The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

Here are Howard’s greatest horror tales, all in their original, definitive versions. Some of Howard’s best-known characters – Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and sailor Steve Costigan among them – roam the forbidding locales of the author’s fevered imagination, from the swamps and bayous of the Deep South to the fiend-haunted woods outside Paris to remote jungles in Africa.

The collection includes Howard’s masterpiece “Pigeons from Hell,” which Stephen King calls “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century,” a tale of two travelers who stumble upon the ruins of a Southern plantation – and into the maw of its fatal secret. In “Black Canaan” even the best warrior has little chance of taking down the evil voodoo man with unholy powers – and none at all against his wily mistress, the diabolical High Priestess of Damballah. In these and other lavishly illustrated classics, such as the revenge nightmare “Worms of the Earth” and “The Cairn on the Headland,” Howard spins tales of unrelenting terror, the legacy of one of the world’s great masters of the macabre.

Contents:

• Foreword by Greg Staples
• Introduction by Rusty Burke
• In the Forest of Villefère
• A Song of the Werewolf Folk (poem)
• Wolfshead
• Up, John Kane (poem)
• Remembrance (poem)
• The Dream Snake
• Sea Curse
• The Moor Ghost (poem)
• Moon Mockery (poem)
• The Little People
• Dead Man's Hate (poem)
• The Tavern (poem)
• Rattle of Bones
• The Fear that Follows (poem)
• The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux
• Casonetto's Last Song
• The Touch of Death (aka The Fearsome Touch of Death)
• Out of the Deep: A Tale of Faring Town (aka Out of the Deep)
• A Legend of Faring Town (poem)
• Restless Waters
• The Shadow of the Beast
• The Dead Slaver's Tale (poem)
• Dermod's Bane
• The Hills of the Dead
• Dig Me No Grave
• The Song of a Mad Minstrel (poem)
• The Children of the Night
• Musings (poem)
• The Black Stone
• The Thing on the Roof
• The Dweller in Dark Valley (poem)
• The Horror from the Mound
• A Dull Sound as of Knocking (poem)
• People of the Dark
• Delenda Est
• The Cairn on the Headland
• Worms of the Earth
• The Symbol (poem)
• The Valley of the Lost
• The Hoofed Thing (aka Usurp the Night)
• The Noseless Horror
• The Dwellers Under the Tomb
• An Open Window (poem)
• The House of Arabu (aka The Witch from Hell's Kitchen)
• The Man on the Ground
• Old Garfield's Heart
• Kelly the Conjure-Man
• Black Canaan
• To a Woman (poem)
• One Who Comes at Eventide (poem)
• The Haunter of the Ring
• Pigeons from Hell
• The Dead Remember
• The Fire of Asshurbanipal
• Fragment (poem)
• Which Will Scarcely Be Understood (poem)
• Golnor the Ape
• Specters in the Dark
• The House
• Untitled Fragment
• Appendix: Notes on the Original Howard Texts by Rusty Burke and Rob Roehm