Robert E. Howard - The Best of Robert E. Howard: Grim lands

T HE F ULLY I LLUSTRATED R OBERT E. H OWARD L IBRARY
from Del Rey Books

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

The Bloody Crown of Conan

Bran Mak Morn: The Last King

The Conquering Sword of Conan

Kull: Exile of Atlantis

The Best of Robert E. Howard

Volume 1: Crimson Shadows

The Best of Robert E. Howard

Volume 2: Grim Lands

The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume Two, is a work of fiction.
Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors
imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original

Copyright 2007 by Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D EL R EY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon
is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

The stories and related names, logos, characters, and distinctive likenesses herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of Conan Properties International LLC, Kull Productions, Inc., Solomon Kane, Inc., or Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC.

This edition published by arrangement with Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Howard, Robert Ervin, 19061936.
The best of Robert E. Howard; illustrated by Jim & Ruth Keegan.
p. cm.
A Del Rey trade paperback original.
eISBN: 978-0-345-50250-6
I. Title.
PS3515.O842A6 2007
813.52 dc22 2007029740

www.delreybooks.com

v3.1

To Marcelo Anciano
Without whom

Jim & Ruth Keegan

By This Axe I Rule!
first published in King Kull, 1967

The King and the Oak
first published in Weird Tales, February 1939

The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune
first published in Weird Tales, September 1929

The Tower of the Elephant
first published in Weird Tales, March 1933

Which Will Scarcely Be Understood
first published in Weird Tales, October 1937

Wings in the Night
first published in Weird Tales, July 1932

Solomon Kanes Homecoming
first published in Fanciful Tales, Fall 1936

Lord of Samarcand
first published in Oriental Stories, Spring 1932

Timur-Lang
first published in The Howard Collector, Summer 1964

A Song of the Naked Lands
first published in A Song of the Naked Lands, 1973

The Shadow of the Vulture
first published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, January 1934

Echoes from an Anvil
first published in Verses in Ebony, 1975

The Bull Dog Breed
first published in Fight Stories, February 1930

Black Harps in the Hills
first published in Omniumgathum, 1976

The Man on the Ground
first published in Weird Tales, July 1933

Old Garfields Heart
first published in Weird Tales, December 1933

Vultures of Wahpeton
first published in Smashing Novels, December 1936 (as Vultures of Whapeton)

Gents on the Lynch
first published in Argosy, October 17, 1936

The Grim Land
first published in The Grim Land and Others, 1976

Pigeons from Hell
first published in Weird Tales, May 1938

Never Beyond the Beast
first published in The Ghost Ocean, 1982

Wild Water
first published in Cross Plains, September 1975

Musings
first published in Witchcraft & Sorcery, January February 1971

Son of the White Wolf
first published in Thrilling Adventures, December 1936

Black Vulmeas Vengeance
first published in Golden Fleece, November 1938

Flints Passing
first published in Fantasy Crossroads, May 1975

Red Nails
first published in Weird Tales, July, August September, October 1936

Cimmeria
first published in The Howard Collector, Winter 1965

The first time we saw the layouts and illustrations for The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, we couldnt believe our eyes. Here was an illustrated book of a variety that no one had tried to produce in decades. It was magnificent. In fact, it was difficult to imagine such a book actually being published in a world that didnt take the time for such things any longer.

Little did we realize that ten years later, that book would have become the first volume in an ongoing illustrated library collecting the works of Robert E. Howard, and that we would find ourselves illustrating the seventh and eighth volumes in that series.

And what a treat its been.

Every paragraph of Howards vivid prose has something that fires the artistic imagination. Pirates and knights. Cowboys and barbarians. Warrior women and monsters. Is there an artist alive who can resist such things?

The stories of Robert E. Howard challenge your inner kid illustrator and reader alike to come out and play, and stay out past dinner time.

Enjoy.

Jim & Ruth Keegan
Studio City, California
July 2007

The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.

Joseph Campbell

No writer has ever answered the call to adventure with greater alacrity than Robert E. Howard, and few have proven superior to him in issuing that call to readers. For all that his stories appeared in the pages of pulp magazines during the era between the World Wars, they are always fresh, always modern, always ready, as David Weber observes, to teach another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory, because they spring from that eternal well of hero tales from which the most enduring writers have drawn. His is the art of the bard, the skald, the cyfarwydd, the seanchai, the griot, the hakawaty, the biwa hoshi. Howard, in fact, may be said to have a direct connection to the oral tradition, as he is well attested to have talked his stories out, sometimes at the top of his voice, while he was writing, and to have been a spellbinding oral yarnspinner among his friends. The tales in this book, and in its companion volume, could well have been told around a fire, the audience listening raptly to the teller, surrounded, just outside the circle of light, by Mystery, and Adventure.