Let's explore a Robert E. Howard bestiary by reading three late 1920s stories from Weird Tales penned by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, all of which, coincidentally, have animal titles. These stories have all been reprinted in books, including books I own or have access to via the magic of internet piracy, but I will be reading the versions that appeared in Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine through the medium of scans at the internet archive. Click the links below for quick access to these scans your own self.
"Howoooooo!" "Hissssssss....." "Hehehheheheheheeh!"
"Wolfshead" (1926)
"Wolfshead" is the cover story of the April 1926 issue of
Weird Tales and it gets a blood-dripping woman-in-peril cover that is just bursting with energy and emotion.
Weird Tales covers often look static, but this one really conveys motion and feeling to the viewer, so kudos to E. M. Stevenson.
The narrator of "Wolfshead" is an old man hanging out with some soldiers in the 16th or 17th century or whenever, and tells them a story of his youth, prefacing his tale with the suggestion that his story will relate the scariest event any man will witness until the arrival of the end of the world.
Dom Vincente da Lusto was an adventurer and he built a castle on the coast of West Africa to trade with the natives, acquiring slaves and ivory and other valuables and shipping them up to Europe. Negotiating with African chiefs and driving local labor with the lash is hard work, so every year Dom Vincente invited a bunch of European friends down to his castle for a few weeks of revelry. Our narrator was one such invitee, and he describes the castle and the surrounding landscape and the assembled Europeans, among thtem men who love to drink and women who love to flirt (and maybe more!) One European who drinks heavily but never gets drunk, and is otherwise quite stern and taciturn, is a de Montour. "Wolfshead" is a sequel to
"In the Forest of Villefere," a story in which, you will remember, de Montour fought a werewolf. Well, it is quickly quite clear that de Montour himself is now a werewolf, what with his comments on the moon and warning to everybody to bolt their doors securely at night.
A beautiful woman is assaulted and left bleeding, her clothes torn to reveal her body; a white man in the castle is torn to pieces, as are local blacks out in the jungle--who is committing these atrocities? Native worshippers of the leopard? Some of the rowdier European guests, who are having a feud over a woman who has been flirting with both of them? De Montour, whom Howard has been hinting is a werewolf but not necessarily so bad a guy? Or Dom Vincente's rat-faced nephew Carlos, whom the narrator, when he isn't describing how he beat the hell out of his slave, Gola--Gola volunteered to be the narrator's slave because he was fascinated by the narrator's hair(!?)--has been foreshadowing is the true villain of the story.
Things escalate radically when Carlos tries to seize the castle himself by murdering Dom Vincente and leading an army of Africans to storm the place and the werewolf enters the fight, performing unimaginable deeds to decide the battle's outcome and resolve its own eerie fate!
"Wolfshead" is a good werewolf story and a good white-people-up-to-their-necks-in-danger-in-Africa story. The terror and violence and exploitative eroticism are all there, and Howard also comes up with his own theory of lycanthropy and how it operates that is pretty cool, more epic and weird than the general werewolf "rules" which are regularly presented to us. The story is also full of disturbing ethnic and sexual stereotypes and sexist and racist behavior--just about everybody in the story is morally compromised--but don't we read horror stories to be disturbed? Thumbs up for "Wolfshead," another Howard story worth seeking out.
"Wolfshead" is justly popular and is the title story of a Howard collection which has been graced by cover illustrations by such savants as Frank Frazetta and Paul Lehr. After reading such a cool story, and seeing these awesome and evocative cover paintings, you have every reason to say to yourself "The speculative fiction world really is full of talented people!"
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The '68 printing (left) has as an intro an excerpt from a letter to H. P. Lovecraft written by Howard;
the '79 edition (right) has an intro by Robert Bloch of Psycho fame;
both intros are well worth the time of the weird aficionado |
"The Dream Snake" (1928)
"The Dream Snake" debuted in the same issue of
Weird Tales as one of the most famous and influential of all weird or speculative fiction stories, H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," an issue the cover of which seems to illustrate a story about an evil piece of furniture. Even though our pal from Texas won the cover illo just two years ago with the great "Wolfshead," this cover doesn't even mention Howard's name!
A bunch of people are hanging out outside at night. The moon rises, and one of the party, Faming, responds to the appearance of this heavenly body by going pale and rigid, by biting his lip so it bleeds. His friends notice, so Faming explains the uncanny reason the moon affects him so.
Like plenty of people in the kinds of stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Faming has been having a dream all his life in which he inhabits the life of a similar man in radically different circumstances. This dream feels so real that at times Faming wonders if that life might be the real one and this life the dream!
In that other life, Faming is a fugitive living in a hilltop bungalow in Africa, surrounded by grassland. He lives with a servant, a Hindu ("Hindoo"), also a fugitive. The dream is almost the same every time he has it, and covers a few days time. In the dream, he comes home from an unsuccessful hunting expedition, his rifle broken beyond repair. He finds his Hindu companion absent, and clues suggest the man was carried off or swallowed whole by a mind-bogglingly colossal serpent! With no rifle, Faming is horrified the snake will come for him and he will be powerless to defend himself. All night he listens in horror to the snake move through the tall grass, to its pushing at the bolted door! The bungalow has a window, and Faming knows if he sees the snake through the window he will go insane! The huge reptile does not reveal itself, and during the day Faming hurries towards the coast. When night falls he is still making his desperate way through the grasslands, and he looks back and in the light of the moon to see the tall grass waving in the still air--the giant snake must be behind him! And closing in!
Faming wakes up before the snake catches him--but lately the snake has been getting closer and closer before he awakes!
That night Faming's friends here a scream and rush to Faming's room to find him dead, his body crushed, as if by an impossibly huge constrictor snake.
This is filler material but Howard handles it very well--thumbs up! "The Dream Snake" is very smooth and economical, with the odd notes--why is Faming a fugitive in the dream? Why is his servant a Hindu?-- adding to the air of menace and mystery. (Gola's bizarre fascination with the hair of the narrator of "Wolfshead" serves a similar purpose--it doesn't add to the plot but it adds to the atmosphere of alienness and disorder.)
"The Dream Snake" has reappeared in a bunch of books with terrific covers, including one I own, the edition of Pigeons from Hell with cover illo by Jeff Jones that features two of your favorite warm-blooded reptiles, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Pteranodon. Let's also today celebrate the edition of Pigeons from Hell with an Esteban Maroto cover, where we find some of your favorite cold-blooded reptiles, among them the cobra.
"The Hyena" (1928)
Here's another story that was reprinted in
Pigeons from Hell. You can also find it in the various editions of
The Dark Man and
Shadow Kingdoms. "The Hyena" debuted in an issue of
Weird Tales that carries a story by August Derleth and serials by Murray Leinster and Ray Cummings, all of which we may very well find ourselves reading as we continue our
Weird Tales journey.
One reason I like stories in which people are in space or on the moon, in spacesuits, that kind of thing, is that in the vacuum of space or on the surface of an alien world death is just moments and millimeters away--one mistake, one bit of carelessness, a little bad luck or betrayal or negligence on the part of a comrade and you are done for. The setting of such a story generates a tension which is exciting.
I feel the same way about these stories of white people in Africa or some such place. As in outer space, in Africa it is like the whole universe around you is out to destroy you, so you'd better keep on your toes! And just as the science of what is going on in the void between the worlds or on the surface of the moon is mysterious and alien, the culture of Africans and the plants and animals of Africa are alien, inscrutable, will kill you you know not why, kill you you know not how.
(Of course I refer to the outer space and the Africa of fiction--I know next to nothing about space or Africa in real life and am sure Africa is a great place.)
I say all this as a preamble to telling you I really enjoyed "The Hyena." Thumbs up!
Our narrator, Steve, is a young man newly arrived in East Africa, with a job on a cattle ranch. Steve is a fish out of water. He doesn't speak the language of the locals, the Masai, and he doesn't have much in common with his boss, a Boer. He doesn't really like to hunt, to kill animals, or to boss the blacks around, and when the blacks start sniggering that he is womanish he has to beat one to maintain his dignity and reputation. We get the impression Steve even felt uneasy and out of place back home in Virginia when he tells us he didn't know how to act around women back there and would avoid them.
Living in the area is a singular black man, very tall, very lean and muscular, his skin a different shade than that of the Masai, his facial features--the thin nose, the thin lips--suggesting he has some Berber blood. Confident and well-spoken, Senecoza the fetish-man gives Steve an inferiority complex, and Steve comes to hate the fetish-man, based more on instinct than any evidence. The Masai fear Senecoza and avoid him, while the white ranchers like him and trade with him.
Howard admires barbarians and the primitive and so we shouldn't be surprised that Steve's intuition, even if it seems to be based on simple racism and childish envy and fear, turns out to be correct and Senecoza turns out to be a monster who can turn into a hyena at will and who is plotting to lead a crew of cannibals with filed teeth in a campaign of murder against all the white ranchers. The hints of magic early on and the fight scenes that ensue once Senecoza's powers and plans are made plain to Steve and us readers are pretty good, quite exciting--Howard excels at this sort of thing. Also effective are Steve's and Senecoza's relationships with a woman who comes to the ranch from New York, a beauty who exerts a powerful attraction on both the sexually naive Virginian and the masterful dominating fetish-man. The woman from the Big Apple is open-minded and finds everything in Africa just fascinating and she and Steve don't see eye to eye about Senecoza at first, but she gets an education when the fetish-man rips her clothes off and ties her up and she has to be rescued by Steve.
Like "Wolfshead," "The Hyena" is a well-crafted adventure and horror story and it covers some of the same themes and has many of the same disturbing attributes as the tale of de Montour the werewolf. Quite entertaining.
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Three good stories. It is always gratifying to read the work of a writer and find that he deserves his high reputation. These stories buttress Robert Bloch's contention that the Conan stories are far from Howard's best work. I should look into the collections Wolfshead, Pigeons from Hell and The Dark Man and Others and read the included stories I have not yet blogged about. Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log and see what comes of that idea.
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