The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard

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The Cthulhu Stories
of Robert E. Howard
Edited by Paul Di Filippo
Word Fire Press ISBN:  9781680570984

If you are into H. P. Lovecraft you’ll know that his most famous legacy, a common thread running through many of his stories recalling ancient, tentacle, aggressive God-like creatures known in its various guises as Chtulhu... was not just something that Lovecraft wrote himself. He freely gave friends and correspondents licence to also reference this, sometimes somewhat tenuous thematic tentacle, in their own writings... often published in similar pulp magazines as Lovecraft’s own tales. So you had people like August Derleth and, I believe, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. One of these writers and pen pals was the late, great Robert E. Howard, who would be best remembered for his tales of his Cimmerian barbarian Conan, not to mention such characters as Solomon Kane and Kull The Conqueror. And it’s some of his stories which feature, rather tenuously I should add, in terms of this selection at least (I hear there are many other examples of his tales with Cthulhu elements) in the volume The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard, which was published a couple of years ago.

Now, I am mostly only familiar with Howard's Conan and Kane stories so I was very pleased to have this. As it is, there is a lot of stuff in here which I find oblique in terms of accessing even the sometimes hard to pin down Cthulhu element of Lovecraft’s tales and I have to warn you that if you are expecting horror stories full of madness and creeping dread... well, there are a few of those but there are also a lot of other things which are less likely to make you think of one of Lovecraft’s slithering horrors. For instance, I’d read one of the tales in this tome before... a Kull story called The Shadow Kingdom, in an equally unlikely tome for it to be collected in... a complete Conan in Weird Tales collection (reviewed here). The most this and, a fair amount of the other twelve tales joining it in this collection, has in common with the spirit of Cthulhu is maybe a brief reference to an ancient alien race, perhaps originating from the stars. Some of the stories will make more pointed references to Lovecraft creations such as Dagon and the demonic book known as The Necronomicon and, yeah, others have almost no tenuous grip on the subject at hand, it seemed to me. There are, however, a few tales which are absolutely fitting  in with the spirit and atmosphere of the tales and, as you would expect, Howard has his own way of doing things...

The editor makes the point, in his introduction, that Howard’s version of this ‘horror brand’ is less likely to result in the descent into madness for his main protagonists... Howard being someone who would have his characters meet the lurking dread in a less passive and more heroic manner. Indeed, by way of an example, there is a ‘round robin’ collaborative story near to the end of this volume which was issued as a challenge to some writers from Fantasy Magazine. The story is called The Challenge From Beyond and it’s started off by C. L. Moore and the writers A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long all add excerpts of the story as a chain to bring it to a conclusion...

It’s interesting to note that the authors of the piece really don’t do too much to hide their own style and although the story certainly gets from point A to B, the small chapters all seem to have a different energy to them. Once Moore has set things up and Merritt further has the main character’s mind transformed through the power of a well worn, black stone cube... we get to Lovecraft’s section where the whole thing is turned to absolute bleak terror and a fate worse than death for the main protagonist as he finds his mind swapped across the cosmos with an alien creature, with absolutely no hope of returning to his body. But then Howard comes in and suddenly, the hero is pretty happy with his lot because he is in an alien body with a human thinking mind and, taking just a shard of rock, overpowers the various aliens on their own world and becomes their God. So, yeah, not a passive madness but a conquering spirit for sure. What really annoyed me about this story, however, is that the year before I read a book called The Complete Fiction of H. P Lovecraft (reviewed here) and this tale certainly wasn’t included... how the heck is that complete then?

And it’s a hit and miss affair, as you would expect but there are certainly some things of note. For instance, Howard uses a black, monolithic stone to run a common thread between some of his unrelated tales and there’s more than one story in here which has people transformed from his present day in the 1930s and back to ancient times to have an adventure, before returning to their modern day guise. One of these is actually, although people may want to argue with me on this (and I don’t care), a Conan story. People Of The Dark was written a month or so before the first of Howard’s more widely acknowledged Conan tales and tells of a man who, on his way to murder a rival in love with a pistol, gets magically transported back to ancient times at the same location and spins a tale which is a metaphor for the one going on simultaneously in the 1930s. Granted it’s all told from the first person but much if it is told by the barbarian character Conan who also, of course, invokes his God Crom. So, frankly, I don’t know why this isn’t included in collections of the Conan stories just because it’s considered by some a prototype (perhaps even by Howard himself) because it seems pretty plain to me.

And talking of Conan, there’s even reference in another story in here, again set in more contemporary times to when it was written, where the black ring of one Thoth-amon is invoked. So, yeah, there are Conan references in these tales as well as the Lovecraftian mentions.

Now, in the 1970s, I remember there were one or more story collections which were basically tales of different Howard characters that were transformed, by unscrupulous publishers who shall not be named here, by changing the character and location names to ones found in the Conan tales and reprinted as Conan stories. I believe the story in this collection entitled The Gods of Bal-Sagoth may indeed have been a victim of this practice at some point over the decades... and possibly more than one of the tales in this story may have been further transformed, perhaps.

There are some other tales which almost seem like dry runs for Conan stories by Howard here too... as you might expect. More than one story included here is a little close in structure or idea to existing Conan tales which may have come later and, certainly, the tale here entitled Worms Of The Earth, which tells a tale of Bran Mak Morn, the king of the Picts... and his vengeance unleashed on certain agents of the Roman army, seemed to me to bear a striking structural similarity, in a much simpler and less round about form, to Howard’s one and only Conan novel, The Hour Of The Dragon, if I’m not mistaken. I can see where he may have built on the idea at play in this tale.

My favourite story in this collection, however, has little to do with Cthulhu. It’s called Skull Face and it’s obviously been ‘inspired’ by Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, if Fu Manchu was called Skull Face and was a hideous, resurrected Egyptian sorcerer mummy. Starting in the opium dens of Limehouse, the main protagonist actually starts off as a henchman, of sorts, owing the titular character the debt of his life but, soon, the beauty of an oriental girl and the heroism of another character inspire him to attempt to kick his hashish habit and team up against the atrophied but powerful, demonic wizard. It’s one of the longer stories in this volume but certainly the jewel in the crown, as far as I’m concerned. Although, I did find it interesting that, in another story called The Fire Of Asshurbanipal, the two adventurous heroes have to avoid looking at a demonic manifestation causing destruction around them to their enemies, much like the climax of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

And that’s about it from me on this one. The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard is a handsome tome with a beautiful cover (on the hardback at least) depicting a Cthulhu terror and, on the wraparound, a man fleeing for his life as it doggedly pursues him. The tales are not all nearly Cthulhu enough, for my liking, for the tome to use such a title but, it doesn’t really matter all that much as it’s a fine collection and Howard is as good a writer when he’s telling tales that don’t involve his famous Cimmerian, as when he’s depicting the Hyborian Age. Definitely worth a read and some space on your bookshelf if you are a Robert E. Howard fan, for sure.