Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1: Crimson Shadows

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Jim and Ruth Keegan

The UK based small press Wandering Star issued glorious editions of Robert E. Howard’s work, including The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, The Ultimate Triumph, as well as two volumes of Howard’s Conan tales.

Subterranean Press is proud to continue this series of limited editions, beginning with Kull: Exile of Atlantis, exquisitely illustrated with color plates and black and white illustrations illuminating the text. We now continue with our second offering, Crimson Shadows, The Best of Robert E. Howard, volume one. We plan to match or better the quality of materials used in the Wandering Star editions, and will be doing a number of other books in the series.

Among the great pulp writers whose work continues to enthrall new generations of readers -- Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler--few were as versatile as Robert E. Howard. Best known as the creator of Conan, Howard also wrote not only of other memorable fantasy characters, such as Puritan swordsman Solomon Kane and Pictish king Bran Mak Morn, but hundreds of stories of boxing, detection, westerns, horror, “weird menace,” desert adventure, lost race, historicals, “spicies”, even “true confessions.”

Robert E Howard is best known as the father of “sword and sorcery” fiction, an exciting blend of swashbuckling action and supernatural horror epitomized by his characters King Kull, barbarian usurper of the throne of fabled Valusia, and Conan, who wanders the Hyborian Age “to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

But the young Texas author was far more gifted and versatile than many readers know: in a career that lasted only twelve years before his untimely death, he wrote some 300 stories and 800 poems, covering anastonishing variety of subject matter—fantasy, boxing, westerns, horror, adventure, historical, detective, spicy, even confessions—running the gamut from dark fantasy to broad humor, from brooding horror to gentle love story. In this volume, and its forthcoming companion, editor Rusty Burke, with help from his fellow Howard fans and scholars, has selected the very best of Howard's work from most of these genres, enabling newer readers to discover the richness of Howard's varied oeuvre, fans of his fantasy tales to sample his other work, and long-time fans to reconnect with old favorites. Crimson Shadows will sweep you into the vivid world of excitement and adventure of master storyteller Robert E Howard.

Limited: 750 numbered copies, signed by the artists
Deluxe Limited: 50 numbered copies, bound in leather, signed by the artists

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• The Shadow Kingdom
• The Ghost Kings
• The Curse of the Golden Shell
• Red Shadows
• The One Black Stain
• The Dark Man
• The Marching Song of Connacht
• Kings of the Night
• Recompense
• The Black Stone
• The Song of a Mad Minstrel
• The Fightin’est Pair
• The Grey God Passes
• The Song of the Last Briton
• Worms of the Earth
• An Echo from The Iron Harp
• Lord of the Dead
• Untitled
• “For the Love of Barbara Allen”
• The Tide
• The Valley of the Worm
• The Dust Dance: Selections, Version II
• The People of the Black Circle
• Beyond the Black River
• A Word from the Outer Dark
• Hawk of the Hills
• Sharp’s Gun Serenade
• Lines Written in the Realization that I Must Die

Appendices:

• Robert E. Howard: Twentieth-Century Mythmaker
• A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard
• Notes on the Original Howard Texts