The Children of the Night

by Robert E. Howard

"The Children of the Night" is a short story by Robert Ervin Howard. Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is well known for his character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. Howard was born and raised in the state of Texas. He spent most of his life in the town of Cross Plains with some time spent in nearby Brownwood. A bookish and intellectual child, he was also a fan of boxing and spent some time in his late teens bodybuilding, eventually taking up amateur boxing. From the age of nine he dreamed of becoming a writer of adventure fiction but did not have real success until he was 23. Thereafter, until his death at the age of 30 by suicide, Howard's writings were published in a wide selection of magazines, journals, and newspapers, and he had become successful in several genres. Although a Conan novel was nearly published into a book in 1934, his stories never appeared in book form during his lifetime. The main outlet for his stories was in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Howard’s suicide and the circumstances surrounding it have led to varied speculation about his mental health. His mother had been ill with tuberculosis his entire life, and upon learning that she had entered a coma from which she was not expected to wake, he walked out to his car and shot himself in the head. In the pages of the Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales, Howard created Conan the Barbarian, a character whose cultural impact has been compared to such icons as Tarzan, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and James Bond. With Conan and his other heroes, Howard created the genre now known as sword and sorcery, spawning many imitators and giving him a large influence in the fantasy field. Howard remains a highly read author, with his best works still reprinted. Howard spent his late teens working odd jobs around Cross Plains; all of which he hated. In 1924, Howard returned to Brownwood to take a stenography course at Howard Payne College, this time boarding with his friend Lindsey Tyson instead of his mother. Howard would have preferred a literary course but was not allowed to take one for some reason. Biographer Mark Finn suggests that his father refused to pay for such a non-vocational education. In the week of Thanksgiving that year, and after years of rejection slips and near acceptances, he finally sold a short caveman tale titled "Spear and Fang", which netted him the sum of $16 and introduced him to the readers of a struggling pulp called Weird Tales. Now that his career in fiction had begun, Howard dropped out of Howard Payne College at the end of the semester and returned to Cross Plains. Shortly afterwards, he received notice that another story, "The Hyena," had been accepted by Weird Tales. During the same period, Howard made his first attempt to write a novel, a loosely autobiographical book modeled on Jack London's Martin Eden and titled Post Oaks & Sand Roughs. The book was otherwise of middling quality and was never published in the author's lifetime but it is of interest to Howard scholars for the personal information it contains. Howard's alter ego in this novel is Steve Costigan, a name he would use more than once in the future. The novel was finished in 1928 but not published until long after his death.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction

34 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2014

About the author

Robert Ervin Howard was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror."

He is well known for having created—in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales—the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can only be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

—Wikipedia

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a truly dreadful story of interwar racial fantasy and of blood lust, in the same vein as 'The Little People', that would leave a bad taste in the mouth if it was not for the saving grace of having the 'hero' clearly turn out to be as mad as a hatter.

This creates a nice irony. The unutterable tedium of the ethnic theorising and pseudo-history and the nutty story line about a man going into his ancestral past because of a knock on the head and slaughtering dwarfish little yellow people with slant eyes only becomes tolerable in the final pages.

Which leaves us with a conundrum. Is Howard being ironic in which case this is a work of literary genius? Or is he not? In which case he is proving himself an utter fool. I decided he was being ironic - possibly without justification - and, being a nice guy, gave him an extra star for that.

But be warned that, to get to the punch line and decide yourself, you will have to wade through some arrant and tiresome nonsense which only becomes tolerable in retrospect if it is ironic and offers the mentality of Himmler at the expense of the prejudices of its 1931 'Weird Tales' audience.

[Liz · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 What a freaking disappointment. I was actually hoping for a vampire story, and what I got was a weird racist diatribe with a silly premise of being knocked back into a distance past followed by slaughter and mayhem. The only interesting thing is the ending, but it is not worth wading through the rest of it to get to. Audible edition, narrated by Robertson Dean.

[Michael Sorbello · Rating 1 out of 5]

This story is the equivalent of listening to your grandpa go on a long-winded racist tirade about how nasty and evil other races and cultures are. Definitely not Howard’s best material.

[Tracey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have honestly never read a more blatantly racist story against Asians, full of white supremacy tirades about "pure" blood lines and how naturally "royal" and glorious Aryans are.

[Mark Tallen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one is nowhere near to the usual standard of fiction & storytelling quality that I've so far experienced from reading Robert E. Howard stories.

[Michael Potts · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ooof, this was a big nothing. Weirdly racial and nothing.

I love Howard but the only redeeming factor in this story is the general premise. Weirdly slow and boring for him, like it was written by someone else.

[Marie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this as part of “The Horror Megapack” which is a collection of short stories because that’s what I was in the mood to read - what a disappointment this short story was…

[Timothy McGowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

More action than any other of the Cthulhu mythos that I’ve read thus far. Amazing addition of adding the red mist to add a layer to rage madness

[Filbi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Straight up Nazi shit.

[Forked Radish · Rating 3 out of 5]

A trifle Nazish.

[Per · Rating 1 out of 5]

https://archive.org/details/WeirdTale...
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607...

A couple of books mentioned in this short story...

long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to a Missale Romanum

...Boccaccio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovann...) is known for The Decameron, Missale Romanum is The Roman Missal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_M...)...

You'll find there a number of delectable dishes—Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin—look, there's a rare feast—Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse—the real Eighteenth Century edition.

...The Horrid Mysteries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horrid_...) subtitled "A Story From the German Of The Marquis Of Grosse" is a translation by Peter Will of the German Gothic novel Der Genius by Carl Grosse -- mistaking the hero of the tale for the author...

But look there, [...] sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans', and Walpole's Castle of Otranto—Von Junzt's Nameless Cults. There's a book to keep you awake at night!

...Castle of Otranto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cas...) is authentic, but, Nameless Cults is where things start getting interesting. Just as H. P. Lovecraft invented the Necronomicon -- later used by other authors like Robert E. Howard -- this is the first mention of Von Juntz's Nameless Cults (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unaussp...) -- which in turn will be used by H. P. Lovecraft and other authors.

If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled onto cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt's hints of 'a city in the waste'? What do you think of Flecker's line:

'Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose
But with no scarlet to her leaf—and from whose heart no perfume flows.'

Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.

The quote from James Elroy Flecker comes from his poem Gates of Damascus, available here: http://www.public-domain-poetry.com/j...