Not only did [Howard] excel in pictures of strife and slaughter, but he was almost alone in his ability to create real emotions of spectral fear and dread suspense...that such a genuine artist should perish while hundreds of insincere hacks continue to concoct spurious ghosts and vampires and space-ships and occult detectives is indeed a sorry piece of cosmic irony...his loss at the age of thirty is a tragedy of the first magnitude, and a blow from which fantasy fiction will not soon recover.