Informal Guides to Robert E. Howard

An interesting series of works on Robert E. Howard is the “Informal Guide to Robert E. Howard” series by Fred Blosser from Pulp Hero Press. At present the series consists of five volumes.

I also review another REH-related volume by the author here as well.

If you want to read REH’s fiction, your best bet is to get the current trade paperback series from Ballantine/Del Rey along with the new Ultimate Editions from the REH Foundation Press. Further, these books all cite the stories located in these collections.

So far we have the following in the series:

• Ar-I-E’ch and the Spell of Cthulhu: An Informal Guide to REH’s Lovecraftian Fiction (2018)
• Western Weirdness and Voodoo Vengeance: An Informal Guide to REH’s American Horrors (2018)
• Silken Swords: An Informal Guide to the Women in the Fiction of REH (2019)
• The Annotated Guide REH’s Weird Fiction (2020)
• Savage Scrolls: Scholarship from the Hyborian Age, Vol. 1 (2017)

Most of the guides are short, about 100-150 pages long, though a few get around 200 pages.

As REH’s Cthulhu fiction was the first of his works I read, I was most interested in Ar-I-E’ch and the Spell of Cthulhu: An Informal Guide to REH’s Lovecraftian Fiction. If you don’t get where the name Ar-I-E’ch comes from, it’s the name that H.P. Lovecraft used to refer to REH in his letters to him. We get chapters covering REH’s interaction with Lovecraft and a good overview of Lovecraftian fiction.

Then we get into a more detailed look into a dozen Lovecraftian stories, giving the plot and a discussion of the story. A further four stories that aren’t explicitly mythos-influenced are covered. We also get an overview of REH’s contributions to the mythos in terms of tomes and entities. There are also a few appendixes, one on the mythos elements in Kull and another works out a chronology of Solomon Kane.

The next volume, Western Weirdness and Voodoo Vengeance covers his horror stories outside the mythos. These could be called “regional horror,” with several set in Texas, along with the swamp lands of Louisiana. This includes REH’s most well-known horror story, “Pigeons From Hell.” Again, we get a look at different groups of stories with an overview of them, then a look at particular stories with their plot and a discussion.

Then we get Silken Swords, which looks at a variety of female characters across all of his fiction. We start off with an alphabetical listing of all these characters. And next there’s a look at the unnamed female characters from his works. Next, are several parts looking into different kinds of characters, such as sword women, sorceresses, and more.

The Annotated Guide Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fiction was originally written in the 1970s to be a companion to Robert E. Weinberg‘s The Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Sword and Sorcery (maybe someone should reprint that). But it never appeared and so was updated and published in 2020, now under the overall “Informal Guide” series. Here, the author covers 13 groups of stories, such as “Cthulhu Mythos,” “Skull-Face” (REH’s Fu Manchu-like villain), “Shudder Stories,” and more.

As always, several sections were more interesting to me than others, so I jumped around reading certain ones. Each section goes over that area, and then looks at the major stories in that group, including the characters, plot, and commentary. Notes are given as to where you can find these stories.

Now Savage Scrolls, Vol. 1, came out before the “Informal Guide” books but seems to have been retroactively included in the series. While it is subtitled “Scholarship From the Hyborian Age,” there is a lot of Conan-related stuff here, other characters such as Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and others are also included.

Overall the book contains nearly 30 articles organized into four parts. The first two parts are Conan-specific, giving info on his world, his friends, and his foes. The other two parts cover his other sword-and-sorcery characters and then the rest of his characters and story cycles. As with other such works, I jumped around to the ones I was most interested in.

The other work is an omnibus edition of Exploring the Worlds of REH. These are works that appeared in a series of three ebooks but have been collected in a single POD edition in 2022. More precisely, the three ebooks contained 13 articles to which were added eight new ones.

These are organized into eight parts. Three parts are focused on his stories in Texas and the American West. Another part looks at his planetary romance Almuric. A lot of interesting articles in this one. I’m not sure why they weren’t done as another “Informal Guide” or a second Savage Scrolls.

I have no idea when we will get more volumes in the “Informal Guide” series. It’s been several years since the last one. And I have no idea when or if we will get a second volume of Savage Scrolls, or have the other works made that unnecessary?

If you want to go beyond just reading REH’s stories, these would all be a good start. You can either focus on a particular area or get one of the generalist volumes (Annotated Guide or Savage Scrolls). While I’m not a huge REH fan, as I start reading more of his works, I’ll keep these volumes handy and keep an eye out for future works from this author.