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Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn. Into a dim alley, one of a veritable labyrinth of mysterious winding ways, four masked figures came hurriedly from a door which a dusky hand furtively opened. They spoke not but went swiftly into the gloom, cloaks wrapped closely about them; as silently as the ghosts of murdered men they disappeared in the darkness.

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 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 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.

Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. In a meteoric career that spanned a mere twelve years, Robert E. Howard single-handedly invented the sword and sorcery genre. From his fertile imagination sprang some of fiction’s most enduring heroes. Yet while Conan is indisputably Howard’s greatest creation, it was in his earlier sequence of tales featuring Kull, a fearless warrior with the b...

The Pool of the Black One is one of the original short stories starring the sword and sorcery hero Conan the Cimmerian, written by American author Robert E. Howard. It is set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and concerns Conan becoming the captain of a pirate vessel and encountering a remote island with a mysterious pool that has powers of transmutation.

In a world ruled by piracy, stalked by vampires, peopled by cities of the inhuman, he stood tall amid the terrors of the Dark Continent. Kane, a man of savage and unconquerable courage, strode deep into the jungles, forever slashing his diamond-edged rapier as evil guided the creatures of the night toward him. Wicked whispers of death touched him. Haunted horrors of the world beyond life reached for him. But Kane never halted his march, for he would never rest until the fin...

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.

...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.

The long tapers flickered, sending the black shadows wavering along the walls, and the velvet tapestries rippled. Yet there was no wind in the chamber. Four men stood about the ebony table on which lay the green sarcophagus that gleamed like carven jade. In the upraised right hand of each man a curious black candle burned with a weird greenish light. Outside was night and a lost wind moaning among the black trees.

The Black Stranger"is one of the stories byRobert E. HowardaboutConan the Cimmerian. It was written in the 1930s but not published in his lifetime. When the original Conan version of the story failed to find a publisher, Howard rewrote „The Black Stranger” into a piraticalTerence Vulmeastory entitled „Swords of the Red Brotherhood.”

Before Robert E. Howard wrote of „Conan the Cimmerian”, he wrote of the swashbuckler Solomon Kane. „The Adventures of Solomon Kane” takes you through Howard’s horrific and fantastic world of swords and sorcery, the world of ancient secrets and the monsters that live in the jungles of Africa where Kane vanquishes evil. Here are shudder-inducing tales of vengeful ghosts and bloodthirsty demons, of dark sorceries wielded by evil men and women, all opposed by a grim avenger arm...

This collection contains all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian stories published during his lifetime, contextualized with biographical details of their author. His Conan stories feature a young barbarian warrior who carves himself a kingdom and rules with a degree of wisdom and justice. Neither supernatural fiends nor demonic sorcery could oppose the warrior as he wielded his mighty sword and dispatched his enemies to a bloody doom on the battlefields of the legenda...

Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard is a collection of Cthulhu Mythos short stories by Robert E. Howard. It was first published in the US in 2001 by Chaosium Press. All of these stories had been published previously, between 1929 and 1985, in Weird Tales, From Beyond the Dark Gateway, Strange Tales, Weirdbook, Fantasy Crosswinds, Coven, Fantasy Book, Dark Things, and The Fantasy Magazine. The collection includes an introduction by Robert M. Price ...

Five incredible stories of the wild west, from the supremely creative mind of Robert E. Howard: „"Golden Hope” Christmas”, „Riders of the Sunset”, „Boot-Hill Payoff”, „Vultures’ Sanctuary”, „The Vultures of Wahpeton”. The serious, hardcore western stories in this collection fit the writing style of Howard like a glove. Like his horror stories, historical fiction, straight adventure like El Borak does. The stories collected here show a West stripped down to essentials, where...

The horror first took concrete form amid that most unconcrete of all things–a hashish dream. I was off on a timeless, spaceless journey through the strange lands that belong to this state of being, a million miles away from earth and all things earthly; yet I became cognizant that something was reaching across the unknown voids–something that tore ruthlessly at the separating curtains of my illusions and intruded itself into my visions.

If you like your horror with a western twist then these tales are for you. Awesome occult western adventure, from the master of strange fiction, Robert E. Howard! This collection includes the following stories: „THE HORROR FROM THE MOUND”, „THE MAN ON THE GROUND”, „OLD GARFIELD’S HEART”, „BLACK CANAAN”, „THE DEAD REMEMBER”, „PIGEONS FROM HELL” and others. Kind of like „Dreams at the Witch House” by Lovecraft but mixed with Howard’s own legends. „Tales of the Weird Southwest...

Red Nails is the last of the stories about Conan the Cimmerian written by American author Robert E. Howard. A novella, it was originally serialized in Weird Tales magazine from July to October 1936. It is set in the pseudohistorical Hyborian Age and concerns Conan encountering a lost city in which the degenerate inhabitants are proactively resigned to their own destruction. Due to its grim themes of decay and death, the story is considered a classic of Conan lore and is oft...

Pigeons from Hell is a short story by Robert E. Howard written in late 1934 and published posthumously by Weird Tales in 1938. The story title derives from an image present in many of Howard’s grandmother’s ghost stories, that of an old deserted plantation mansion haunted by ghostly pigeons.

The dagger flashed downward. A sharp cry broke in a gasp. The form on the rough altar twitched convulsively and lay still. The jagged flint edge sawed at the crimsoned breast, and thin bony fingers, ghastly dyed, tore out the still- twitching heart. Under matted white brows, sharp eyes gleamed with a ferocious intensity.

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.

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.

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...