Over the years, I caught bits and pieces of John Milius’ 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian — starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the big lug himself — on cable TV. But I was never tempted to watch the whole film. I finally gave in when I started writing my series on Classics of Right-Wing Cinema, and friends urged me to add Conan to my list. I admit that a film about Robert E. Howard’s iconic hero, with visuals borrowed from Frank Frazetta, starring the future California Governator, and directed by Right-wing Jew Milius sounds like a formula for a classic of Right-wing cinema, teeming with paleo-masculine heroics and illiberal political realism. (more…)
Richard Corben, Robert Ervin Howard, & John Jakes Bloodstar
Leawood, Kan.: Morning Star Press, 1976
Bloodstar is a post-apocalyptic sword-and-sorcery graphic novel based on a short story by Robert E. Howard (“The Valley of the Worm,” from the February 1934 issue of Weird Tales) about a warrior who must defeat a giant worm-like creature that threatens to destroy his race. (more…)
A Sky Without Eagles is Jack Donovan’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to The Way of Men (2012) – which has now sold an astonishing ten thousand copies. This anthology collects a number of essays and talks Donovan has given since 2010. (more…)
When Mark Finn read the initial biography of Robert Ervin Howard (Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard by L. Sprague de Camp), he was enraged by what he found. Thus, his Blood and Thunder, published some 30 years after de Camp’s, was meant as a corrective: (more…)
The adventure fiction of American author Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) has, in the last few years, begun to be publicized and appreciated on such a scale that it is becoming a formative element in the spiritual-ideological development of a substantial portion of American youth. (more…)
The following text is a transcript by John Morgan of a lecture by Jonathan Bowden, “Robert Erwin Howard: Pulpster Extraordinaire,” given at the 26th New Right meeting in London on Saturday, April 17, 2010. The audio is available on YouTube.
In our final installment we will examine the end of this novel and its denouement. The Heart of Ahriman—the foundation to resist Xaltotun’s magick—has been obtained by Conan after numerous adventures. This means that the Aquilonians do not need to fear his necromancy as they begin their final rebellion against the Nemedians—prior to expelling them from the kingdom for good. (more…)
In our synopsis and analysis, we left Conan and Hadrathus discussing how to regain the initiative by seizing the Heart of Ahriman. Conan then heads south in the funereal barge of a follower of Asura — to make sure that he and Albiona are unmolested — and he quickly makes up the leagues necessary to visit Count Trocero’s Poitain in the deep south of Aquilonia. (more…)
Moving on from my recent review of Robert E. Howard’s “Rogues in the House,” I would like to have a look at the only full-length Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon (sometimes known as Conan the Conqueror).
This piece again illustrates the subliminal racialism of the Howard mythos as well as providing a template for his mordant, pessimistic, and ultra-conservative views about civilization. (more…)
In this essay I shall seek to pick out a few themes from Robert E. Howard’s writing life, using one of his most emblematic stories, “Rogues in the House,” as a living illustration.
Howard certainly had (or imagined that he did) strong Irish roots which influenced much of his fiction in a Celtic direction. One only has to look at the nature of the Nemedian chronicles in the Conan mythos to see this. (more…)
This review will look at Robert E. Howard’s second most important hero to Conan the Barbarian—namely, the puritan hero Solomon Kane. Kane could have been a more ideological hero than Conan, yet the stories themselves don’t read that way.
For the purposes of analysis, I shall be looking at a curiosity that was published in 1968 by a hitherto obscure house called Peter Haddock limited. The volume, entitled The Hand of Kane, bears the imprimatur of Glenn Lord, the then executor for the Howard estate and was printed in Hungary (behind the Iron Curtain) to reduce printing costs. (more…)
In Archeofuturism, Guillaume Faye envisions a future world that simultaneously embraces both the latest advances in science and technology, and the values and worldview of Homer and ancient myths. A world that is profoundly inegalitarian, in which might makes right, but in which might now includes the powers of science. (more…)
This review will examine the work of Robert E. Howard and, in particular, his greatest creation the barbarian Conan. For the purposes of concentration and illustration, I will look at the comic strip “Zukala’s Daughter,” scripted by Roy Thomas, and featuring in the 1972 Fleetway annual in Britain. It happened to be one of the earliest numbered editions of the color comic known as Conan the Barbarian. (more…)
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by L. Sprague de Camp), he was enraged by what he found. Thus, his Blood and Thunder, published some 30 years after de Camp’s, was meant as a corrective: 
