Fri 18 Jan 2019
Pulp Stories I’m Reading: ROBERT E. HOWARD “The Horror from the Mound.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Science Fiction & Fantasy , Stories I'm Reading[6] Comments
ROBERT E. HOWARD “The Horror from the Mound.” Short story. Non-series. First published in Weird Tales, May 1932. Collected in Skull-Face and Others (Arkham House, hardcover, 1946) and Wolfshead (Lancer, paperback, 1968). Reprinted elsewhere many more times, including Trails in Darkness (Baen, paperback, 1996).
A short tale — only 23 pages long in the Baen edition — but still one of the most effective vampire stories I’ve ever read. Not that anyone except a poor Mexican laborer knows ahead of time who or what lies inside the ancient burial mound on Steve Brill’s land, somewhere in the American southwest, and he makes a great point of avoiding the area whenever he trudges back to his hovel of a home after a hard day’s work.
What Brill does — in spite of all the alarms that go off in the minds of every single reader of this tale, every single one — his curiosity completely out of control, is to start digging into the mound on his own and far into the night.
What emerges is something he does not expect, not in today’s day and age (or 1932, to be precise, which is when the story was first published). This is the kind of story in which the suspense builds and builds, whether you’re a believer of the supernatural or not. It’s not a story to be put down easily, I can assure you.
January 18th, 2019 at 2:53 pm
Both this story and “The Valley of The Lost” come from Howard’s last years and really shows that he was always developing as a writer. Howard easily sifts from atmospheric scenes to historic backstory, building suspense all the time. Check out his story “Wild Waters” to see how well he handles a non fantasy adventure. I’ve always thought that if he had lived to the war and the emergence of the paperback novel he would have been a best seller like James A. Michener, or Louis L’amour.
January 18th, 2019 at 10:37 pm
I’m happy to have a second opinion that this is one of Howard’s more effective stories, Matthew, especially from a fan of his work such as yourself.
I’d stopped reading Howard when I decided that I’d “outgrown” the Conan stories. This was back in the 60s, when they started coming out from Lancer in paperback. I thought they were overgrown adolescent fantasies, and except for a couple of Dennis Dorgan stories, that’s been it until now.
I don’t know how he would have fared as a writer if he hadn’t taken his own life when he did, but it”s fun to speculate. If this tale is any indication, it should have been easy for him to find a way out of the strictly pulp mode he was in. I think he’d have had to widen his horizons, and maybe go into straight historicals, as one possibility, but it’s obvious he had the imagination and the talent.
January 19th, 2019 at 4:59 pm
Both of these stories, plus a lot of other stories by Howard, are out of copyright (at least in Australia). I have located a copy of The Horror
from the Mound and audiobook version of The Valley of the Lost, lasting about an hour. Such a nice way to spend two hours this weekend.
January 21st, 2019 at 7:37 pm
A good example of atmosphere and mood at work in Howard’s work, mindful of his classic Pigeons From Hell, as Howard in a slightly different mode than his usual action.
January 21st, 2019 at 11:53 pm
“Wild Water”, which Matthew Clark mentions above, is my favorite Howard story and one of the best stories I’ve ever read, period. Of course, some of that opinion may be influenced by having my father tell me about the historical incident that inspired the story, which he lived through. I agree that “The Horror From the Mound” is excellent, one of the first stories, if not the first, that can be called what we now refer to as a Weird Western. The subject of what Howard would have done if he’d lived is usually discussed, sometimes at great length, at the Howard Days get-together every year in Cross Plains.
January 22nd, 2019 at 12:10 am
One of the regrets of my life is not getting to nearly as many get-together’s like the Howard Days as I should have. I’d have found plenty of people to talk to and things to talk about, that’s for sure. Maybe one day, but I doubt it. The window on that happening is getting narrower all the time.