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A few American
writers have successfully combined fantasy, horror, and U.S. Southern
regionalism. Along with Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Vincent Benet
before him, and Manly Wade Wellman and Joe R. Lansdale after,
Robert E. Howard was one of those masters. Howard’s talent
for writing macabre fiction and his deep interest in the history
and cultures of the U.S. South and Southwest came together in
a series of memorable regional horror stories. Howard’s
imagination populated the dusty plains of his native West Texas
with horrors from the age of the Conquistadors and Native American
legend. The bayous and piney woods of the Deep South hide wrathful
shapes of darkness that stir fear even in Howard’s hard-bitten
heroes.
Folk tales told to Howard in his boyhood inspired this masterpiece,
which Stephen King called “one of the finest horror stories
of [the 20th] century” and which Boris Karloff dramatized
on his “Thriller” TV series in 1961. Deep in the piney
woods, the ruined Blassenville plantation house hides a secret
from the cruel days of slavery. Two travelers, Griswell and Branner,
awaken the horror when they camp out in the old house, and only
Griswell survives to seek help from the local law officer, Sheriff
Buckner. Only by going back into the house at sunset, when the
ghostly pigeons fly out of hell, can Griswell prove to Buckner
that he did not murder Branner. Having escaped the lethal hatchet
of the lurking Zuvembie once, can Griswell survive a second encounter?
An unspoken curse hangs over the old burial mound on Steve Brill’s
West Texas farm. The sagas of the Conquistadors hint of a terrible
association between the mound and Don Santiago de Valdez, the
Spanish Dracula, whose bloodlust spanned two continents in the
age of Coronado. When a misguided quest for gold leads to Don
Santiago’s disinterment, only Steve Brill’s six-gun
and fighting spirit stand between the modern world and the shadow
of the vampire.
To the townsfolk of 1930s Lost Knob, Texas, Old Jim Garfield’s
accounts of life on the Texas frontier are colorful tall tales.
How could a man living in the 20th Century have ridden alongside
the heroes of the Texas Republic and fought Comanches in the years
after the Alamo, as Old Garfield claims? One youngster discovers
that Old Jim is telling the truth, when a ghostly Indian shaman
returns to claim the secret gift that has allowed the elderly
Texan to cheat death for almost a century.
In a drunken argument, cowboy Jim Gordon shoots and kills Old
Joel, a black farmer, and Joel’s wife Jezebel. Before she
dies, Jezebel lays a voodoo curse on Gordon. She pledges to return
from the grave when the time is ready, and as he rides north to
Dodge City on a trouble-plagued cattle drive, Gordon realizes
that the hatred of the voodoo people is implacable. The dead remember
their dreadful promises, and they always come back to fulfil them.
In the tangled fastnesses of Canaan, voodoo man Saul Stark works
a gruesome magic that turns men into soulless, misshapen swamp
dwellers. With this army of monsters, Stark plots to foment a
bloody revolt of former slaves and make himself master of Canaan.
Kirby Buckner plunges into the bayous to halt the conspiracy,
but even Kirby’s skill with pistol and Bowie knife may not
be enough to save him from Stark’s evilly alluring mistress,
the High Priestess of Damballah.
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