The Bodhisattva

You get to a point where you’ve read enough Robert E. Howard (which is usually not much or enough - and I feel many times feels like a claim more than fact considering how various works are described in passing) that you feel you need to move on as, even beyond the standard view of pulp works  -  a perfunctionary fondness for sure, but something that is the past and should be relegated as a basis and cannot compare to current writing even if only speaking of Science Fiction, Horror or Fantasy and as I sit here reading a collection of Howard’s Horror stories (The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard - I believe coming out in October) you are so quickly, so abruptly corrected, in a manner that made even me, a fan of Howard’s work - including continuations of via Busiek and Dark Horse - check myself.

I’ve been able to read a lot of short fiction, even beyond Heliotrope submissions, I have had access to many of the fine (and not so fine) short fiction collections and anthologies that have been published over the last few years but no matter the quality you find yourself at a point where you have trepidation of popping open a collection simply due to the (over) exposure and you start getting tired of the next whimsical, what if, new pseudo-penetrating discovery of the human condition and you just need to recharge before dipping in again.

Howard will do that.

Three or four stories in you see Howard’s gift is not to to tease, or to lay down bread crumbs to lead you to a destination or a decision - from the first sentences it’s as if Howard drops you into the jungle, the dark continent, a village on the coast, and I got that feeling I got from the narrator like I hadn’t felt since I was in 9th grade trying to figure out why my English teacher (who thanks to writing this I have been reminded was coming off a scandal of having an affair with the Principal- and didn’t quite know it yet, when all the students did) was trying to get me to read when it was clearly beach weather outside. Do you remember reading Poe’s The Cask of the Amontillado? When suddenly you and only you were being spoken to? When suddenly you were in the middle of murder, revenge, adventure?

Howard tells a story and doesn’t walk you around one and I hadn’t realized how much I missed that. You throw in that a lot of these stories came from Weird Tales and you got me upping my search for issues I’m missing like this right here (that’s covers shows one of the first stories in the collection - Wolfshead);

You can check out the other Weird Tales Covers here - these are all damn sweet and fun to collect (they don’t do Horror and SF like they use to). They also don’t make writers like this anymore and I just found myself drawn into an era where a Machen reference was a rather contemporary one and what I was reading was atmosphere but not in the sense of a dream - Howard knocks you out and when you wake up he tells you that you are no longer where you were a few words ago and you have no choice to question it during a time where adventure had to be this way, as the idea of such had to a personal, tangible, or plausible imagination not that of a video game facsimile though it’s clearly fantastic.

“Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one’s lot is cast; a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe.” - Robert Howard

“But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.” - Robert Howard

The foil however is that Howard seems completely absorbed in the fantasy - Damon Knight referred to him (albeit for Conan and not - I don’t believe - as a compliment):

“Howard had the maniac’s advantage of believing whatever he wrote”

..and you believe it as well, because he offers no choice, as by the time you read another story a month later you were elsewhere, in someone else’s nightmare, voyage or march.

I picked the book up because I’m one of those people who just can’t sit and do nothing. So I’ll be watching a television show I enjoy and when  commercials come on I immediately start looking for something to do and just by chance, this book was in reach and before too long I was actually getting impatient waiting for the commercials to come.