The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard Read Free Page B

“The Horror from the Mound,” Howard turned increasingly to his native environs for other tales of horror and the supernatural. “The Valley of the Lost” makes use of the theme of little people, essentially transferring elements of “The Children of the Night” and “Worms of the Earth” to the Southwest and giving the story an ending we might more expect of Lovecraft than of Howard. “The Man on the Ground” is a very short tale but a gripping meditation on the power of hate, a crystallization of all Howard had learned in his study of Texas feuds. It is a fine example of that ability we noted earlier to lend almost tangible form to an abstract emotion. “Old Garfield’s Heart,” in which early Texas Indian fights and legends play a prominent part, is about as close to home as Howard gets in a story: Lost Knob is his fictional counterpart to his hometown of Cross Plains. The dark magic of “The Dead Remember” is all the darker when set against the authentic backdrop of a cattle drive. These stories, along with his increasingly confident handling of westerns, convinced Lovecraft that “in time he would have made his mark…with some folk-epic of his beloved southwest.”
    The story generally considered Howard’s finest horror tale, though, was not set in the Southwest, but in the South. Texas straddles both geographic regions, and Howard explained to Lovecraft that a dividing line ran between Dallas, which was in East Texas and looked to the south, and Fort Worth, which was, as its slogan goes, “Where the West Begins.” Bagwell, where the Howards lived when Robert was about eight years old, is east of Dallas, on the fringes of the Piney Woods area that takes in parts of southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, and East Texas. And it is in Bagwell that we find the genesis of “Pigeons from Hell.”

    “I well remember the tales I listened to and shivered at, when a child in the ‘piney woods’ of East Texas, where Red River marks the Arkansaw and Texas boundaries,” Howard wrote to Lovecraft (using the phonetic spelling for his father’s native state). “There were quite a number of old slave darkies still living then. The one to whom I listened most was the cook, old Aunt Mary Bohannon…. Another tale she told that I have often met with in negro-lore. The setting, time and circumstances are changed by telling, but the tale remains basically the same. Two or three men—usually negroes—are travelling in a wagon through some isolated district—usually a broad, deserted river-bottom. They come on to the ruins of a once thriving plantation at dusk, and decide to spend the night in the deserted plantation house. This house is always huge, brooding and forbidding, and always, as the men approach the high columned verandah, through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away. The men sleep in the big front-room with its crumbling fire-place, and in the night they are awakened by a jangling of chains, weird noises and groans from upstairs. Sometimes footsteps descend the stairs with no visible cause. Then a terrible apparition appears to the men who flee in terror. This monster, in all the tales I have heard, is invariably a headless giant, naked or clad in shapeless sort of garment, and is sometimes armed with a broad-axe. This motif appears over and over in negro-lore.”
    Just how familiar Howard might have been with “negro-lore” must remain a matter of some conjecture (he lived most of his life, other than that short period in Bagwell and a few weeks in New Orleans, in communities in which there were few, if any, African Americans), but certainly he used what he did know to good effect. Critical consensus seems to concur with Stephen King’s remark that “Pigeons from Hell”
    is “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century.” It was later adapted for television’s Thriller! , an