Zuvembies and the Voo-Doo Man

Pigeons From Hell    by Robert E. Howard  (1938 Weird Tales)

Tuesday’s Tale of Terror  January 26, 2015

 

Come to the old south, to Blassenville Manor. Who doesn’t love a Southern Gothic horror story?  Blassenville Manor is long abandoned when two young men stumble upon this decaying mansion and decide to spend the night.

‘The old deserted house stimulated their imagination with its suggestion of antebellum splendor and ultimate decay. They left the automobile beside the rutty road, and as they went up the winding walk of crumbling bricks, almost lost in the tangle of rank growth, pigeons rose from the balustrades in a fluttering, feathery crowd and swept away with a low thunder of beating wings.

 ‘The oaken door sagged on broken hinges. Dust lay thick on the floor of the wide, dim hallway, on the broad steps of the stair that mounted up from the hall. They turned into a door opposite the landing, and entered a large room, empty, dusty, with cobwebs shining thickly in the corners.’

 

I won’t ruin the suspense (and this story is truly high suspense), but  I will say the story includes a secret room, People of Damballah, and yes, a hatchet-stroke in the dark.

 

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s nonfiction book about the horror genre, he writes that, Robert E. Howard’s Pigeons from Hell, is “one of the finest horror stories of our century.” See if you agree.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Robert E. Howard fans favor his stories about explorer Solomon Kane and Conan the Barbarian. Weird Magazine fans revere him as one of the best in weird and fantasy fiction. At the age of thirty in 1936, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

 

 

 

 

Read the short story (three parts) at Gutenberg.net.au.

Listen to the audio (1:19 hours) on YouTube.com

Watch the 50-minute film (adaptation), Boris Karloff’s Thriller Theater on YouTube.com

Visit the Robert E. Howard Foundation.

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free Tales of Terror.

 This is a compendium of over 160 short stories by over 100 master storytellers of mystery,  supernatural, horror, and ghost stories.

 Join me in reading one short story every week!

 Comments are welcome.

 

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

PulpFiction.com

Books & Such   Bibliophilica    Lovecraft Ezine     HorrorAddicts.net  

Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com

Monster Librarian     HorrorNews.net     HorrorTalk.com

 Rob Around Books      The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

February is Women in Horror Month.  Stop by for shorts stories by women authors for the entire month. And not just horror but mystery, supernatural, fantasy too.

Skulls in the Stars: Solomon Kane

Skulls in the Stars  by Robert E. Howard  (1929)

Tuesday’s Tale of Terror, January 28, 2014

How’s your imagination these days? Looking for something fiendish?

In Skulls in the Stars, our character Solomon Kane attempts to cross the moor road on his way to Torkertown. The villagers have warned him of an evil haunting on the moors. Something wicked is killing the travelers and the deaths are as gruesome as one could not imagine. Kane is advised to take the swamp road. But if you know anything about the adventurous Solomon Kane (a Puritan of high faith and dedicated to defeating evil), meeting up with Satan himself would not deter this man. What does Kane meet on the moors?

“…a thing that had once been a man—a gore-covered, frightful thing that fell at Kane’s feet and writhed and groveled and raised its terrible face to the rising moon, and gibbered and yammered, and fell down again and died in its own blood.”

… “The moon began to rise, lean and haggard, like a skull among the stars.”

If you like your horror full throttle, this is it. Robert E. Howard writes a thrilling story, saturated with descriptions of this beast and its victims. Truly nightmarish. A virtual exercise in evil vs. courage. I actually needed some of Kane’s courage to finish reading this story (as you know I’m more the quiet horror type). This story did in fact give me a nightmare; I woke up screaming. I admit this story made me feel like a kid again, reading the scariest story, being haunted by the images, and afraid to shut the bedroom lights off. Are you laughing?

We all know author Robert E. Howard for his famous character Conan the Barbarian, and sword and sorcery genre. Most of the Solomon Kane stories were published in Weird Tales at the height of pulp fiction era. Here is the official Solomon Kane Web site: http://www.solomonkanethemovie.com/

Read the short story at Gutenberg.net Australia  (and do keep the lights on).

Solomon Kane Movie Trailer:

Another of Howard’s titles is Moon of the Skulls: African jungle story where Solomon Kane seeks the vampire queen of Negari: crags dark and forbidding with impenetrable blackness, a virgin on a Black Altar, a tower of death, Babel of bestial screams, blood drenched brains  … I didn’t make it through this one. But you might.

Read Moon of the Skulls at Gutenberg.net

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Horror Novel Reviews   Hell Horror    HorrorPalace

HorrorSociety.com

 Monster Librarian  Tales to Terrify       Spooky Reads

 Lovecraft Ezine      Rob Around Books    The Story Reading Ape Blog

     The Gothic Wanderer   Sirens Call Publications

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

NEXT WEEK BEGINS WOMEN IN HORROR MONTH