Description

A Little Bronze Book Of Weird Tales  by Robert E. Howard

Hardcover – Borderlands Books – February 2024 – 130 pages

Signed by editor P. Gardner Goldsmith

As the “father of Sword and Sorcery,” Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) stood at the nexus of two Western cultural and literary ages. As an American growing up in Texas in the final days of the “Frontier,” he absorbed and enjoyed exercising the liberty of life in the wilds while receiving the wisdom, beauty, scholarship, and budding narrative power cultivated for decades by European and North American authors. Informed, and, it seems, energized, by the vanguard of Fantasy he so greatly enjoyed in his youth, Mr. Howard grabbed the proverbial baton and ran—hard and fast—becoming a creator in the vanguard of Pulp.

As such, he helped form the bridge between the Dawn of Fantasy, and the Golden Age of Pulp Fantasy and Science Fiction, creating tales, poetry, worlds, and characters that, for nearly a century, have entertained and colored modern literature.

In Howard’s work, we see a synthesis and a battle. His iconic Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, Bran Mak Morn, El Borak, Carmac Mac Art, and Steve Costigan, stand with feet firmly planted in the realities of life. They know physical pain. They know how to fight. They know how to hunt and fish, and hike and camp. They know the land and the shocking output of men who hatch and execute evil plans. They know sin, and they might know redemption.