Snowshoes discarded as an encumbrance, he slid down the frozen declivity until his feet struck something that snapped with an inauspicious crack. The rib-cage of a headless skeleton, the inhumanly slender bones of which identified it as one of the svartalfar. Now that the terrain no longer sloped away from him, his trek brought him alongside similar leavings again and again. This was the killing ground of something unimaginably powerful and insatiably bloodthirsty.

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We’re barreling towards Christmas and, as always in early December, posting has become awfully light around these parts. Finn is running his movie theater, [redacted] is traveling for a school soccer tournament, and Steve is hiding behind the ten-foot-tall stack of books in his to-be-read pile, plotting new sorceries to unleash on his coterie of blog admirers. That leaves lonely old me to take a break from working on three different print issues of TC long enough to check in here and mouth off about the latest Howard book to hit the mean streets.

THE BEST OF ROBERT E. HOWARD VOLUME 2: GRIM LANDS

This book appeared in late November, giving Howard fans the first complete Best Of set worthy of the name since Skull-Face and Others in 1946. In a sense, these two volumes are designed more for the reader who is not yet a fan — as Rusty has often stated, the intention was to be able to hand these books over to the unconverted and say, “Here — if nothing in these pages captures your imagination, then REH ain’t for you.” With Conan, Kull, Kane, Costigan, Elkins, and a host of minor celebrities all vying for the reader’s attention, I’m guessing that few people will walk away without something tickling their fancy. Whether your mind drifts towards low comedy or high drama, dark history or the bright glare of a boxing ring, blades of Damascus steel or the smooth gleaming barrel of a Winchester, there’s many things within these pages for you. I haven’t yet, but I intend at some point to read these cover to cover, savoring the interplay and the thrill of having Robert E. Howard’s finest tales and poems presented one after the other, without the usual low-grade filler bringing the reader down from the rhetorical highs of his best stuff.

The art matches the high standards set by Crimson Shadows, and indeed by the “Adventurers of Two-Gun Bob” comic strips the Keegans have been producing for Dark Horse’s Conan title. After flipping through this latest book, I stand by my previous proclamations that the Keegans have done the most well-researched, most daringly original, and, in a word, the best work out of all the Wandering Star/Del Rey artists. Not to take anything away from the others, but clearly there is a fire burning here that had been smoldering for years, a desire to do right by Robert E. Howard that was not going to be denied. Filtered through the prism of Ludwig Hohwein and spiced with thoughtful, often tenderhearted nods to everyone from Pyle and Wyeth to Ditko and Schulz, Jim and Ruth make full use of the massive literary sandbox they have been given to revel in. I don’t profess to have any real skill at judging art or spotting influences with any accuracy, but even I can notice that there’s an insistent stream of quiet, almost subliminal homages popping up here, referencing everything from old newspaper comics to the distinctive pulp cover art of the 1930s to memorable compositions of favored film directors. Even the most minor touches delight, such as the drawing on page 286 that manages to capture the indefinable gloss of an old image from the dawn of photography, showing us that touching familial warmth that often peeked out through the stiff poses and solemn demeanor of people caught in the firing-squad glare of then-futuristic Daguerreotype cameras.

Unlike previous volumes, there are no drafts or miscellanea here, just an introduction by Rusty Burke and a much longer afterword by TC‘s own Steve Tompkins. In the years since Wandering Star’s first release in 1997, Rusty has developed a certain confidence of purpose with these introductions, a surety and clarity that serves both the book and Howard fandom well. The somewhat tentative, still-gelling musings of old have solidified into a measured case for Howard’s talent and worth that strikes a dulcet tone of strength, without resorting to either the hyperbolic screeches of fandom or the increasingly de rigeur cluelessness of most pro writers who write about REH. For those of us in whose minds Howard looms large, it’s sometimes difficult to resist overloading pieces for a general audience with excess baggage of a sort appealing only to die-hard Howardists. Like in his recent National Review interview, Rusty has become increasingly adept at riding this line, giving newbies the information they need while providing hints of avenues of further discovery to those so inclined. I’m more anxious than ever to see Rusty knuckle down and complete a Howard biography, because it’s more apparent each day that he’s reached a place in his mental wanderings where he could really do the subject justice.

Steve’s essay at the back of the book is the Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Brooklyn at his most unfettered, the literary equivalent of The X-Men‘s Magneto raising his gauntleted hands to the heavens and summoning an entire city full of metal to his beck and call in one apocalyptic expression of power. As mere mortals, the rest of us can do little but stand aghast at the sight and collect our SAG extra wages at the end of the day. I was so overwhelmed by this cosmic Twister game of lit-crit references — twenty-seven pages worth — that I felt strangely compelled to count them up:

Frederick Jackson Turner, Tom Pilkington, Edgar Allan Poe, John Clute, Verlyn Flieger, J.R.R. Tolkien, Brian Attebery, J.K. Rowling, Thomas Jefferson, L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gordon R. Dickson, C. S. Lewis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, Philip K. Dick, Charles Lindbergh, Ian Fleming, John Wayne, Garry Willis, Amerigo Vespucci, George Templeton Strong, Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks, Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, T. R. Fehrenbach, Paul Horgan, Richard Matheson, Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Tom Shippey, Henry David Thoreau, Herodotus, Cyrus the Great, Aubrey de Sélincourt, A. R. Burns, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Howard Hawks, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Chabon, Stephen King, Harold Bloom, Paul Seydor, Sam Peckinpah, Leslie Fiedler, Ann Douglas, James Fenimore Cooper, William Carlos Williams, Richard Slotkin, Eugene O’Neill, Stephen Crane, Jack London, George Orwell, Alfred Kazin, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rafael Sabatini, Billy the Kid, Shirley Jackson, Mary Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Chase, George Steiner, Larry McMurtry, Katherine Ann Porter, Virgil, Cotton Mather, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Tony Tanner, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Van Doren, James Branch Cabell, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, Bernard DeVoto, W. H. Auden, Richard Poirier, and The Brothers Grimm.

Many of the above-listed names are not only mentioned but quoted, some multiple times, with the excess overflowing out of the essay proper and into footnotes. And all of this doesn’t include the Howardian references, dragging in everyone from Novalyne Price Ellis and her cousin Enid to David Weber, Tevis Clyde Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Milius, Patrice Louinet, Rusty Burke, Clark Ashton Smith, Steve Trout, E. Hoffmann Price, and Farnsworth Wright. It’s ten essays for the price of one, and those of you who like to trip the light fantastic with my fellow blogger no matter how crowded the dance floor becomes will definitely get your money’s worth. I managed only a half-dozen pages before skimming the rest, then pushing my plate away with a belch and politely refusing the dessert menu. To each his own: some readers have an insatiable need for speed, and the rest of us get sick when the roller-coaster is amped up with that many G’s. In my case, this essay was akin to the centrifugal chamber in the James Bond film Moonraker, spinning me around and spitting me out with a (it is to be hoped not permanent) case of Howardian motion sickness. Perhaps I’m wrong — I’ve often come back to things after a spell to discover that I can engage with them much better the second time round. But any future attempts will have to wait — I’m still reeling with dizziness from the first ride.

In other news, Paul Herman has announced that Howard Works, his Cimmerian Award-winning bibliographic website, is being taken under the umbrella of The Robert E. Howard Foundation. I haven’t the slightest idea what this means, but it should be fun to wait and find out. Eventually, many of the Foundation’s nascent initiatives are going to begin to grow and pay off for fans and scholars, it’s just going to take time for it all to mature. I always thought that Howard Works is well positioned to expand its reach beyond bibliographic information, and also include things like story summaries, character listings, indexes, and the like. We’ll see what happens.

(With profuse apologies to Robert E. Howard)

Still carven with the heraldry of a dynasty decades gone, the door closed behind his well-wishers, and all at once the walls, ceiling, and floor of the chamber were only a more well-appointed version of the dungeons into which his many captors had flung him. They crowded in upon the king, tightening their grip in much the same fashion, it seemed to him, as would the old age he had held at bay for so long. He listened to the retreating footsteps, footsteps which to his irritation tripped lightly, almost mincingly. The footsteps of men too young to have been at Valkia and Tanasul, too young for the siege of Khorshemish or the foray that caught thirty war-chiefs bickering over Zogar Sag’s old ostrich feathers at Gwawela. The footsteps of those born too late even for the great eastern campaign that had ended with Hyrkanian horsemen gazing in awe across the Vilayet as the night sky was lit by what had been Aghrapur and was now the funeral pyre of Yezdigerd’s ambitions. The footsteps of courtiers and dissemblers.

His stormy nature mutinied against the notion of celebrating his 75th birthday. The feigned merriment of the interlude just past fell away from him like a mask, and his face was suddenly even older than the occasion implied, his eyes clouded. For weeks the inherent melancholy of his ancestral hills had been dampening the dynamism he had always taken for granted, paralyzing him with a crushing sense of the futility of human endeavor and the meaninglessness of life — of his life as it would be told and retold in the far future. His kingship, his pleasures, his fears, his hopes, and all earthly things were revealed to him suddenly as dust and broken toys. He now knew that the borders of the life he had lived would be transgressed, flouted. Dozens of spurious episodes, devoid of either veracity or invention, would diminish him, as if jesters from an alien, frivolous court had been vouchsafed the power to dress him in fool’s motley. Dropping his snow-lion head in his formerly mighty hands, he groaned aloud.

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What angelic deed did we Howard fans do to deserve John J. Miller? Here he is making REH news again, this time treating us to a talk with Conan the Phenomenon author Paul M. Sammon. This is a part of Miller’s ambitious new National Review Online feature, “Between the Covers,” wherein he podcasts ten-minute audio interviews with various writers about their latest releases. Check out Miller’s archives to sample some of the other books Conan the Phenomenon now joins in the lineup. Fantasy scriveners are set to be well represented — yesterday’s discussion was with George R. R. Martin.

The audio files are in MP3 format, playable via the Windows Media Player plugin (available for Firefox users here) or downloadable with your favorite download accelerator. The Cimmerian says Check It Out.

And as usual, John J. Miller is all over it. Read his first impressions here, and then head over to the Movie Review Query Engine for a selection of other opinions. The reviews are largely encouraging — Rotten Tomatoes shows the positive consensus at 73% — and yet even some of the ones who liked the film share John’s main gripe about disrespect. Roger Ebert, for example:

In the name of the mighty Odin, what this movie needs is an audience that knows how to laugh. Laugh, I tell you, laugh! Has the spirit of irony been lost in the land? By all the gods, if it were not for this blasted infirmity that the Fates have dealt me, you would have heard from me such thunderous roars as to shake the very Navy Pier itself down to its pillars in the clay.

To be sure, when I saw “Beowulf” in 3-D at the giant-screen IMAX theater, there were eruptions of snickers here and there, but for the most part, the audience sat and watched the movie, not cheering, booing, hooting, recoiling, erupting or doing anything else unmannerly. You expect complete silence and rapt attention when a nude Angelina Jolie emerges from the waters of an underground lagoon. But am I the only one who suspects that the intention of director Robert Zemeckis and writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary was satirical?

He then goes on to compare the bulk of the film to Monty Python and Austin Powers. Ouch — shades of Karl Edward Wagner’s referring to Universal’s Conan the Barbarian as “Li’l Abner versus the Moonies.” Still, the film is shaping up to be a hit, which when filtered through crude logic may translate into more big budget fantasy fare in multiplexes.

TC‘s previous Beowulf coverage:

An Irish Bard at King Hrothgar’s Court

More Beowulf

The blogging universe is a large place, growing bigger every day. WordPress claims that .8% of the Internet is powered by its software. In that maelstrom of creativity, I occassionally come across someone blogging about REH in an impressive fashion.

Case in Point: a new blog titled The Silver Key. The blog’s author, Brian Murphy, has over the last few months offered readers a nice selection of thoughtful posts on fantasy. Horror movies, The Once and Future King, Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut, Pulp Fiction — Brian handles them all with grace and discernment. I especially enjoyed his succinct evaluation of what I consider one of the most underrated films of all time: Excalibur. Very nice to know there is at least one other person out there who appreciates the fierce, moving, Shakespearian grandeur and pathos of the film and all its trappings. (I myself have a long essay on Excalibur in mind, if I ever get the time to write it in a way that does the subject justice).

Recently Murphy turned his attention towards Robert E. Howard, and I found his commentary more learned than most blog evaluations from guys who aren’t known in Howardian fandom. One of the pleasures of The Cimmerian has been the discovery that the world is filled with REH fans who are utterly unknown to the group of scholars who form the core of the field. It’s often easy to assume that there’s only a few dozen guys out there who like REH and write for the various magazines, but the truth is that there are legions of intelligent fans absorbing this stuff and valuing Howard, who for whatever reason have never come out of the shadows. It’s a heartening notion.

Give Brian Murphy and The Silver Key a read. Perceptive and intelligent readers of fantasy need to stick together.

For those of you that are comic book fans (I am not) you might be interested in this retrospective article on an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Valley of the Worm,” a classic Sword-and-Sorcery comic illustrated by a legend in the business, Gil Kane (1926-2000). The piece was written by John R. Fultz, and here is his bottom line on REH:

He was a masterful writer, whose non-Conan work is too often ignored, but his prose sang with power and imagery unrivaled to this day for its evocative qualities. Howard has been much imitated over the decades, but there’s only one REH.

Amen.

English fan David Drage has been planning a regular podcast for pulp aficionados over the last year. Recently, the first episodes of the podcast have appeared at his website, with more to follow on what looks like a monthly basis. Highlights for Howard fans include an audiobook rendition of the Solomon Kane tale “Red Shadows,” some commentary on new Howard books such as Almuric and Conan the Phenomenon, information on casting for the new Solomon Kane film, and a laconic and humorous Howard Days trip report by Larry “Deuce” Richardson.

My first impression is that the jury is still out on whether this experiment will become a must-listen for fans. Right now the delivery is a bit bland and stiff, the information somewhat of a rehash of things long known on the Internet, and the theme music far too goofy compared to the somewhat rarefied accent of Drage. On the plus side, the Richardson trip report does hint strongly at the possibilities of the medium, and how phone interviews and other never-before-heard audio content (on-site reports from Howard Days or Gen Con, perhaps) would be compelling. Drage’s podcast is still in its infancy, and as he gets more contributors and develops a less scripted delivery of his material, it might grow into something special. Give it a listen and see what you think.

Cimmerian reader Jack Jones tipped me off to the latest Robert E. Howard write-up in America’s most read newspaper. Nice to see Conan and REH getting out to millions of readers. There’s also an accompanying article focused on the two forthcoming Conan video games here.

Robert E. Howard aficionado John J. Miller, the National Political Reporter for National Review, has conducted an interview with Rusty Burke at National Review Online, focusing on the release of the two Best of REH volumes debuting this summer and fall. Lots of good red meat to savor here.

And for those who missed it, check out John’s article on Howard in The Wall Street Journal from late last year.