Robert E. Howard will always be the father of Sword & Sorcery. He created Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, King Kull, and finally, Conan the Cimmerian. But part of that new sub-genre was a horror story element that rests in the background. It should be no surprise that Howard wrote horror tales as well. Some of these were mere pot-boilers (“The Haunter of the Ring”), others more interesting (“Wolfshead”) but there is one story that rates Howard as a top horror writer.
That story was “Pigeons From Hell” by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, May 1938), a tale of the old days of slavery, of evil that never dies. Robert E. Howard based this story on the old legends his grandmother told him in West Texas. Weird Tales reprinted the story in 1951, giving it a second illustration, an unusual event.
The plot has two New Englanders, Branning and Griswell, staying a night in a deserted olf house on a plantation. Branning wakes up to hear a siren call drawing him upstairs. Griswell wakes up in time to see his go up those stairs. When he returns he has a chunk cut out of his head, while gripping the bloody hatchet in his hand. Griswell wisely runs away.
He runs into the local sheriff, Buckner, who investigates. Finding what looks like a murder at Griswell’s hand, the man is accused. But Buckner isn’t out for an easy arrest. He knows the history of the plantation. It had once belonged to the Blassenvilles, cruel slave owners. In 1890, the last of the Blassenvilles, Elizabeth fled the house and was never seen again. Since then the place has been deserted. Buckner and Griswell follow the trail that leads to a terrible secret and perhaps one of the best Lovecraftian reveals since H. P. L’s “The Outsider”.
“Was that thing a woman once?” whispered Griswell. “God, look at that face, even in death. Look at those claw-like hands, with black talons like those of a beast. Yes, it was human, though — even the rags of an old ballroom gown. Why should a mulatto maid wear such a dress, I wonder?” “This has been her lair for over forty years,” muttered Buckner, brooding over the grinning grisly thing sprawling in the corner. “This clears you, Griswell — a crazy woman with a hatchet — that’s all the authorities need to know. God, what a revenge! — what a foul revenge! Yet what a bestial nature she must have had, in the beginnin’, to delve into voodoo as she must have done———” (“Pigeons From Hell” by Robert E. Howard)
Howard had a reputation among hard ass Weird Tales readers as a guy who didn’t play by the rules. His vampire in “The Horror in the Mound” (Weird Tales, May 1932) didn’t behave like Bela Lugosi. REH liked to make this more interesting and original. He does so here too. The vampire-like Zuvembie has the power to control her victims. She places them in a dream-state then commands them. Once in her midst she likes to chop them with hatchet and drink their blood.
“Pigeons From Hell” received a television adaptation on Boris Karloff’s Thriller (June 6, 1961). The Zuvembie was played by Ottola Nesmith. Scott Hampton did a comics version in 1988 for Eclipse (with a Ramsey Campbell intro) and Joe R. Lansdale, a fellow Texan, did one for Dark Horse comics in 2009.
Robert E. Howard was a professional Pulp writer. His goals can be obscure to some readers who know him only as a Sword & Sorcery writer. Or as a correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and as part of that Cthulhu Mythos circle. These constructs (S&S, Cthulhu Mythos) came largely after his death from the editors that repackaged his work. At the time REH wrote his stories he wanted first to succeed as a Pulp writer, with his crowning glory being to be in Adventure, a wish he never achieved. The truth is he had a multi-faceted pen that gave us boxing yarns, sailor stories, thundering Kipling-esque poems, Lovecraftian terrors and tales of Hyboria all at the same time. “Pigeons From Hell” cements his reputation in the roll call of the great horror writers as well.
Nice write-up! A quick correction to your article: the story is based on ghost stories the Howards’ Black cook, Mary Bohannon, told Robert while the Howards were living in East Texas, in the town of Bagwell, and not Howard’s grandmother’s stories.