Howardists’ Howardist Charles Hoffman turns in an Amazonian review of The Collected Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. He’s none too affrighted by “Rattle of Bones” (for my part I don’t think “Delenda Est” is classifiable as a horror story unless one is on the payroll of the late-period Roman Empire) and sticks up for the excluded “The Hyena,” “Black Wind Blowing,” and especially “The People of the Black Coast.” I tried to push that story hard in a TC essay back in February, but it seems that “People” is a rare blind spot for His Editorial Excellency Rusty Burke; perhaps he’s simply dined too well on too many crabmeat dinners over the years to accept the crustaceans’ oversized and supersapient brethren as a credible threat.

Today is of course Black Friday for those of us who unswooningly prefer the gore-and-gravedirt-reeking, hemoglobin-slurping, food-chain-topping undead of yester-fiction, so it’s great to see Hoffman plugging The Collected Horror Stories at the expense of “contemporary horror…recently dominated by chicks’ overheated erotic fantasies about their imaginary vampire boyfriends.” I don’t think Del Rey did themselves any favors in terms of imprinting a strong visual identity for each REH collection this time, though. Here’s the Greg Staples tentacular spectacular that for months was the front runner for front cover:

Instead they went with this:

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The wait is almost over. The REH Foundation is now accepting pre-orders for The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard. This volume collects all of Howard’s known verse (more than 700 poems), excluding only certain draft and/or variant versions of his poems which are not significantly different from published versions. It also includes the prose poems published in Etchings in Ivory, title and first line indexes, and “Barbarian Bard: The Poetry of Robert E. Howard” by Steve Eng. This massive volume, over 800 pages, will be printed in hardback with dust jacket, in a limited quantity of 150 individually numbered copies. Cover design is by Jim Keegan. The book is expected to ship early in 2009.

The book will contain several “firsts,” thanks to Paul Herman’s recent discovery of a cache of transcriptions at Ohio State University (of all places). These papers probably date back to the early 1960s and reveal all sorts of differences between these and the latter-published poems. “Long Ago,” for example, was missing a line in its first publication; the previously published version of “Victory” is very different from the one at OSU; and the OSU stash revealed a completely different version of “The Cats of Anubis” from the one published in Night Images. They’re so different, in fact, that both versions are included in Collected Poetry. And there’s lots of other little nuggets as well.

More information is over at the Foundation’s recently revamped website (Thanks, Leo!).

LEO GIVES CREDIT WHERE IT IS DUE: Rob, let’s not forget that it was longtime Cimmerian subscriber and Howard fan extraordinaire Eric Johnson who actually discovered the “cache of transcriptions at Ohio State University” that has you Foundation guys scrambling to update your poetry volume. Since August my pal Eric has been the Associate Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Ohio State, and it was during the performance of those duties that he spotted a mysterious catalogue entry marked “Robert E. Howard typescripts.” He promptly pulled them from Ohio State’s remote storage stacks and read them, and — realizing their potential value to the Foundation — he contacted Paul Herman and alerted him to the find, which of course allowed The Foundation to partake of a hot new discovery.

Eric has been a standout member of The Cimmerian‘s scholarly bullpen throughout my run. Witness his letter in V3n11 where he informed readers about his trip to Spain, where he found among many other Howard items a complete Deluxe slipcased translation of the Wandering Star Conan volumes, “sporting full color plates, all the line drawings from the Del Rey Volume 3 edition, a bound-in silk bookmark, and a slipcase just like the WS editiions.” At the time, my readers were stunned to hear Eric reveal that, unlike in English, Spanish readers have all three of the Deluxe Conans, a complete set in slipcase. Eat your heart out, Subterranean Press.

I also enjoyed Eric’s V4n5 letter in The Cimmerian, wherein he dug up a great quote about Howard I had never seen before:

Finally, I just wanted to bring to the attention of TC readers a comment pulp writer Murray Leinster made about Howard in the last published interview he gave in 1977. Speaking about REH, Leinster stated: “He [Howard] had a stellar talent. I not only lost a contemporary in the death of Robert E. Howard. The world lost a writer of extraordinary gifts.” (published by Ronald Payne in The Last Murray Leinster Interview, Waves Press, 1982 in a limited edition of 150 copies). It’s always nice to see mentions of Howard in unexpected places.

Indeed it is, and I may never have enjoyed that one if it hadn’t been for Eric’s eagle-eye and willingness to share his discovery with Cimmerian readers.

Eric Johnson is one of the many largely under-the-radar Howardists who regularly contribute to the ever-growing body of knowledge in our field, scholarship that is too-often assumed to be the sole purview of the small group of us who stand out a bit more by virtue of publishing this-or-that. One of the primary joys of The Cimmerian has been the number of previously unheralded fans the journal has managed to tease out of the woodwork, guys who engage in private research and collecting every bit as scholarly and valuable as what one might find in self-important (if perennially sleepy-eyed) academic venues such as The Dark Man. I do hope that when The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard is released, Eric J. Johnson (Ph.D., natch!) receives proper credit for his startling poetry discovery, and for his generosity in sharing it with The REH Foundation, and through them with Howard fans everywhere.

ROB ADDS: Can’t forget what you never knew, but thanks for the information; I wondered how it all came about. Eric has been very helpful in answering questions about the stack of papers at OSU.

A big chunk of the poems in that stack come from Howard’s letters to Harold Preece and items that ran in The Junto. None of these items were included in Always Comes Evening (1957), so it’s fairly safe to assume that they were acquired by Glenn Lord sometime after that. The whole pile comes with a cover page: “Unprinted Poems by Robert E. Howard.” The first of the Preece/Junto poems from the stack to be published was “Surrender” in The Howard Collector #3 (1962). So I think the whole pile dates to somewhere between 1957 and 1962. But we’ll probably never know.

Charles Saunders has posted some new material to his website of interest to fans of fantasy and historical fiction.

First, for the politically minded there’s Chuck’s detailed thoughts on the recent election, from the perspective of a black North American fantasist intimately engaged in furthering appreciation of African culture, legendry, history, and dealing with what he ominously calls “The Legacy.” Worth a read, if you are so inclined.

More on point for this blog is Saunders’ review of a new series of historical fiction, one that furthers the inroads that Saunders himself pioneered with his creation and defining of what’s come to be known as “Sword-and-Soul” fiction. Brother G (pen name for Gregory L. Walker) has taken Greek mythology, quest narratives, ancestral memories, and loads of original Afrocentric worldbuilding rooted in ancient history, and used them to create a rip-roaring adventure that at times literally spans the world. Sounds very promising, with what sounds like hearty helpings of Howardian-style storytelling in the mix. I’m looking forward to reading them. You can buy them yourself here:

Book 1: Shades of Memnon

Book 2: Ra Force Rising

Book 3: African Atlantis Unbound

Steve adds: I note from Charles’ review that Memnon’s adventures come to us via “the framing device of the ancestral memories of a contemporary African-American man in a coma after a serious accident.” At this late date Walker didn’t necessarily borrow the framing device from REH or Jack London, but it’s cool to see the technique being de-mothballed.

It’s been ninety years since “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918 on the Western Front, and very soon now recalled or recollected history will give way entirely to history that is merely recorded. My thoughts never require much encouragement to run to World War One, and this morning two “holiday”-themed pieces got me musing about remembrance and the conflict that murdered illusions and mothered ironies, the distant Armageddon of Robert E. Howard’s childhood. In “Photographer Races Clock to Honor Last Few World War I Vets” Mark Bixier and Paula Hancocks describe the commemorative efforts of one David De Jonge, who’s driven by his awareness of “the last breaths of the last souls who witnessed one of the most horrific wars this world has ever seen.” By his painstakingly researched count, only ten veterans — of any Great War army — still survive:

Four live in Britain, two in Australia, two in France and two in the United States: Buckles and 108-year-old John Babcock of Spokane, Washington, who served with Canadian forces during World War I, DeJonge said.

Each week or month that passes, it seems, brings news of an aging veteran succumbing before DeJonge can find the time and money to photograph him.

Not long ago, he said, two Jamaicans who fought with the British during World War I died. The last known German, French and Austro-Hungarian veterans died in the last year as well.

“These are the last of the last,” he said.

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