Wednesday 18 August 2010

Shocking Announcements from the Robert E. Howard Foundation

Holy Smokes!  New letters, new poetry, new drawings!

As you can see, lots of exciting stuff.  Steve Harrison's Casebook and Tales of Weird Menace sound fun: I distinctly remember some stories were left out of The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard because they were considered to be of the latter genre ("Skull-Face" in particular.)

However, I notice one glaring omission from Tales of Weird Menace (glaring to me, at least): where's "The Black Bear Bites"?  That's pretty clearly Weird Menace, it isn't a particularly long story, and it isn't half bad in my eyes.  What gives, REHF?  "Black John's Vengeance" sounds like it could be another name for TBBB.

Still, aside from that, looks good.  I suppose if they didn't include "The Hyena" from Horror Stories, for whatever reason TBBB didn's pass muster.

EDIT: Paul Herman and Rob Roehm have helpfully confirmed that "Black John's Vengeance" is, in fact, "The Black Bear Bites," and that there's a little controversy about the two titles and Howard's final word on the matter:

I've heard two stories about this. One of the stories is that "Vengeance" was changed to "Bites" by an editor or someone because it gave away too much of the plot. The other story is that "Vengeance" was just a "working title" and that "Bites" was the final. I chose to go with "Vengeance" because that is the title that is on the typescript I used, and there was practically no difference between that ts and the published version of the story -- a single word here and a comma there.

Huzzah, big Black John's in Tales of Weird Menace!

5 comments:

  1. so err.. does that mean my copy of "Complete Poetry" isn't really complete anymore?

    le sigh.

    The two books though.. I will have to try and get those.. money permitting..

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  2. That's why they called it Collected Poetry. The gang at the REH Foundation KNEW this would happen.

    Tex
    (who will print out a copy of the newly discovered poem, on parchment, and tuck it into his slowly expanding CP)

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  3. I thought it was "Complete" Poetry?

    I hope I paid more attention to the contents than the cover..

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  4. Yup, "Collected Poetry." Given Howard's fondness for writing poems in letters and whatnot, I'd dare say there are tons of undiscovered poems out there, in boxes of old letters and the like.

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  5. well thats ok then, I don't feel so bad..

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