Robert E. Howard wrote some Cthulhu Mythos stories, though most are admittedly minor ones. His Serpent Men were coopted into the cycle by H. P. Lovecraft in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (Weird Tales, August 1931), thus creating an entire branch of the Mythos dedicated to these loathsome snakemen and their degenerate children. “The Shadow Kingdom”, the story first featuring the Serpent Men, was published in Weird Tales in January 1929, and is important for another reason. It is the first full-blooded sword & sorcery tale, as well. Howard had been trying out his ideas for a horror-oriented, fantasy-style tale with Solomon Kane, previously, but it is only with the creation of King Kull, the ancient Atlantean world of Valusia, and the insidious Serpent Men, that the mix is right.
I’ve pontificated on how the Conan stories belong in the Mythos (at least, tangentially) at length in “Conan and the Cthulhu Mythos”) (You can find it here), so I’m not going to cover that ground again. I’m not really that interested in nit-picking, anyway. What interests me more is how HPL’s ideas helped to enrich Howard’s invention. Taking the excitement of historical fiction (such as the stories Howard read in Adventure, or work by Harold Lamb, for instance), adding Howard’s own Dunsanian Fantasy world and, finally, the monsters that could only exist in a reality of the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, we get the final form of sword & sorcery. Nothing was quite like it before Howard and everything would change after him.
Read the Rest:
http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2014/05/guest-post-writing-mythos-sword-of.html
