Weird Talers : Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others

For more than a decade, Bobby Derie has written insightful and penetrating essays on some of the leading authors of pulp fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, especially Robert E. Howard and his friends, colleagues, and fellow-writers. In this collection of twenty-six essays, Derie covers an extraordinarily wide range of subjects; but in every instance he draws upon primary documents to illuminate some of the obscurer corners in the realm of the pulp magazines, especially the legendary Weird Tales.

Here we find studies of the expansive and at times contentious correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard; Howard’s association with such colleagues in the pulp world as Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, and Frank Belknap Long; Howard’s sporadic involvement with such fans as R. H. Barlow, Stuart M. Boland, and Francis T. Laney; a discussion of Howard’s writing for amateur papers; and numerous other topics.

Derie’s perspicacity and keenness of analysis are apparent on every page of his work. His thorough familiarity, not only with Robert E. Howard’s fiction but also with his bountiful letters, serves as the foundation of his critical work, and he exhibits a wide knowledge of the work of Lovecraft, Smith, and others who form the inexhaustibly fascinating cadre of writers associated with Weird Tales.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) and the compiler of The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard: Index and Addenda (2015). He has written numerous articles on pulp fiction that have appeared in print and in online venues.