"The Fearsome Touch of Death," "The Black Stone" and "The Thing on the Roof" by Robert E. Howard

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from early 1930s issues of Weird Tales, and today we're looking at three horror pieces by the creator of Conan of Cimmeria, Robert E. Howard, two stories directly connected to the Cthulhu Mythos and one essentially mainstream story about fear and death.

"The Fearsome Touch of Death" (1930)

In our last episode we read from the February 1930 issue of Weird Tales Edmond Hamilton's space opera "The Comet-Drivers."  In that same issue is Howard's "The Fearsome Touch of Death," which would not reappear until 1974, when it was included in the first issue of the fanzine The Howard Review.  In our enlightened 21st century it has been included in several books.

This is a brief and I might say trifling tale with no SF elements, but well written.  A misanthropic hermit, Adam Farrel, a man with no friends or relatives, has died.  Falred, a man who knew him slightly, volunteers to sit up overnight with the corpse in the deceased's remote house.  (I guess until pretty recently it was normal for the living to make sure a dead person was never alone until he or she was buried, and that some people still do this; I am from a totally secularized and deracinated family and have never had any direct experience of this.)  As he sits next to the dead Farrel, then dozes on a couch in the same room, Farrel begins to experience a terrible fear, a fear that grows until he cracks and something terrible happens.

A minor, essentially mainstream, story, but well put together.  Thumbs up.          

The first issue of The Howard Review was reprinted in 1975 with a different cover

"The Black Stone" (1931)

This is a pretty famous Cthulhu Mythos story that I read back in my New York days, I believe in an edition of Jim Turner's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos with a John Jude Palencar cover.  (Turner's anthology, for which he did not take credit on the cover, is, I believe, a sort of revision and update of August Derleth's 1969 anthology of the same title.)

As an epigraph, "The Black Stone" has four lines from Justin Geoffrey, whom we are later informed was an insane early 20th-century American poet.  The start of Howard's tale is a little biography of von Junzt and a description of his book Nameless Cults and its publication history.

The narrator of "The Black Stone" is an American scholar who has read the rare first edition of Nameless Cults and conducts additional research on The Black Stone, a monolith inscribed with illegible characters that sits in an out of the way region of Hungary; von Junzt hints it is very very old and it is the subject of many scary folktales.  The narrator, after reading up, goes to the little village near the Stone to talk to the locals, and learns all about the bloody history of the region around the Stone.  For a long time a bunch of unneighborly pagans who were always raiding the nearby Christian communities lived there, but these pagans were massacred by Muslim invaders in the early 16th century; the current inhabitants of the area are descendants of Christian colonists who resettled the area after the Mohammedans were ejected.

Despite all the cautionary tales he has read and heard about the monolith (one villager, who met the poet, suggests it was spending time near The Black Stone which drove Justin Geoffrey insane),  our dude goes to take a look at The Black Stone.  I am in no position to criticize this guy's contrarian life-choices--growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s and '80s I constantly heard New York City described as a hellscape where the streets ran red with blood but I eagerly moved there in the 1990s and my only regret is that I ever had to leave. 

Of course, I was cautious enough not to fall asleep on the subway or in Central Park after sunset--our narrator in rural Hungary does the exact thing everybody has been telling him to not do: fall asleep next to the monolith on Midsummer Night!  He has a horrendous nightmare in which he observes those pagans, people with brutish features and squat bodies, perform a human sacrifice before The Black Stone that is replete with gruesome violence against women and ecstatic animalistic sexuality!  Howard holds back but little when describing this bloody and sexually-charged ritual, which climaxes with a monstrous toad-god appearing on the apex of the monolith--the priest of the pagans is lifting a bound young woman up to this disgusting apparition when the narrator wakes up from his dream.  

(This whole story gave me a Felicien Rops vibe, and the talk of a Polish Hungarian Count who fought the Muslims nearby The Black Stone, and the murder of a baby, reminded me of Dracula.)  

After the dream the American scholar does a little feverish archaeology and digs up a final clue, a document written by one of the 16th century Muslim invaders that relates now they not only killed all the pagans who worshipped at the monolith, but also, in a terrible fight, the monstrous toad-god itself!  The narrator is convinced that the Earth has been haunted by, and ruled by, monsters, and may still be today!

A good bit of Yog-Sothery--everything in the story is interesting, fun, and/or strange.  Thumbs up!  "The Black Stone" has been reprinted a multitude of times in Howard collections as well as in Lovecraftian-themed and general horror anthologies. 

The Tim White cover on the 1988 edition (right) is awesome, but keep in mind that 
Howard says The Black Stone is 16 feet tall and a foot and a half thick

 "The Thing on the Roof" (1932)

Like "The Black Stone," "The Thing on the Roof" begins with four lines from Justin Geoffrey, and includes a description of the publication history of Nameless Cults.  

Our narrator this time out is a British academic, an expert on the Indians of Latin America, and a rare book collector.  He and another British researcher on Native American history and culture, Tussmann, don't get along: they had a big dispute over the narrator's book on the Yucatan, and, besides, Tussmann is a money-grubber--how gauche!  But the narrator agrees to help Tussmann when the guy asks a favor--Tussmann wants a copy of the first edition of von Junzt's Nameless Cults.  It takes three months, but finally our narrator acquires a copy and hands the old book over.  Tussmann in the book finds the clue he has been looking for--a strange temple he saw in Honduras, one whose architecture was unlike any of the other ruins in the area, and which the local Indians disavow, must be the structure von Junzt calls The Temple of the Toad!  According to von Junzt the temple houses a mummy that wears a toad-shaped jewel that is a key to a fabulous treasure buried deep in a crypt.  Tussmann hurries to book passage to Central America, where he is determined to get his mitts on that treasure!

   
Some months later Tussmann returns to England and invites our narrator to his estate to show him the toad-shaped jewel and to tell him about his adventure in the New World.  Tussmann complains that the toad-jewel was the only thing he could bring back--there was neither gold nor precious gems in the crypt, and the mummy vanished while he wasn't looking, presumably stolen by the "rogues" he'd hired to accompany him on the expedition. Neither Tussmann nor the narrator can tell what type of stone the toad jewel is, or read the inscriptions on the necklace from which it hangs, though they remind Tussmann of the inscriptions on the Black Stone in Hungary.

(Howard closely connects this story and "The Black Stone" in a way that is fun; another example is how in the 1931 story the narrator is puzzled by von Junzt's unconventional use of the word "keys," and here in the 1932 tale von Junzt uses the word to describe a jewel.)

The narrator notices that Tussmann is anxious, acting as if somebody has followed him from Central America, and after a sound is heard from upstairs he flies into a rage at his servant and precipitously retires to his room.  The narrator looks over the passages on the Temple of the Toad in Nameless Cults again and finds a line suggesting that the temple's treasure was the god to whom it was dedicated.  Moments later the narrator hears a scream and rushes to investigate, finding Tussmann dead in his room, the toad-jewel stolen, and clues left behind suggesting Tussmann's killer was quite inhuman.

This is a pretty good Lovecraftian story.  It is shorter and ends more abruptly than I had expected, I having expected extended scenes of Tussmann and/or the narrator in the house, terrified by the sounds coming from the roof, maybe glimpsing the monster, maybe the monster killing the servants before finally getting Tussmann, but Howard instead wraps the story up pretty quickly, focusing his efforts on developing a sense of mystery and springing a chilling little surprise at the end instead of on generating suspense.  (The little surprise is the realization that the monster was up on Tussman's roof the entire time the narrator was there, that the book collector heard it while approaching the house but dismissed the sound as something quotidian.)   

"The Thing on the Roof" has been reprinted many times all over the globe in both Howard collections and anthologies since its first appearance in Weird Tales.

Joe R. Lansdale, in the intro to 2005's People of the Dark, says that he feels the Conan stories are Howard's best work, but other critics and SF fans, like Robert Bloch (see his intro to the 1979 edition of Wolfshead) disagree, finding Howard's non-Conan stories superior.  "The Fearsome Touch of Death," "The Black Stone" and "The Thing on the Roof" have me thinking Bloch and those who agree with him may have a point.

More early 1930s Weird Tales in our next episode.