Who Goes There?

Robert E. Howard is a favorite on this site for a few reasons: he wrote a lot, pretty much all his work was published in the magazines, and he writes action that doesn’t bore me—a real achievement if you know my reading habits. Howard’s career was tragically short-lived but he got started very young and never stopped, debuting in 1924 at the age of 18 and only stopping with his suicide in 1936, aged thirty. Most authors barely get their feet off the ground by the time they’re thirty, but Howard was such a prolific and restless writer that he had accumulated what would be several hefty volumes of fiction when he died, and that’s not even counting posthumous releases. Nowadays Howard is most known for creating Conan the Barbarian (or the Cimmerian, yes I know that’s technically the correct title), which by itself would prove profoundly influential on American fantasy. True, he was not the first American fantasist, but Howard set the standard for a mode of fantasy writing that could not be confused with British fantasy a la J. R. R. Tolkien or Lord Dunsany.

Howard was only 23 when Skull-Face was serialized, but he had already been in the game for five years and his growing adeptness at storytelling shows. At about 33,000 words Skull-Face was also his longest work of fiction up to that point, and the first installment is also the longest. While Howard ran a ton of series and contributed to other people’s series, most notably the Cthulhu Mythos, Skull-Face is a complete standalone work. How does it measure up to his more mature stories? Hmmm.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Weird Tales, October to December 1929. You can read Part 1 on the Archive here, and subsequent installments are also available there. Skull-Face was later reprinted whole in the December 1952 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, found here. This was added to Project Gutenberg pretty recently (and by that I mean two weeks ago, I’m not kidding), because as far as I can tell Howard’s work is basically all in the public domain, and you can read it here in the format of your choosing.

Enhancing Image

Stephen Costigan is what you might call a fuck-up, being a shell-shocked World War I veteran from America who now spends his days smoking hashish basically nonstop in a London opium den, called the Temple of Dreams. We start with Stephen recounting one of his hashish dreams, in which he sees what at first seems a skull floating midair but which is in fact attached to a person, yellow skin tightly wrapping it and the skull “endowed with some horrid form of life.” This is totally not the villain of the story and Stephen is totally not gonna meet him later.

For now we’re stuck with Stephen’s daily routine, which is to wallow in London’s Limehouse district, in the aforementioned opium den run by some shady Chinese individual (not the words Howard uses) named Yun Shatu. It’s pretty clear, although the term “post traumatic stress disorder” would not be invented for several more decades, that Stephen has become both an expat and a drug addict in no small part due to PTSD. Howard would’ve been a grade-schooler when World War I happened, but Stephen is at least thirty years old here, having survived No Man’s Land surrounded by mud and corpses. “My body recovered, how I know not; my mind never did.” Stephen’s wartime experiences go to explain his character in at least two ways: by giving context to his vulnerable state at the story’s beginning, and by justifying some rather heroic acts he commits later. Howard had a lot to write in so short a time so that every detail here contributes something to the narrative, for we do not have time to waste.

After a brief dream sequence we’re off to the races—at such a breakneck speed that when I reading I actually did not figure at first that we had transitioned from the dream world to the real one; it doesn’t help that the opium den is called the Temple of Dreams, which admittedly does add to the nightmarish atmosphere about to envelope Stephen. Since Howard’s not gonna stop the plot train, I figure I may as well take a break here and talk about a few things that caught my eye—for better or worse. Apparently in 1929 you couldn’t write about sex past some descriptions of scantily clad women in your pulp fiction, but drug addiction is fine. I find it a bit hard to believe Stephen is this much of a wreck because he smokes too much weed; a shame, in 2023 he could’ve started a YouTube channel as a charismatic stoner. We also know weed is not that harmful, although it’s possible (I’m not sure what first-hand experience he had) that Howard is pointing a finger at what would’ve been an enormous stigma against drug use at the time—for Stephen is about to come across a far worse drug than hashish.

Also, I shouldn’t have to explain this, but I do because I wanna recommend Howard’s fiction to people but not have them be blindsided by remarks that are very much part of the vocabulary of Howard’s time. To quote Walter from The Big Lebowski, “‘Chinaman’ is not the preferred nomenclature.” I do suspect Howard picked London because it’s a locale outside of what his American readership would be familiar with, and there’s undoubtedly a good deal of playing to exoticism with all the non-white characters who are described in racialized terms. For what it’s worth, no, Howard does not use the N-word (at least here), although he makes fair use of “negro,” which was a perfectly innocuous word in 1929 and would actually remain so for several more decades. I’m not sure when “negro” would stop being used by well-meaning white folks but it could not have been earlier than the ’70s. Anyway, there’s also a character whose ethnicity combined with her attire are a little dubious, but we’ll get to her in a minute.

Stephen gets taken by some brute named Hassim to an out-of-the-way part of the opium den, and this is where we’re introduced to the villain of the story (I’m just gonna say it here because why bother), Kathulos, the skull-face (get it) Stephen saw in his dream earlier. Kathulos turns out to be a man—sort of. He’s not a walking corpse, although he has unusual proportions, never mind that despite claiming to be of Egypt his skin complexion doesn’t align with any known ethnicity. It’s clear (at least to us) that Kathulos is a sorcerer of a sort, maybe even a zombie; regardless there’s something about him that pushes him into the realm of the supernatural.

A skull to which no vestige of flesh seemed to remain but on which taut brownish-yellow skin grew fast, etching out every detail of that terrible death’s-head. The forehead was high and in a way magnificent, but the head was curiously narrow through the temples, and from under penthouse brows great eyes glimmered like pools of yellow fire. The nose was high-bridged and very thin; the mouth was a mere colorless gash between thin, cruel lips. A long, bony neck supported this frightful vision and completed the effect of a reptilian demon from some mediæval hell.

Kathulos, seeing potential in Stephen, has a job offer for him, although it’s not out of the “kindness” of his heart. Unfortunately for Stephen the means by which Kathulos keeps him leashed to this new job is an elixir—a drug of such power (indeed life-restoring properties) but so addictive that withdrawal would mean death. Stephen’s hashish addiction is nothing compared to the hell Kathulos is about to put him through; on the upside, the elixir gives him near-superhuman abilities that’ll prove useful. Kathulos’s goons are also not all eye sores, as there’s a woman under his spell: Zuleika. Circassian “by blood and birth” and spending her youth in Turkey before being bought by Kathulos, Zuleika is a bit of a… problem. She’s a bit of a damsel, which for pulp fiction is not unusual, but this is more conspicuous by Howard’s standards, coming from the man who would write some strong-willed women later in his career. It’s also clear from her background and how she dresses (in a mix of “Oriental” and Western fashions) that Zuleika is acting as the exotic woman whom the white man will woo.

Lastly we’re introduced to John Gordon of the London secret police, whose role in things is vague at first but who will prove useful in Part 1’s climax. By the time we get to the back end of Part 1 we have a few parties involved, each other their own goalss in mind and, more importantly, these goals are not made clear to the reader. It’s clear Kathulos wants to use Stephen as his slave, to accomplish a mission whose bigger goal remains utterly a mystery to Our Hero™. What could the skull-face be planning? (By the way, Kathulos sounds a bit like Cthulhu, which, being correspondents with Lovecraft, Howard would’ve been well aware of at the time, though I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.) The elixir Stephen has become horribly addicted to will be both the ssaving and death of him as he takes part in a mission of impersonation, and later murder, that goes amiss.

There Be Spoilers Here

What happens from hereon is a bit much, but it involves, among other things, an assassination plot and Stephen dressing up in a gorilla costume. I’m not kidding about that last part. Stephen explains the situation to Gordon and the two agree to team up with, with Stephen lying about his mission and confronting Kathulos while Gordon and his men surround the opium den so as to block off escape routes. Since these are London cops I assume Gordon and his men plan to apprehend Kathulos using nothing more severe than harsh language. It doesn’t matter, because naturally Kathulos expected Stephen would betray him, and not only that but there’s a secret tunnel the cops could not have anticipated; that said tunnel turns out to be filled with “scores of hideous reptiles” only adds insult to injury.

So bad news, Kathulos has gotten away and he took Zuleika with him; the good news is that Stephen drank enough of that elixir that it should last him a few days before he starts going into withdrawal. The hunt is on, between a shattered veteran and an aloof plain-clothes cop for a sorcerer who is probably even more powerful than what we’ve seen up to this point. Howard wrote his stories with magazine publication in mind and as such he knew how serials worked, with the end of each installment leaving bread crumbs for intrigue but making the reader excited for more. Howard’s writing itself has a drug-like effect wherein it transports the reader to a mindset that is not lucid, but rather based primarily on imagery and action, with anything not action being omitted; as such you have potentially a 50,000-word narrative compressed to 2/3 that length.

A Step Farther Out

Every time I read a Howard story I feel tempted to become one who those nerds who digs up his letters to try to see how his brain worked. Not that Howard was an unparalleled genius whose inner workings would be a treasure trove, a Shakespeare for us to bow to, but more that his interests strike me as so human that reading much of his fiction almost reads like having a conversation for me. There’s a lot to unpack with Skull-Face and we’re only just getting started, so I’ll say for now that I feel the way I ought to feel when it comes to the opening salvo of a serial: that is to say intrigued. I would’ve read it all in one sitting if not for work, which I think again speaks to Howard’s skill with keeping the reader’s attention.

See you next time.