The Horror from the Mound

Cowboy turned rancher turned Mythos investigator/victim? That's right!

An exemplar of Robert E. Howard's "Weird Southwest" subgenre, The Horror from the Mound is one of about a dozen stories to blend western fiction with horror and fantasy in a way that would no-doubt irritate the obsessive categorizers and genre labelers of later decades, while exploring the perception that the "New World" is actually very ancient in fact.

First published in the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales magazine, it shared the same issue with that fantastic tale of Martian horror I posted about last week--The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, by Clark Ashton Smith.

Only when I began to look up the original publication information for these tales did I start to comprehend the magnitude of kick-assitude that was 1930s era Weird Tales.

Seriously, in any given issue a depression-era teen might pick off the newsstand, he or she would be likely to find original stories from Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, et al. Stories that would be collected and discussed as "classics" over 80 years later. And this wasn't a case of one of these stories every few months--it was 2 or more of them in each issue.

Let's take a look at the fiction published in the year 1936 alone:

January: The Hour of the Dragon pt. 2 (REH), Dagon (HPL), as well as Seabury Quinn (a Jules de Grandin mystery), C.L. Moore (a Jirel of Joiry adventure), and August Derleth.

February:The Hour of the Dragon pt. 3 (REH), The Temple (HPL), plus Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore (a Northwest Smith yarn), and Frank Owen.

March: The Hour of the Dragon pt. 4 (REH), The Black Abbot of Puthuum (a Zothique story by CAS), plus Henry Kuttner and Edmond Hamilton.

April: The Hour of the Dragon pt. 5 (REH), plus August Derleth, E. Hoffman Price, and Robert Bloch.

May: Stories from Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, Edmond Hamilton, and August Derleth, plus a poem from CAS.

June: Black Canaan (REH), as well as stories from Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamiliton, and August Derleth.

July: Red Nails pt 1 (REH), Necromancy in Naat (a tale of Zothique by CAS), Lost Paradise (a Northwest Smith story by C.L. Moore), plus August Derleth and Manly Wade Wellman.

August/September: Red Nails pt 2 (REH), plus Edmond Hamilton and August Derleth.

October: Red Nails pt 3 (REH), another Northwest Smith story from C.L. Moore, plus Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.

November: Black Hound of Death (REH), Pickman's Model (HPL), plus Seabury Quinn and Robert Bloch.

December: The Haunter in the Dark (HPL), The Fire of Asshurbanipal (REH), plus Henry Kuttner, Otis A. Kline, Robert Bloch, and Manly Wade Wellman.

WOW! What an embarrassment of riches!

So, without even an ounce more ado, let's wander stupidly up to...

The Horror from the Mound