Robert E. Howard Ebooki

The king of vendhya was dying. Through the hot, stifling night the temple gongs boomed and the conchs roared. Their clamor was a faint echo in the gold- domed chamber where Bhunda Chand struggled on the velvet-cushioned dais. Beads of sweat glistened on his dark skin; his fingers twisted the gold-worked fabric beneath him. He was young; no spear had touched him, no poison lurked in his wine.

The cliffs rose sheer from the jungle, towering ramparts of stone that glinted jade-blue and dull crimson in the rising sun, and curved away and away to east and west above the waving emerald ocean of fronds and leaves. It looked insurmountable, that giant palisade with its sheer curtains of solid rock in which bits of quartz winked dazzlingly in the sunlight. But the man who was working his tedious way upward was already halfway to the top.

The immortal legacy of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Cimmerian, continues with this latest compendium of Howard’s fiction and poetry. He will always be best remembered for his sword and sorcery tales but his work was extraordinarily varied. Unlike most of his better known works such as Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, etc., these stories are all historically based adventure stories. These adventures, set in medieval-era Europe and the Near East, are among the most grippi...

Hoofs drummed down the street that sloped to the wharfs. The folk that yelled and scattered had only a fleeting glimpse of a mailed figure on a black stallion, a wide scarlet cloak flowing out on the wind. Far up the street came the shout and clatter of pursuit, but the horseman did not look back. He swept out onto the wharfs and jerked the plunging stallion back on its haunches at the very lip of the pier.

Breck Elkins is a hillbilly from Bear Creek, a fictional location in the Humboldt Mountains of Nevada. He is „mighty of stature and small of brain"–a physically huge and imposing figure, and his reputation as a short-tempered and ferocious fighter often precedes him throughout the Southwest. He is usually found in the company of Cap’n Kidd, his equally fierce and cantankerous horse.

One moment the glade lay empty; the next a man poised tensely at the edge of the bushes. No sound warned the red squirrels of his coming, but the birds that flitted about in the sunlight took sudden fright at the apparition and rose in a clamoring swarm. The man scowled and glanced quickly back the way he had come, fearing the bird-flight might have betrayed his presence. Then he started across the glade, placing his feet with caution. Tall and muscular of frame, he moved w...

Kirby O’Donnell is a Howard hero less familiar to most readers. Howard only wrote three stories about O’Donnell’s exploits, of which only two actually saw print during his lifetime -- „The Treasures of Tartary” and „Swords of Shahrazar” -- neither in Weird Tales.

Steve Harrison is a police detective. His cases are not always easy but for sure very, very weird. Robert E. Howard delivers an impressive tour de force of weird fiction awesomeness with „Steve Harrison, Detective of the Occult! „. Three short masterful stories in the Steve Harrison series from one of the greatest fantasy writers of the 20th century, the uncontained, uncontainable, Mr. Robert E. Howard: „Fangs of Gold” „Names in the Black Book” „Graveyard Rats”. Robert Ervi...

Francis Xavier Gordon was a living legend in the Middle and Far East. The boars called him El Borac, „Swift,” the title earned by his awkward abilities with a gun, a knife and a sword. Now, the mighty El Borak must stretch its forces to prevent the Turkish uprising, protect the hermits from murders and stop the dangerous amir without allowing him to seize control over India.

Shadows in Zamboula is one of the original stories by Robert E. Howard about Conan the Cimmerian, first published in Weird Tales in November, 1935. Its original title was „The Man-Eaters of Zamboula”. The story takes place over the course of a night in the desert city of Zamboula, with political intrigue amidst streets filled with roaming cannibals. It features the character Baal-pteor, one of the few humans in the Conan stories to be a physical challenge for the main Cimme...

Some such thoughts flitted vaguely through my mind that night as I groped along the narrow trail that wound through the deep pinelands. Such thoughts are likely to keep company with any man who dares invade, in the night, that lonely stretch of densely timbered river-country which the black people call Egypt, for some obscurely racial reason.

Torches flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night. In the Maul they could carouse and roar as they liked, for honest people shunned the quarters, and watchmen, well paid with stained coins, did not interfere with their sport. Along the crooked, unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring. Steel glinted in the shadows where wolf preyed on wolf, and from the darkness ...

The Sowers of the Thunder is a short story by Robert E. Howard (published in Oriental Stories, Winter 1932) that takes place in Outremer (the Crusader states) in the time of General Baibars and deals with the General’s friendly/adversarial relationship with Cahal Ruadh O’Donnell, an Irish Crusader with a troubled past cut in the Howardian mold. Both the Siege of Jerusalem (1244) and the Battle of La Forbie feature in the plot.

So thay brought the envoys, pallid from months of imprisonment, before the canopied throne of Suleyman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey, and the mightiest monarch in an age of mighty monarchs. Under the great purple dome of the royal chamber gleamed the throne before which the world trembled– gold-paneled, pearl-inlaid. An emperor’s wealth in gems was sewn into the silken canopy from which depended a shimmering string of pearls ending a frieze of emeralds which hung like a...

The roar of battle had died away; the shout of victory mingled with the cries of the dying. Like gay-hued leaves after an autumn storm, the fallen littered the plain; the sinking sun shimmered on burnished helmets, gilt-worked mail, silver breastplates, broken swords and the heavy regal folds of silken standards, overthrown in pools of curdling crimson. In silent heaps lay war- horses and their steel-clad riders, flowing manes and blowing plumes stained alike in the red tid...

The stories are humorously written as if told by Breckinridge Elkins, a hillbilly with no schooling. He and his kin live in the Humboldts in Nevada. Elkins is six feet six inches tall, is as strong as a grizzly bear. He can be just as bad tempered if riled. And there is a lot to rile him, especially his relatives.

This early work by Robert E. Howard was originally published. ’Hawk of the Hills’ is a story in the El Borak series where El Borak leads a tribe to war in Afganistan. I recommend this book

Harrison is a brawny police detective who patrols the unquiet slums and dives of River Street, in an unnamed port city where the sun never shines. But REH’s stories were far-removed from the „mean streets” of Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s stories in Black Mask. Like Skull-Face they owe more to Sax Rohmer – and to REH’s own contemporary horror stories.

The silence of the pine woods lay like a brooding cloak about the soul of Bristol McGrath. The black shadows seemed fixed, immovable as the weight of superstition that overhung this forgotten back-country. Vague ancestral dreads stirred at the back of McGrath’s mind; for he was born in the pine woods, and sixteen years of roaming about the world had not erased their shadows.

This is a good book of four Western stories. The title story, however, is the longest. „The Vultures of Whapeton” suffers from a protagonist who is just a bit too manly and effective to be believed. Everyone who meets Steve Corcoran seems to instantly know he’ll just prevail in any kind of gunfight, no matter how outnumbered he is -- and then, of course, Corcoran goes on to do use that.

An Irish-American warrior passes himself of as a Kurd and sets out to steal the treasure of Tartary. This is one of Robert E, Howard’s fast-paced short stories, featuring lots of fights and sliced entrails. Not one of his best works, in my opinion, as it somehow lacks substance. It seemed all hell and no notion.

The blare of the trumpets grew louder, like a deep golden tide surge, like the soft booming of the evening tides against the silver beaches of Valusia. The throng shouted, women flung roses from the roofs as the rhythmic chiming of silver hosts came clearer and the first of the mighty array swung into view in the broad, white street that curved round the golden-spired Tower of Splendor.

...Shipwrecked on a mysterious island, two sailors find traces of a lost civilization – and memories of their own impossible part in it! ...The „last words” of an operatic tenor bring the music of hell to the man who destroyed him....Turlogh O’Brien, mighty Gaelic warrior who serves no master but gold and blood, battles for a kingdom against the fearful ancient gods of Bal-Sagoth. All together for the first time in The Gods of Bal-Sagoth.

The fisherman loosened his knife in its scabbard. The gesture was instinctive, for what he feared was nothing a knife could slay, not even the saw-edged crescent blade of the Yuetshi that could disembowel a man with an upward stroke. Neither man nor beast threatened him in the solitude which brooded over the castellated isle of Xapur.