded with the fictional forbidden tomes, esoteric knowledge, and dark gods that are familiar to readers of horror, but they are also purely Howard's own: the heroes here aren't pasty scholars and recluses, but men of muscle, bone, and sinew - which he won't often let you forget - while locales are often misty craggy lands from a deep and forgotten ancient age rather than the wilds of Arkham or the historic university environs of Providence. Howard even goes for the one-up on HPL when a character from "Pigeons from Hell" states, "Witchcraft always meant the old towns of New England, to me - but all this is more terrible." Zing!

I kinda skimmed through stories that contained vast passages about pure races, tribal honor, bravery, vengeance, that sort of thing (sword and sorcery - not my sort of thing), even when mixed with vague Lovecraftian darkness. Still, Howard's tales of grue work well and work often, and a few - "Pigeons from Hell," of course, "The Black Stone," "The Fires of Asshurbanipal" - I consider classics of their era. The famous and intriguingly titled "Pigeons from Hell" is a virtually perfect example of pulp horror. From its haunted house opening to its voodoo revenge turn all the way to its lurid, heart-palpitating climax, Howard never falters in his ability to propel a story forward (modern readers could probably do without the consistent use of the N-word, period-appropriate as it may be). I've read this tale a few times over the decades, read one comic book version, and recently saw its very well-done adaptation on the old "Thriller" show. Listen:

"A zuvembie is no longer human. It knows neither relatives nor friends. It is one with the people of the Black World. It commands the natural demons - owls, bats, snakes and werewolves, and can fetch darkness to blot out light... It dwells like a bat in a cave or a house... It can hypnotize the living by the sound of its voice, and when it slays a man, it can command his lifeless body until the flesh is cold. As long the blood flows, the corpse is its slave. Its pleasure lies in the slaughter of human beings."

Eclipse Books, 1988

It works like gangbusters, and if you haven't read "Pigeons," step away from your computer or smartphone or whatever and get to it! "The Black Stone" showcases Howard's main contribution to the Cthulhu mythos, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or Nameless Cults, by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, an adventurer-scholar who of course discovers something he shouldn't have and is murdered - only after he finishes his book. This is the most overtly Lovecraftian story, with its academic narrator finally learning the horrors hinted at in a forbidden book are - gasp! - all too real. Howard whips himself into a frenzy of outlandish pulp prose  when he sets out to describe those "nameless rites" our old pal HPL was too squeamish to depict forthrightly. In a brooding forest beneath the moonlight, the narrator has found the titular object, but watches from afar:

...the worshipers, howling and foaming at the mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rendering one another's garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up an infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror I saw him rip the tiny body open...

Ballantine 1979, Paul Lehr cover art 

I mean what! So, so good, really. The Ballantine paperback cover above captures the mood perfectly. "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" was also excellent, successfully mixing men's adventure in the exotic land of Arabia with mind-blasting cosmic horror. The back-story from Howard, about a green jewel, an ancient desert land of black stone, and a vengeful sorcerer, reads a bit like "The Shadow out of Time," and the two protagonists' entrance to this lost, deserted city evokes At the Mountains of Madness.They're looking for that fabled jewel, but they've been followed across the burning desert sands:

The shrieks had faded into a more horrific silence. Holding their breath, they heard suddenly a sound that froze the blood in their veins - the soft sliding of metal or stone in a groove. At the same time the hidden door began to open, and Steve caught a glimmer in the blackness that might have been the glitter of monstrous eyes. He closed his own; he dared not look upon whatever horror slunk from the hideous black well. He knew that there are strains the human brain cannot stand, and every primitive instinct in his soul cried out to him this thing was nightmare and lunacy.

Well, duh. Howard had a long obsession with obscure history, languages, and peoples, and enriched his pulp writing with it; "The People of the Dark," "The Children of the Night," "The Garden Fear," and "The Valley of the Worm" are the best examples of this proclivity. While not necessarily to my taste, I can see how young Weird Tales readers found their minds stimulated and expanded on such fare - which made Howard the success he was, and why he's still read today. Other tales like "Old Garfield's Heart," "The Thing on the Roof," and "Dig Me No Grave," are pure enjoyable gruesomeness with twist endings but retain a charm and readability for all that. Robert E. Howard's muscular prose, vivid action scenes, moody horrors, and ability to conjure in writing precisely what he imagined, can hijack your mind to a place in a past in which men are made of iron, honor is king, pigeons are from hell and dark and hungry gods demand nothing less than our very blood.

Let's Go Play at the Adams' by Mendal Johnson (1974): The Last and Only Day

Innocence is the most frightening sight of all.

This compelling but squicky little cult novel by one-time author Mendal W. Johnson is the kind of book that makes you reevaluate what you read for entertainment and why - I mean, why was I somewhat disappointed that Let's Go Play at the Adams' wasn't as disturbing an experience as I'd... uh, expected (not hoped; no, surely not that)? You can tell just by the reprint cover art (Bantam Sept 1980), with its exploitation and fetishization of sexual abuse, that moral discomfort will be in full effect ("A novel of lingerie horror"? Oh, wait, oops). There's also a promise of rare and illicit thrills. Johnson has written a very strange work that offers credible motivation - at first - for a group of five seemingly normal kids who, during one hot rural summer week while their parents are away on vacation, tie up their downy blonde 20-year-old babysitter and... well, you know.

These five children and young adults -  Dianne, 17, John, 16, Paul, 12, Bobby, 10, and Cindy, 9 (they've dubbed themselves the Freedom Five in a bit of stick-it-to-the-man early '70s counterculture vernacular) - have upended one of the most basic social conventions: that kids and adults are basically two different species and that the adults are the superior ones. And now, they've captured an adult. They shouldn't have been able to, even with all the planning, because of that bedrock social convention, but here they were, out in the open, breaking the law between children and adults, and nothing was happening. They ignored the taboo, and no lightning fell. 

This transgressive thrill motivates them, especially for grubby, twitchy 12-year-old Paul, but ultimately they know and resign themselves to the bald fact that they are entirely responsible and answerable for their own actions, no matter what comes next. They get unknowingly existential, as when Bobby explains to the captive: "Like when we were all figuring out if we could do it, it seemed like something we had to do. Like if you think you can do something, you have to"... till the end, when they realize someone has to pay for the end result of their hellish "fun." 

 Original non-exploitative 1975 paperback

Loosely based, as you may have guessed, on the torture/murder of Sylvia Likens (like Jack Ketchum's much more accomplished 1989 novel The Girl Next Door), Johnson's work goes down dark avenues and doesn't want to come back. Horror fans will want to keep reading, but they might find, as I did, that Johnson seems conflicted as to why he wants to go to those cruel and twisted places; is his motivation to show us the darkness so we can better understand it? Or is the author secretly getting off on the whole sitch? Judging by the endless descriptions of the knots and ropes and other items that bind poor Barbara in more and more uncomfortable positions, these S&M aspects seem less depictions of fictionalized reality than Freudian slips from Johnson's repressed fantasies. 

As for characterization, the tormentors are well-drawn, particularly budding sociopath Paul and oldest sister Dianne, who has some commonality - no matter how denied - with their babysitter. But Barbara is more blank cipher than sympathetic victim and often Johnson intellectualizes her plight rather than giving us the raw, naked hysteria and then detachment that I can only imagine would be real. The author saw Let's Go Play as a political allegory (read here), which honestly I didn't even think of while reading. I suppose if I ever read it again it will be all I can think. This makes me ambivalent about the novel.

 Mendal W. Johnson (1928 - 1976)

 

The final chapter, a shuddering repercussive fadeout that gives no quarter and no ultimate answer, is as unremittingly sad as it is, at moments, difficult to read. It will most likely haunt you afterwards. In the epilogue, we learn of the intimate guilty and ambiguous thoughts of Barbara's one-time roommate Terry as she grieves: Barbara, I hated you for being so easy and simple and happy. You deserved it, I hated you, too...Beauty, I knew you, and I never want to see you again... Goodness, go out of the world so that we can live in it. This seems so ungracious, so unseemly, so terrible a thought to have about a murdered loved one that it actually has a ring of truth. In his own sometimes awkward, sometimes pretentious manner, Johnson might be on to something.

That is some tagline

When he's not focused on babysitter bondage, I believe Johnson is saying that instead of ennobling us, beauty can make us feel lesser beings by showing us its unattainability; that we are cramped and craven, as it awakens in us whispers to dole out pain and humiliation, a torturous desire to topple beauty, to stain it in the dirt-crusted earth from which we can never escape. As if beauty were somehow an escape from the harshest of life's realities, as if it were some ideal beyond the everyday banalities we must endure. How dare beauty remind us, by its very existence, that we'll never possess it? 

The difference tonight - her nakedness - did not much affect Bobby. Barbara appeared to be sweet, defenseless, and all that, but to him, she was also a trifle repugnant. The raw thrust of genitals and hair was a little too much for him at his age; everything was overscale compared to his own slight build. Her nudeness was simply another grotesque item in Bobby's troubled week.

Arthur Machen Born Today, 1863

A towering figure in weird fiction, Arthur Machen (who died in 1947) was an influence and an inspiration for many of the writers I've covered here at TMHF: Lovecraft of course, and the whole circle of Weird Tales folks like Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long, on up to King, Straub, Campbell, T.E.D. Klein and Karl Edward Wagner. And while Machen's output is out of my self-defined era of "vintage" horror fiction, these wonderful paperback covers most certainly are not! These collections date from the 1960s to the early '80s, American and British editions, with covers highlighting various lurid and sensational aspects of the Welshman's superb tales. They're are all highly collectible paperbacks as well; I've lost one or two over the years and have not yet replaced them.

These top four paperbacks are from Pinnacle in the 1970s, two reprints of two volumes. Robert LoGrippo is responsible for the garish, blood-drippy covers from 1976. The fifth Pinnacle paperback is from 1983 and contains all the stories from the two-volume set. Can't even recall which one(s) I owned, and I haven't reread even "The Great God Pan" in over 15 years. Surely it is one of the seminal tales of classic horror.

In 1972 the highly-regarded Ballantine Adult Fantasy line published The Three Imposters (1895). This novel - with Boschian art again by LoGrippo - in episode form includes two of his most influential stories, "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "The Novel of the White Powder." Below you can see the British paperbacks with those titles, from Corgi in the mid-'60s; love the covers by Josh Kirby.

 

Two more British paperbacks from Panther - a publisher known for putting out lots of horror fiction - dated 1975, with eye-catching occult cover art from Bruce Pennington.

Fawcett Horror Paperbacks of the 1980s

 

By the early 1980s, Fawcett seemed to have moved on from the moody, studied paperback cover art they used in the 1970s. Perhaps the growing horror field of the new decade gave them more competition and those books didn't sell as well any longer. Perhaps talented artists who worked in paints and canvases and good old-fashioned suggestive spookiness were too expensive. These covers are simpler, more direct, not as impressive, and in a couple cases just corny, tasteless without being quite ridiculous enough for a laugh. The three volumes in The Howling series, Gary Brandner's werewolf saga, (1977/1981/1985 respectively) utilize the same monstery font and stylization; I do kinda like the "one fang/two fangs/three fangs" motif.

 

When Paul Schrader remade the 1940s classic B&W Val Lewton horror film Cat People in 1982, Brandner wrote the novelization. Sure, this cover has the same image as the movie poster, but what an image! Truly one of my favorite horror ladies of all time.

Vampire Notes (1989) and The Keeper (1986), Robert Arthur Smith. No idea who Smith is, but he got some of the better '80s covers from Fawcett. 

Killing Eyes, John Miglis (1983) Yikes. I mean, look away! Those eyes are so unsettling, I missed the bullet hole first time I saw this cover.

 

The Boogeyman, B.W. Battin (1983) This kind of simplicity actually works: the child's scawl, the bloody fingerprint that looks almost real...

 

The Beast, Walter J. Sheldon (1980) Move along, nothing to see here folks.

 

Death Sleep, Jerry Sohl (1983) He sure sounds like Freddy Krueger...

Falling Angel, William Hjortsberg (1978) - Yeah, it's from '78, but I'm throwing this in as a freebie. I've featured this cover before, in my review; it's absolutely one of my favorite books that I've read for this site! I even sent an effusive fan email to Hjortsberg a month or two ago (drinking and the internets don't mix), but luckily received an appreciative reply. Whew.

Fawcett Horror Paperbacks of the 1970s

Thanks to the incomparable bibliographic efforts of both The Paperback Fanatic and The Vault of Evil, I'm able to feature a mere morsel of the strangely tasteful yet effective paperback covers featured on horror/thriller novels published several decades ago by Fawcett, which includes Fawcett Crest and Fawcett Gold Medal imprints. So many skilled, eerie, beautifully specific paintings, evoking in us the ghostly chill of mere shadows and gloom... and making you realize how much most paperback horror covers today suck. Hauntings by Norah Lofts (1977) above, the creepy old crone, glaring owl, and robed figure make for a wonderfully gothic horror cover, even if it is all painted in gold.

American Gothic, Robert Bloch (1974). Ah, yes, By the author of Psycho, the ever-present quote. That dark figure following... looks a bit like Bloch's other fave psycho, that Saucy Jack!

Leviathan, John Gordon Davis (1977) Really really great cover in the style of Jaws.

The Dark Below, Michael Hinkemeyer (1975) Love the contrast between title and cream-colored cover art. Veeerrry menacing.

The Running of the Beasts, Bill Pronzini and Barry Malzberg (1976) I've heard good stuff about this thriller... gotta love the reflection of the woman in the knife. Well, I suppose you don't gotta, but I do.

The Night Creature, Brian Ball (1974) A perfectly reductive horror title, and such an evocative macabre piece of cover art, darkly unfocused except for that look of paralyzed fright.

The Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot (1982): You Can't Even Touch the Books They've Read

I had always viewed the vampire as the interloper, but if they were interwoven in our history, if they were responsible for many of our ancient churches and monuments, how must they view themselves? They were not homeless ghouls or wanderers. They communicated with one another in ways we could not fathom. What sense of possession must they feel for this world, and how must they view us mere scurrying mortals?

Here's a paperback original from Avon Books that was in print for about five minutes back in 1982 but has garnered a reputation as a stellar and original vampire novel, much sought after by collectors who will pay ridiculously inflated prices for it. People wax nostalgic over the novel and rue the day they lent out their only copy, never to be seen again (I had a copy in 1990, read a few pages, thought meh, then traded it in at a used bookstore). I guess I can see why. In The Delicate Dependency, nearly all the traditional vampiric trappings are eschewed; the late Michael Talbot gives us a story not from the vampire's POV - as one might expect from its subtitle A Novel of the Vampire Life - but from that of a mortal doctor ensnared in that endless life. I may not have been as blown away as those diehard fans, but it is worth searching out for fans of cult horror novels. But then... is it really horror? God, that question, again?! Yep, again.

The time is the turn of the last century. Dr. John Gladstone is a man of science, a successful yet widowed English virologist who lives the examined life, who has benefited from the Ages of Reason and Enlightenment and is refreshed and renewed by them. And then, of course, he runs into - literally! - a vampire. Dr. Gladstone however recognizes the gravely injured young man who fell beneath his carriage's wheels, recognizes him from a dream-like encounter he had as a child with a person of such unearthly and supernatural androgynous beauty that Gladstone takes this individual to be an angel, an angel that seemingly stepped whole and breathing from da Vinci's "Madonna of the Rocks."

Talbot's vampire Niccolo, the angel in red

The man is named Niccolo Cavalanti, and he will lead Gladstone into a night-time world of which he had never imagined. Through machinations inconceivable to the mortal mind, Gladstone's life and the lives of those he loves - his two daughters Ursula and the "idiot savant" Camille - become entwined with that of the vampire. Soon Camille is missing, and so is Niccolo... and at his door one morning is the Lady Hespeth, a driven woman of society with her own woeful tale of the vampire, and her own missing child. Gladstone and Hespeth join together and begin their search for those who seem to be only legend. They are now caught in the enormity of vampire destiny, mere mortal cogs in the eternity of the undead.

The Delicate Dependency is quite the rational philosophical treatise (I recall Rice doing something similar years later with The Queen of the Damned). These immortal creatures crave not blood but knowledge, and knowledge is the ultimate good. Their centuries are filled with neither blood orgies or guilt-ridden despair but with learning, traveling, art, building, collecting, experimenting. Their lust for life is not motivated by a desire for death but to amass as much total experience as possible. The vampire as a race are cunning and brilliant and nothing will stop them because first, no one believes they are real, and then, they are "evolved" so far past us they can communicate with one another without speaking, and have such wealth as they can appear in public as eccentric as they wish. They are effectively "invisible" to us.

But there's also some bosh about freemasonry and the illuminati, two topics I find so utterly useless that I nearly swoon with boredom every time I try to read their Wikipedia articles. I guess it's because the vampire is, as I said, so far beyond us mortals they are like another race entirely. It definitely makes sense within the novel, these "Unknown Men" who work behind all the world's scenes, but Talbot doesn't drone on about those specific esoterica. It colors his novel in just an appropriate amount, hinting at the timeless time and exceeding grasp of the vampire.

At a dense 400 pages, Dependency is overloaded with Talbot's sensuous descriptions of men, women, children, angels, buildings, furniture, clothes, art, cities, etc., and this adjective OD can get exhausting. It does however create a sort of hothouse atmosphere, steamy and oppressive, which is apt since the orchid itself - as seen on the Avon paperback cover, evoking decadence, and purple, royalty - functions as a metaphor for the vampire (as does Gladstone's study of virology). One of the oldest and most brilliant vampires, Des Etiennes, cultivates a vast greenhouse of rare orchids on his estate, just as carefully as his kind cultivate their immortal minds. It's just that humans can't begin to comprehend this cultivation, how advanced the vampire is, in his learning, in his communication, in his accomplishments. Talbot's characterizations are top-notch as conflict and ambition and love and deceit vie within human and inhuman alike. Gladstone fortunately is a rich character, driven by love for his daughters, fear of his late father, an ugly competition with another doctor, ultimately fearful he may never find his way out of this strange new world he's accidentally stumbled upon.

Michael Talbot (1953 - 1992)

There is virtually no bloodshed; this is pure dark historical fantasy. Little is made of the so-called romance of the vampire, much less its horror at having to literally feed on humanity; no odes to the never-ending night or the pleasures of the hunt or the taste of innocent blood; no slick fangs being licked by pink tongues or red-mouthed ghouls clad in black or eternally young fish-belly-white women whose darkened eyes speak of nightly hungers and worse - uh, can you tell I kinda missed that stuff? But I'm not being fair: that's not the novel Talbot set out to write. And actually I'm glad he didn't, because do we really need another vampire novel like that? Well, yeah, I suppose I will always want to read that traditional kind of vampire novel, but Michael Talbot has written something much more substantial, something special, a unique and engrossing paperback original that retains a power to reach out from the mists of time. How satisfying it is, or how much you want to pay for it, well, that's between you and you.

Finding a copy for 50 cents

*And oh yeah, if you're wondering how and where I came across my copy, any diligent book hunter will appreciate this: last summer I was vacationing at a Carolina beach and was fortunate enough to find a used bookstore and a local public library book sale. So I of course found two copies! For about 50 cents apiece. Sorry guys. We can hope that someday it gets reprinted... yeah, right.

Postscript: The Delicate Dependency has indeed been reprinted! Go here to buy it for a normal person price.

The Crabtastic Mr. Smith: The Dell Paperback Covers of The Crabs Series

For your crustacean delectation, I present these paperback editions of Guy N. Smith's infamously crass yet undeniably charming Crabs series. Which is about giant man-eating crabs. Which of course you knew. Originally published in England by New English Library and Grafton, during the late 1980s the series was repackaged for American consumption by Dell. To which I'm sure pulp-horror fans shouted a heartfelt Huzzah!

At the top, you'll see Night of the Crabs (UK 1976/Dell 1989) The original (but not the first published in the States; that was Killer Crabs). But this cover doesn't give you a sense of scale so there's no way to know that they're GIANT CRABS. Boo. But check this out!

Killer Crabs (UK 1978/Dell 1989) Okay, here you can see this is a GIANT CRAB. Also, I'm assuming, a KILLER CRAB. Read it early this year.

The Origin of the Crabs (UK 1979/ Dell 1988) The crabs have crossed the pond!

Crabs on the Rampage (UK 1981/Dell 1988) Is that crab drooling?

Crabs' Moon (UK 1984/Dell 1988) Now that's an ENORMOUS CRAB! But what makes me happiest about this cover is the correct use of the plural possessive apostrophe, which is quickly becoming obsolete because people are illiterate.

Crabs: The Human Sacrifice (UK 1988/Dell 1989) What the eff is going on here?! Why is a GIANT CRAB using a knife?! Why is it sacrificing anything? Is it a special ritual knife the crabs brought over from Old Blighty? Does anybody know? Most of these Dell editions are collectors' items and not easily found; I don't think I'm gonna spend $20 to find out. However, they are available as something called an "ebook" which I'm led to believe is a book that is not printed on paper between two cardboard covers and that you can't find after diligent searches in musty old used bookstores. That, truly, is a tale of horror unlike any I've ever known...

The crabtastic Mr. Smith himself