Click on a right-hand cover image to go to the publisher’s website for more details about the book!

C21 REH Collections
A weird new millennium

Wandering Star, Del Rey and Subterranean Press

Wandering Star  published three collections of Howard’s stories in the same series as its three-volume Conan of Cimmeria series. As with the Conan series, Del Rey republished two of these in the U.S. and has continued with new collections since Wandering Star folded. In 2008, Subterranean Press  began (almost) where Wandering Star had left off, with limited and deluxe hardcover editions of the Del Rey paperbacks.

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane compiles all of Howard’s tales of REH’s puritan avenger for the first time.

The Ultimate Triumph: The Heroic Tales of Robert E. Howard collects seven stories and five poems which represent some of the best of Howard’s work featuring barbarians. Also included is a forward by Frank Frazetta, the illustrator; an essay from the noted French scholar, Patrice Louinet; a section with excepts from Howard’s letters to H.P. Lovecraft in which he discusses “barbarism vs. civilization”; and a complete set of textual notes, creating a record of any deviations from the meticulously restored and unexpurgated text.

Bran Mak Morn: The Last King features all Howard’s Bran Mak Morn stories, including the eerie masterpieces “Worms of the Earth” and “Kings of the Night” – in which Kull the Conqueror is summoned from the depths of time.

Following Wandering Star’s fold, Del Rey continues to publish collections of Howard’s stories roughly according to plan…

Two “best of” collections were added to the schedule to broaden the appeal of the series and attract new readers.

A collection of Howard’s horror stories – and poetry! – was scheduled for publication for Hallowe’en 2008!

A further volume is planned for publication in February 2010.

University of Nebraska Press

Spear-headed by Wandering Star’s series editor Rusty Burke, five new volumes of Howard’s stories have been published by the University of Nebraska Press . As with the Wandering Star series, these volumes present many stories restored from Howard’s original manuscripts.

In The Black Stranger , REH explores a New World older and more haunted than that 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. He 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. (Source: UNP.)

Lord of Samarcand contains all of Howard’s Oriental stories, including those published in Farnsworth Wright’s Oriental Stories between 1930 and 1934, unpublished tales printed here in authoritative texts based on the author’s surviving typescripts, and some fragments. His stories of the Crusades are the closest to the Conan tales in content and intensity. (Source: UNP; The Barbarian Keep.)

Wordsworth Editions

Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural – “for lovers of the ‘horror’ genre” – includes two REH collections.

The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard series

Wildside Press has buplished several of a projected ten-volume series, The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, which presents all of Howard’s classic fantasy, horror, and poetry for Weird Tales (and a few other magazines), “meticulously restored” to the original magazine texts.

Its Cosmos Books imprint is republishing these in a five-volume series of mass-market paperbacks. It combines two or more Wildside Press volumes at a time (as well as taking out some content with copyright questions).

Wildside Press

Cosmos Books

Other Wildside Press collections

Wildside Press has also published various other Howard collections, overlapping rather with Bison Books’.

The Complete Action Stories contains 24 action, western, and boxing tales featuring characters such as Breckinridge Elkins. “Blow the Chinks Down!” and “Dark Shanghai” appear in English for the first time since their original pulp publications. (Source: WP.)

Gates of Empire presents eight of Robert E. Howard’s adventure stories set during the Crusades.

A Gent from Bear Creek and Other Tales showcases REH’s comic westerns. REH’s novel A Gent from Bear Creek is included (with its text restored to the original versions, including the italics left out of previous editions), as well as two additional western stories that were re-written by someone at the Kline Agency as Breckinridge Elkins tales.

Chaosium

REH was one of H.P. Lovecraft’s frequent correspondents, and an author of many pivotal Cthulhu Mythos tales. This book collects together all of Howard’s Mythos tales – including the tales that originated Gol-Goroth, Unausspreclichen Kulten, and Friedrich von Junzt – along with several fragments left behind by REH and completed by a variety of authors.