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Shrieks and Chants from Pale Shadows: Verses of Perversion and Mania
67 pages, Paperback
Published November 20, 2025
About the author
Robert E. Howard
3,301 books2,636 followersRobert 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 28, 2025
Shrieks and Chants from Pale Shadows is brand new for 2025 and contains some Robert E. Howard poems I’ve never seen. According to Charles Hoffman, who put this collection together, “Howard once informed a friend of his intention to release a collection of his ‘verses of perversion and mania’ under the title ‘Shrieks and Chants from Pale Shadows.’” This is Charles’s selection of the kind of poems that REH must have intended for that title.
The material contained within would certainly have been thought perverse at the time that Howard lived, although for the most part it is no longer considered so. We have a bit of Sado-masochism with plenty of whipping, interracial attraction, and lesbianism and homosexual sex. Lesbianism is probably the most common theme in this collection, and Howard was a great admirer of Sappho, a Greek poet from the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC who was born on the island of Lesbos, from which the term lesbian has been derived. Sappho was a talented and prolific poet who wrote many poems that seem to describe love between two women.
Howard’s poetry here is primarily of the rhyming type and his rhyming schemes contain significant unique phrasings and powerful couplings: “strange eyes aflame, the dark stars came, whispering, one by one.” There are also a couple prose poetry pieces that are not rhyming but seem also like past life memories.
I much enjoyed this collection. And it makes me want to return to some of the work I did in my early days in Robert E. Howard fandom where I considered the psychological aspects of Howard’s writings and life.
The material contained within would certainly have been thought perverse at the time that Howard lived, although for the most part it is no longer considered so. We have a bit of Sado-masochism with plenty of whipping, interracial attraction, and lesbianism and homosexual sex. Lesbianism is probably the most common theme in this collection, and Howard was a great admirer of Sappho, a Greek poet from the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC who was born on the island of Lesbos, from which the term lesbian has been derived. Sappho was a talented and prolific poet who wrote many poems that seem to describe love between two women.
Howard’s poetry here is primarily of the rhyming type and his rhyming schemes contain significant unique phrasings and powerful couplings: “strange eyes aflame, the dark stars came, whispering, one by one.” There are also a couple prose poetry pieces that are not rhyming but seem also like past life memories.
I much enjoyed this collection. And it makes me want to return to some of the work I did in my early days in Robert E. Howard fandom where I considered the psychological aspects of Howard’s writings and life.
Displaying 1 of 1 review