Over at The Official Robert E. Howard Forum, Rob Roehm from the Robert E. Howard Foundation gave frequenters of the forum a sneak peak at the contents of a projected new book from the REHF. This volume will contain Robert E. Howard’s fictionalized autobiographical short novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (the cover from the DMG edition is shown above), along with numerous other works from Howard containing information of a personal and biographical nature. Rob cautions that the whole project is still in development and no firm date whatsoever has been set. The contents, which Roehm has described as “tentative,” are as follows:

Ambition by Moonlight
An Autobiography
The Galveston Affair
In His Own Image
Irony
Ivory Camel, The
Lives and Crimes of Notable Artists
Musings of a Moron
The Paradox
The People of the Winged Skulls
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs – Draft
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs
The Recalcitrant
Some People Who Have Had Influence over Me
Spanish Gold on Devil Horse
The Splendid Brute
Sunday in a Small Town
To a Man Whose Name I Never Knew
A Touch of Trivia
Untitled (“A typical small town drugstore . . .”)
Untitled (“As my dear public . . .”)
Untitled (“Mike Costigan, writer and self-avowed futilist”)
Untitled (“The Seeker thrust . . .”)
Voyages with Villains
The Wandering Years

Rob has also indicated that there might be annotations included as well.

Mr. Roehm has been giving the annotaters a helping hand, it seems. Over at the Two-Gun Raconteur website, Rob has posted a guest blog which examines some of the clues provided by Post Oaks and Sand Roughs. He has made, in my opinion, a very strong case as to what real-life football game REH fictionalized at the very start of his short novel. Check it out here.

rath

noun

1. circular fort protected by earthworks, used by the ancient Irish in the pre-Christian era as a retreat in time of danger. Some of the larger raths such as that at Tara were important in early Irish history and were used by chieftains or kings. Many raths still exist throughout Ireland.

[Origin: ancient Irish]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

Up over the cromlech and down the rath,
Treading a dim forgotten path,
Past the ancient, vague monolith,
Out of the past of tale and myth,
Where the bat wheels silent ’round walls of might,
The phantoms gather from out the night.

[from “The Phantoms Gather”; for the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 199; and A Rhyme of Salem Town, p. 124]

The fourteenth issue of Black Gate, the magazine dedicated to “Adventures in Fantasy Literature,” will be shipping soon. Over at the magazine’s website, editor and publisher John O’Neill has posted a three-part sneak peek about this massive issue, which will be 384 pages-long, with over 150,000 words of fiction and 25 full pages of art.

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I’m off on my annual trip to the Pictish Heartland, so this week’s blog will be fairly short. I have a number of different editions of Howard’s unfinished novel Almuric, and as part of my New Year’s resolution to do more exploration of the story that made me a Howard fan, I plan on looking at those different volumes. I’ll start off with my most recent purchase, the Leonaur edition.

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Any of you been watching Starz’s series, Spartacus: Blood and Sand?

It’s kind of rekindled my interest in the man, and I’m reading Howard Fast’s novel and wondering what I did with my copy of the 1960 Kirk Douglas movie based on that book.

As some of you know, Howard was familiar with the story of Spartacus. In his poem, “A Son of Spartacus” he opens with a line from Reverend Elijah Kellogg’s “Spartacus to the Gladiators” speech. In Almuric you can also hear the echoes of this speech.

As someone who grew up in the age of the Comics Code, when censors suppressed Captain Kirk every time he tried to open-mouth kiss an alien girl, it’s kind of startling how much nudity, sex, violence, gore and profanity they cram into each episode. The storyline is interesting, though they’ve totally recreated Spartacus’s origin from previous versions. Although historians differ, it seems their version is more accurate than Fast’s, who has him born into slavery.

Owner of the gladiator school Batiatus is played by John Hannah, from the Mummy movies, and former warrior princess Lucy Loveless plays his scheming sexy wife. Those who want to see Xena naked are prettty much in luck. The other members of the cast are unknown to me, except for Peter Mensah, who was in 300 and Hidalgo. He plays Batiataus’ trainer.
But the acting is good.

Speaking of 300, it seems every fight is inspired by the 300 style; slow/stop/fast followed by a burst of blood, even if the blow struck would not really have produced much blood. It’s like they think 300 is the best movie ever. But I think it’s an enjoyable series so far, though I feel like a decadent Roman while watching it.

Part five of Blogging the Silmarillion continues with chapters 16-20 of the Quenta Silmarillion.

—

By the command of Morgoth the Orcs with great labour gathered all the bodies of those who had fallen in the great battle, and all their harness and weapons, and piled them in a great mound in the midst of Anfauglith; and it was like a hill that could be seen from afar. Haudh-en-Ndengin the Elves named it, the Hill of Slain, and Haudh-en-Nirnaeth, the Hill of Tears.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, “Of the Fifth Battle”

If you had but four words to describe the action of Chapters 16-20 of The Silmarillion, you could do worse than all hell’s breaking loose. It’s a section I equate to a great turning of the tide against the forces of good.

In fact, Hell breaking loose is almost a literal interpretation of what happens in the fourth great Battle of Beleriand, the Dagor Bragollach (Battle of Sudden Flame). From the deep pits and mines of hellish Angband issue great streams of fire, followed by hosts of orcs, Balrogs, and the dragon Glaurung. It’s very much as if Gehenna, on the orders of Satan, were to empty its bowels of fell spirits and demons. The Noldorin guarding Angband are destroyed or driven back as Morgoth, pent up in his fortress for nearly 400 years, breaks out with a fury and a vengeance.

Seventeen years after this eruption, the forces of good marshal for another great cast at overthrowing Morgoth and ending his reign of terror. The result is the Nirnaeth Arnoediad (Battle of Unnumbered Tears), whose enduring image is a great hill of corpses of Elves, Men, and Dwarves, captured magnificently in the above piece of art by the incomparable Ted Nasmith. The Doom of the Noldor comes home fully to roost as the grieving wives and children of the slain indeed shed “tears unnumbered.” With the defeat, Elven might in Beleriand, save in a defensive capacity only, is smashed. It’s one of the greatest and at the same time most heartbreaking scenes of battlefield ruin I’ve read.

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I just read the newest entry from Ryan Harvey, one of the ace bloggers over at Black Gate. It concerns Cornell Woolrich’s 1938 novella, ”Jane Brown’s Body.” From the sound of it, it’s a fine little science-fictional horror tale. The plot can be briefly summarized: a scientist revives the newly-dead body of a beautiful young woman. Later, a young gangster abducts the woman from the scientist who he believes has “enslaved” her. Action and horror ensue.

Now, as someone who has read his share of Karl Edward Wagner’s works, but very little of Woolrich’s, I have to say that the plot outlined by Ryan Harvey seems to possess some likeness to that of KEW’s ”Undertow.” That tale is a short story in the ”Kane” series written by Wagner in 1977, about forty years after “Jane Brown’s Body.” For those who fear spoilers, my advice would be to stop reading about now.

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Here’s what REH Foundation mover n’ shaker, Rob Roehm, just posted over on the Official Robert E. Howard Forum:

We should start taking pre-orders soon, but I thought folks would want to see the other El Borak cover by the Keegans.

Rob also noted that it’s not too late to email the Foundation regarding this volume. The more they hear from fans, the better they’ll be able to determine the size of the print run.

A Cimmerian Award-winning Howard scholar is now posting at the TGR blog.  Brian Leno is blogging at Publisher’s Journal, the Official REH: Two-Gun Raconteur Blog.

 From 2006 through 2008, Brian made seven contributions to The Cimmerian, including two of my personal favorites, “Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation” and “Down the Rabbit Hole” (for which he won the First Place  for Outstanding Achievement, Essay).

 Brian is also a regular contributor to REH: Two-Gun Raconteur.  So if you enjoy Brian’s writing as much as I do, mosey on over the Publisher’s Journal blog and check it out.

 Brian just posted a new entry, and here are links to his first two posts.

Leno and Damon Sasser came out of the gate on January 1 firing on all cylinders and have kept the blog entries coming ever since. It’s great to see another REH blog out there and I wish them the best.

I have already mentioned on The Cimmerian the Robert E. Howard ebooks published by Halcyon Press for Amazon’s reading device, respectively here and here. Five (?) other REH books have been published by this Texan company since then.

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