Regional Horror

A few American writers have successfully combined fantasy, horror, and U.S. Southern regionalism. Along with Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Vincent Benet before him, and Manly Wade Wellman and Joe R. Lansdale after, Robert E. Howard was one of those masters. Howard’s talent for writing macabre fiction and his deep interest in the history and cultures of the U.S. South and Southwest came together in a series of memorable regional horror stories. Howard’s imagination populated the dusty plains of his native West Texas with horrors from the age of the Conquistadors and Native American legend. The bayous and piney woods of the Deep South hide wrathful shapes of darkness that stir fear even in Howard’s hard-bitten heroes.

Pigeons from Hell

Folk tales told to Howard in his boyhood inspired this masterpiece, which Stephen King called “one of the finest horror stories of [the 20th] century” and which Boris Karloff dramatized on his Thriller TV series in 1961. Deep in the piney woods, the ruined Blassenville plantation house hides a secret from the cruel days of slavery. Two travelers, Griswell and Branner, awaken the horror when they camp out in the old house, and only Griswell survives to seek help from the local law officer, Sheriff Buckner. Only by going back into the house at sunset, when the ghostly pigeons fly out of Hell, can Griswell prove to Buckner that he did not murder Branner. Having escaped the lethal hatchet of the lurking Zuvembie once, can Griswell survive a second encounter?

The Horror from the Mound

An unspoken curse hangs over the old burial mound on Steve Brill’s West Texas farm. The sagas of the Conquistadors hint of a terrible association between the mound and Don Santiago de Valdez, the Spanish Dracula, whose bloodlust spanned two continents in the age of Coronado. When a misguided quest for gold leads to Don Santiago’s disinterment, only Steve Brill’s six-gun and fighting spirit stand between the modern world and the shadow of the vampire.

Old Garfield’s Heart

To the townsfolk of 1930s Lost Knob, Texas, Old Jim Garfield’s accounts of life on the Texas frontier are colorful tall tales. How could a man living in the 20th Century have ridden alongside the heroes of the Texas Republic and fought Comanches in the years after the Alamo, as Old Garfield claims? One youngster discovers that Old Jim is telling the truth, when a ghostly Indian shaman returns to claim the secret gift that has allowed the elderly Texan to cheat death for almost a century.

The Dead Remember

In a drunken argument, cowboy Jim Gordon shoots and kills Old Joel, a black farmer, and Joel’s wife Jezebel. Before she dies, Jezebel lays a voodoo curse on Gordon. She pledges to return from the grave when the time is ready, and as he rides north to Dodge City on a trouble-plagued cattle drive, Gordon realizes that the hatred of the voodoo people is implacable. The dead remember their dreadful promises, and they always come back to fulfil them.

Black Canaan

In the tangled fastnesses of Canaan, voodoo man Saul Stark works a gruesome magic that turns men into soulless, misshapen swamp dwellers. With this army of monsters, Stark plots to foment a bloody revolt of former slaves and make himself master of Canaan. Kirby Buckner plunges into the bayous to halt the conspiracy, but even Kirby’s skill with pistol and Bowie knife may not be enough to save him from Stark’s evilly alluring mistress, the High Priestess of Damballah.