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The Black Stranger book cover
The Black Stranger
2005
First Published
4.14
Average Rating
352
Number of Pages

Robert E. Howard is celebrated as the founding father of sword-and-sorcery, the creator of Conan of Cimmeria and Kull of Atlantis. The Black Stranger and Other American Tales demonstrates that in some of his most powerful heroic fantasy and horror stories, he also explored a New World older and more haunted than that which we’ve seen in textbooks or museum exhibits. In Howard's Gothic America, dominion goes hand in hand with damnation and the present never ceases to writhe in the grip of the past. "The Black Stranger" spearheads the collection. Located at the extreme edge of Hyborian geography and human ruthlessness, this Conan novella has seldom been available until now. All of the Cimmerian's lethal skills may not be enough inside a stockade that shelters a self-exiled, pirate-plagued count, besieged from without and bedeviled from within. Against the backdrop of a demonically hostile dreadwood, Howard recreates the worst nightmares of the earliest European invaders of North America. In the tales that follow, Howard unearths sinister civilizations that have forgotten the mysteries of their origins on American soil tens of thousands of years ago. That soil is a dark and bloody ground, beneath which the monstrous heirs of ancient wrongs and unsuspected wars wait. A Comanche champion and a lone conquistador stumble upon empires carved out of the primordial Southwest by necromancers. Hot hate given cold flesh lurches on zuvembie legs in "Pigeons from Hell" and lurks in the shuddersome swamps of the Deep South in "Black Canaan." These stories, here refurbished with authoritative, unexpurgated texts, have transcended the Thirties pulps in which they first saw print. With their unflinching focus on original American sin and even more original sinners, some are sure to take their place next to dark classics like "Young Goodman Brown," "Benito Cereno," and "A Rose for Emily."

Avg Rating
4.14
Number of Ratings
240
5 STARS
41%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
15%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Author · 189 books

Robert Ervin Howard was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror." He is well known for having created—in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales—the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can only be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond. —Wikipedia Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

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