The Perfect REH Collection
If you’re not a Robert E. Howard fan, then there’s probably not much point in reading this post any further, unless you’re simply curious. If you’ve found that you don’t like REH’s work, though, there’s nothing to see here, so move along. Shoo.
Alright, so now I’m probably mostly sharing this with fans of the stylings of REH, so you probably know that there is, finally, a wealth of material by the man to choose from in print today. For a guy who died so young he was incredibly prolific. I’ve read most of his work several times, and there’s some of it I’ll keep re-reading. Others of it, though, I won’t. For instance, Almuric. Or “The God in the Bowl.” Read it. No second helping required.
I have a long shelf of REH, including a bunch of beat up old paperbacks, all those lovely Del Reys (including the two volume best of), and Conan’s Brethren, which is sort of a “best of” featuring a whole bunch of non-Conan adventure stories. Yet as I look up at that shelf from time to time I think about which stories I would include in my very own Best Of collection.
For starters, I’d want it in one volume. And much as I enjoy and appreciate some of the stories in other genres Howard wrote for, it’s his adventure stories that really tick my clock. I don’t read and re-read “Pigeons From Hell” every few years but I darned well pull down Howard’s historicals with some frequency, or his James Allison tales, or “The Gray God Passes.” And a lot of Conan. You get the idea.