"Black Canaan," "Black Hound of Death," and "The Grisly Horror" by Robert E. Howard

Tarbandu's recent blog post about Spanish artist Sanjulian reminded me about my acquisition back in February of 1979's The Howard Collector, edited by Glenn Lord, for which Sanjulian provided the cover painting of an axe-wielding muscleman freeing a scantily clad woman from captivity in some dimly lit temple or other place of unspeakable deviltry.  The Howard Collector is a collection of documents that first appeared in the periodical The Howard Collector, including fiction, poetry, essays and correspondence by Robert E. Howard and writing about Howard by Howard's friends and fans like E. Hoffmann Price and Emil Petaja.

I saw The Howard Collector at 2nd Act Books in Charlottesville, Virginia, on a street where they have lots of fun bookstores, antique stores and restaurants.  (Charlottesville is a fun place to spend a day or two; my wife and I had great pizza at Lampo and saw beautiful Burne-Jones prints at Blue Whale Books.)  It looked like an interesting read, but I couldn't find any price marked on it, so I asked the guy working in there what it would cost.  Even though the door to the store had been unlocked and this guy had enthusiastically welcomed me in, he told me he couldn't sell any books today because the store was not open and the computers were not in operation.  I offered to pay cash, but he refused to accept it; eventually he just told me to take the book for free.  So I did.

As I had expected, The Howard Collector is a cool book, with plenty of interesting documents; Howard's father's letter to H. P. Lovecraft describing Howard's suicide is particularly memorable, as is Howard's own letter to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright asking for some of the money Wright owed him for stories Wright had purchased long ago and already published, a sum totaling over $800!  In E. Hoffmann Price's June 25, 1936 letter to Lovecraft mourning the loss of Howard and describing the personality of Conan's creator, Price says that "his Conan series were really the dregs of his talent, not the tops."  So let's read three Howard stories set not in the Hyborian Age or Valusia or the limits of the Roman Empire, but in the swamps and pine forests of the American South!     

"Black Canaan" (1936)

Included in The Howard Collector is a 1931 essay by Howard called "Kelly the Conjure-Man," a brief description of what is  purported to be Arkansas folklore about a mysterious African-American hermit who arrived in the area 75 miles north east of Smackover shortly after the Civil War.  Six-foot tall Kelly lived alone in a pine forest by a creek for about a decade before vanishing; reputed to be a wizard, black people would venture to Kelly's cabin to receive protection from spells and cures made of powdered snake bone.  As time went by Kelly began to acquire a bad reputation, his sorcery being blamed for the mental disorders of insane blacks living in the area; Howard speculates that perhaps his disappearance in the late 1870s was a case of one of his victims achieving revenge on Kelly and hiding his body in the creek.

Regardless of how much this is "real" folklore and how much just Howard making stuff up, "Kelly the Conjure-Man" is a fun and evocative bit of writing, and Kelly would serve as the basis for the character at the center of the 1936 story "Black Canaan."  In a letter to August Derleth (also in The Howard Collector) Howard complains that editorial interference ruined the version of  "Black Canaan" that appears in Weird Tales.  It seems that Howard's preferred version is available in some recent publications, but these are not necessarily easy for your impecunious blogger to acquire, so I am going to give the 1936 Weird Tales version, available for free at the internet archive, a go.

Canaan is a triangular stretch of back-country in the American South, somewhat isolated by the three rivers that form its borders, "Black River," "Nigger Head Creek" and "Tularoosa Creek."  Canaanites are independent-minded and have little intercourse with outsiders, and Howard's tale is about some dangerous interlopers who try to revolutionize the place and make themselves its rulers!

Our narrator is Kirby Buckner.  Born and bred in Canaan; a major landowner there, Buckner is something of a community leader.  While in New Orleans, he learns by mysterious means of unspecified trouble back home, and hurries back to that swampy and pine forested country.  It is after midnight when he arrives in Canaan on horseback, and is accosted by a beautiful "quadroon" woman who emerges from the woods.  Buckner has never been attracted to a black woman before, but this girl has an animal magnetism that can "make a man blind and dizzy" as well as good English and facial features as "regular as a white woman's."  Buckner only barely resists her voluptuous charms.  Rejected, the woman sics three "gaunt black giants" on him; Buckner dispatches them with his percussion cap pistols and his Bowie knife.

When Buckner hooks up with the other white men of Canaan he learns that Saul Stark, a huge muscular black man with perfect English, has moved into Canaan and has quickly become a leader among the local blacks.  The black farm hands have not showed up for work, and are congregating in the black village of Goshen, while the blacks who live in the white town, Grimesville, have not been seen for days.  The leaders of the white community fear a black uprising is imminent.  A black spy, Tope Sorely, is captured, and he reveals that Saul Stark is a voodoo conjurer and has the local African-American population in fear of his sorcerous power--those who resisted him have suffered an unspecified but nightmarish fate!  Stark plans to lead the blacks in a campaign of murder that will exterminate the local white population and then be crowned king of Canaan!

While Buckner is off on his own investigating Stark's abandoned cabin, the quadroon girl reappears, and gloats that she has used some blood Buckner shed during his rumble with those "giants" to cast a spell on him.  Sure enough, after she has again vanished, he finds he is powerless to resist the urge to make his way through miles of swamp and through all kinds of scary creeks to where Stark is leading the Canaan blacks in a major voodoo ceremony.  The seductive girl plans to make the torture and murder of Buckner the climax of the ceremony, but the loyalty of one of Buckner's friends, Jim Braxton, who sacrifices himself (he gets killed by a monster who rises from a creek) foils the ceremony and saves Buckner's life.  The girl dies, and the failure of the ceremony shatters the local blacks' fear of and allegiance to Stark.  The horrible spell Stark worked on any black who resisted him is revealed--Stark turned these recalcitrants into aquatic monsters like the one who killed Braxton.  Stark's power broken, the monsters turn against him and Stark kills them with a revolver.  Out of bullets, Stark is attacked by Buckner, who kills him in a fierce hand-to-hand struggle; when the fight is over Buckner finds Tope Sorely, the spy who spilled the beans, halfway through the process of being transformed into one of those monster amphibians--Buckner puts him out of his misery.

The most striking thing about this story to a person reading it in 2019, of course, is how racist it is, in its surface details--the "n-word" is used with reckless abandon--and in its basic themes--blacks are inexplicable aliens, both childish and demonic, reminding us of the line from Kipling's "The White Man's Burden."  Blacks are repeatedly compared to animals, and the American blacks act irrationally while the smarter black invaders are wholly selfish and malevolent.  Blacks in "Black Canaan" show no camaraderie or fellow-feeling for each other, the manipulative interlopers cavalierly abusing and contemptuously exploiting the ignorant American blacks while the black masses, when trouble appears, betray their fellows or stampede right over them.  This is a marked contrast to the white society of Canaan, which Howard depicts as a united and organized democratic polity based on mutual respect and characterized by a willingness to look out for each other and take risks to ensure each other's safety.

A major theme of "Black Canaan" is the vast gulf that lies between the whites and blacks of Canaan--the whites have no idea what goes on in the black community, and there is no point in them even trying to understand what the blacks are up to.  Blacks have knowledge, and means of acquiring knowledge, which whites lack and cannot even comprehend.  This idea is nailed down on the story's first page.  Kirby Buckner first learns that something is up back home when an old black woman emerges from a crowd, utters to him a brief phrase, and then disappears among the teeming throngs of people on the streets of New Orleans.  How does she know what is going on back in Canaan, how did she know who Buckner was or where he was?  It is impossible for a white person to tell, and pointless to guess!

No need to seek confirmation; no need to inquire by what mysterious, black-folk way the word had come to her.  No need to inquire what obscure forces worked to unseal those wrinkled lips to a Black River man.  

When Buckner goes to investigate Saul Stark's cabin he senses that, in Stark's absence, it is inhabited by some inexplicable and invulnerable creature that will destroy Buckner should he open its door, a creature with which blacks are familiar but whites are wholly ignorant.

Man and the natural animals are not the only sentient beings that haunt this planet.  There are invisible Things--black spirits of the deep swamp and the slimes of the river beds--the negroes know of them....   

Opening the door to Stark's cabin, like trying to understand black people, would be fruitless and/or dangerous, and Buckner declines to do so.

"Black Canaan" is all about boundaries and divisions (the three rivers that separate Canaan from the rest of the world are mentioned repeatedly, for example.)  Some characters in the story live in the fuzzy border zones (the "liminal space" you might say if you were in grad school) between black and white (Saul Stark and the quadroon girl with their perfect English) or between land and water (the blacks Stark turned into amphibious monsters) and between the living and the dead.  The second time she meets Buckner, the quadroon girl tells him that she will perform the Dance of the Skull at the voodoo ceremony that evening, and that nothing, not even death, can stop her from doing so.  During their trip through the swamp, just before he gets pulled into a creek and strangled to death by one of the amphibian monsters, Buckner's friend Braxton shoots at the girl when she briefly appears amid some bushes.  She escapes, the shot apparently only a graze, but in the climax of the story, when she dances before Stark, the assembled blacks and a hidden Buckner at the voodoo ceremony, we realize she was hit right in the chest and is in fact dead, her corpse animated by magic and her powerful will to complete the Dance.

It goes without saying that these people who live in the border zone, who are neither fully black nor white, fully neither of the land or the water, or neither truly living nor fully dead, are a terrible danger to the natural order and must be destroyed to maintain peace, and the very fact of their existence hidden from the rest of humanity.  The last lines of "Black Canaan" reinforce the theme of white ignorance of black knowledge, and remind us of all those Lovecraft stories in which knowledge of the true nature of the universe drives people mad:

They [white people] will never know the shapes the black water of Tularoosa hides.  That is a secret I share with the cowed and terror-haunted black people of Goshen, and of it neither they nor I have ever spoken.     

This is a quite good Weird Tales-style adventure horror story if you are not totally repelled by its in-your-face racism; the story achieves its goals.  The magic scenes and monster scenes and fight scenes are all good, and Howard succeeds in setting a mood and in integrating peculiar elements of the culture of the American South (fear of black revolts, for example) with supernatural and monster story themes.  A little more might have been done with the characters; Saul Stark and the quadroon girl (this woman doesn't even get a name!) are interesting villains and the story may have benefited from them being fleshed out further, and I think the story certainly would have been improved if we knew more about Buckner's relationship with Jim Braxton, the man who sticks by Buckner in the face of terrible danger and in fact loses his life saving Buckner's.

"Black Canaan" has been reprinted many times, first in Skull-Face and Others in 1946 and later in a bunch of illustrated paperbacks that I vaguely recognize...maybe my brother has them.  I'd certainly be curious to see all those Jeff Jones and Ken Kelly illustrations.

"Black Hound of Death" (1936)

A black criminal, Tope Braxton (Howard insouciantly reuses names) has murdered Constable Joe Sorely and is loose in the "densely-timbered river country" the local blacks call "Egypt."  Our narrator, Kirby Garfield, ventures into Egypt on this dark night to warn East-coast transplant Richard Brent, who lives in a lonely cabin in the pine forest, of the danger.  Before he reaches Brent's place Garfield comes upon a dying black man who says he was assaulted by a white man, and then a mysterious figure grapples with Garfield and flees.  What is going on in this pitch dark forest?

We learn the backstory to this nightmarish adventure when Garfield hooks up with Brent, Brent's servant Ashley, and Brent's sexy niece Gloria, who has come to the woods from fabulous New York City in response to a telegram she had believed, erroneously, was sent by her uncle!  You see, five years ago Brent was on an expedition to Mongolia when his party was attacked by worshipers of Erlik!  (Wow, two Erlik appearances in a row on MPoricus Fiction Log!  This blog is full of surprises!)  Only two members of the expedition survived the initial attack, and Brent and the other American, Adam Grimm, were surrounded by the death-worshipers.  They had only one camel left to them, and so when night fell Brent knocked out Adam Grimm and rode the camel through enemy lines to safety.  Brent figured Grimm had been murdered by the Erlik cult, but, instead, they used their esoteric science to transform him into a werewolf!  Seven months ago Grimm came to New York, his transformation obscured by a crude disguise, intent on exacting revenge on Brent; Brent fled to a place where he thought he'd never be found, this secluded Southern pine wilderness.

Paranoid Brent thinks Garfield must be working for Grimm, and refuses him entry into his cabin.  While hanging around outside our narrator is slugged and tied up by "squat, apish" Tobe Braxton.  Howard gives us a whole long description of Braxton, who has "thick lips" and "wide, flat nostrils" and so forth--"He was like a shape from the abyss whence mankind crawled ages ago."  Braxton is working with the werewolf, who promised to help Braxton escape the authorities if he helps him kill the Brents.  (Who trusts a werewolf?)

Life in these pine forests is tough, with the men getting involved in feuds and fights all the time, so Garfield is up to the task of wrestling Braxton to the death.  Howard gives us a long gory fight scene here, one in which he belittles the value of finesse and intelligence and tells us that it is sheer strength and animal ferocity you need in a real fight.

I fought Tobe Braxton as the rivermen fight, as savages fight, as bull apes fight.  Breast to breast, muscle straining against muscle, iron fist crushing against hard skull, knee driven to groin, teeth slashing sinewy flesh, gouging, tearing, slashing.  

Having dispatched Braxton, Garfield returns to the cabin to find Ashley is dead, Brent is tied up with his clothes on, and Gloria is tied up with her clothes off.  Grimm the wolfman gives a speech in which he contrasts wimpy backstabbing citified Brent with stolid country boy Garfield, putting forward Howard's typical thesis that the barbaric life is better than the civilized life and the barbarian more noble than the decadent city boy.  The wolfman is about to flay Gloria alive with a skinning knife when Garfield shoots him to pieces through a window; the monster staggers to Brent and murders him (by biting his throat) as his final act.

"The Black Hound of Death," which I have to warn you is as racist as "Black Canaan," is a good horror thriller that voices Howard's usual theme of the superiority of primitivism to intellectualism in more than one way.  After first appearing in Weird Tales (I read the scan at the internet archive) it has been reprinted in a number of Howard collections; it inspired the title of the ninth volume of The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard.

"The Grisly Horror" (1935)

In some reprintings this one is titled "The Moon of Zambebwei," which is a somewhat more appropriate and less vague title.  Among other places, this one was printed in a 1971 issue of the Magazine of Horror.  I read the original Weird Tales version which is available at the internet archive.

In response to a telegram, Bristol McGrath rushes back from the West Coast to the pine woods where he grew up, to the mansion of his worst enemy, Richard Ballville!  On the nearly impassable road to the Ballville mansion he comes upon a prostrate form--it is Ahmed ibn Suleyman, Ballville's Arab servant, and he is dying from the torturing he recently received!

McGrath sneaks up to the mansion, looks in the window, sees that Ballville is being tortured by a "bestial black" (Howard compares the torturer to a frog.)  Among other atrocities, Ballville has suffered the burning onto his chest a strange sign--a sign that world traveler McGrath recognizes from his time in Africa!  The sign of Zambebwei!

McGrath leaps in and kills the torturer with the dagger he acquired and became expert with while in Afghanistan.  Dying Ballville tells McGrath a crazy story.  Three years ago he faked the death of Constance Brand, a woman they both loved, and kidnapped her and has held her in this house ever since.  Brand refused to marry him, so he called on the services of an African wizard, John de Albor.  (I guess wizardry is another job Americans won't do.)  Instead of using his powers to make the woman marry Ballville, de Albor, desiring her for himself, became leader of the blacks who work Ballville's land and made himself master of the estate!  Luckily, Ballville hid Brand from de Albor right before the takeover--she is in a secret cave on the other side of a swamp, a cave sealed by an iron door with a combination lock.  With his dying breaths Ballville tells McGrath the combination.

Ahmed's brother Ali arrives, seeking vengeance, and joins forces with McGrath.  McGrath and this second ibn Suleyman go to the secret cave, enter it, find blondetastic beauty Constance.  That is when the bogus Ali ibn Suleyman throws off his disguise and is revealed as the diabolical "octaroon" John de Albor!  He paralyzes McGrath and carries off our hero's dream girl.  De Albor wants her for himself, but the local blacks seize her and imprison the wizard--they want to sacrifice Brand to their new god, the god de Albor recently introduced to them.

McGrath recovers from the paralysis, liberates de Albor from his single guard, and the two of them agree to work together to rescue Constance Brand from the god of Zambebwei, which is a carnivorous gorilla with talons and fangs like a tiger's, a monster de Albor somehow brought to America from the jungles of Africa.

This thing was an affront to sanity; it belonged in the dust of oblivion with the dinosaur, the mastodon, and the saber-toothed tiger.         

De Albor of course betrays McGrath at the first opportunity.  Pushing Howard's themes of the triumph of the primitive over the intellectual, clever and unscrupulous de Albor keeps tricking the gullible McGrath, but McGrath's iron constitution allows him to shake off the effects of de Albor's drugs and blows to the noggin.

Like in a lot of fantasy fiction, even fantasy fiction by an immortal genius like Gene Wolfe (see The Wizard Knight), the hero of "The Grisly Horror" interrupts the sacrifice of a beautiful woman.  McGrath saves the day by shooting the man-eating ape in the head as it is about to devour his lady love--the god of Zambebwei goes berserk, killing de Albor and running riot among the blacks before expiring.  Now McGrath can make Constance Brand his wife!

Of these three stories "The Grisly Horror" is the weakest.  Howard fails to make the characters' motivations and actions believable and includes various elements that just feel silly.  The plot machinery that gets an African wizard and a man-eating gorilla to a secluded American mansion is way too clunky and contrived.  (If I had been Howard's editor, I'd have told him "Since you don't bother to take advantage of the peculiarities of the American South to lend an atmosphere to this story, why don't you set it in a British or French colony in Africa, which would make the presence of Arabs, witch doctors, carnivorous gorillas and pagan blacks a little more believable?  Such a setting would also allow you to exploit the fear of white people isolated in a nonwhite environment.")  A clumsy plot can be forgiven if a story offers some powerful, compelling scenes that thrill or chill you, but there are no scenes in "The Grisly Horror" that even come close to the quadroon scenes and the monster scenes in "Black Canaan" or Kirby Garfield's to-the-death wrestling match with Tope Braxton in "Black Beast of Death."  "The Grisly Horror" feels like a kind of half-assed job, especially since so many of its basic components would be used more successfully in "Black Canaan," published the following year. 

Barely acceptable.

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I might have my social media accounts suspended for recommending such unabashedly racist stories, but "Black Canaan" is a superior tale of horror and violence, and "Black Beast of Death" also has some good points.  I suggest that you won't miss anything if you skip "The Grisly Horror."

Whew!  That's enough Weird Tales for now.  We'll be tackling a science fiction novel in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.