Skull-Face Omnibus Volume 1: Skull-Face and Others

Skull-Face Omnibus #1

by Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft (Contributor), E. Hoffmann Price (Contributor)

Robert E. Howard - creator of some of the greatest worlds of heroic fantasy and nightmare horror ever conceived by the mind of man

H.P. Lovecraft described Howard as a master of description of vast megalithic cities of the elder world, around whose dark towers and labyrinthine nether vaults lingers an aura of pre-human fear and necromancy which no other writer could duplicate.

In the three volumes of Skull-Face Omnibus published by Panther Books you will find a nerve-tautening gallery of tales of superhuman savagery and supernatural evil, Journey back into long-lost eons of time and across frontiers of the occult with one of the greatest masters of the century, Robert E. Howard.

A classic collection of tales from the Golden Age of fantasy and horror

Cover illustration: Chris Achilleos

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Sword and Sorcery

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the best stories in this collection, the title story, "Skull-Face", is also one of the worst. The best bits are the atmosphere of decay lying at the heart of imperial London; the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of the society shown; the main character's presentation as a person ravaged by the trauma of fighting in the trenches of WWI; and, as might be expected with Howard, an unrelenting forward momentum through the plot. The worst bits are, essentially, the same as the best bits: The decay of empire, which is taken without question to be a bad thing, is blamed upon the diversity in society; the response to trauma is set as a personal failing requiring redemption, rather than as an injury unjustifiably inflicted; the pace of the plot allows no time for reflection upon the issues raised, indeed the issues are not recognised as such, as the story is a conservative exercise in the need to maintain the social and political status quo, and which is therefore not questioned. Beyond the inevitable imperialist tenor of what is a variety of the "Yellow Peril" pulp fiction trope, Howard brings in more overt racist and white supremacist elements than I recall from Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories (which I've not read for some time), though perhaps that transparency is a good thing: the racism is not cloaked at all.

I found the worst story in the collection (and in my recent reading) to be "Black Canaan", set in the US deep South, it is a white supremacist wet dream which I couldn't finish.

The other stories in the collection fit the common apologism for pulp fiction works of this era: that they simply reflect the commonly held views of the time and place in which they were written. Accordingly, these other stories have racism as incidental or secondary features of the narrative, rather than being the central theme. It is possible for me to read around the racism in those stories to appreciate the weird horror elements that I'm actually interested in, but they are still a distraction.

Re-reading this book after several decades of life experience is an interesting and instructive exercise, and one which leads me to a reevaluation of Howard as a writer, and as a promoter of conservative libertarian, and white supremacist, ideas. That I've downgraded my rating by only one star is due to a nostalgic sentimentality for the undoubted escapist pleasure Howard's stories gave me as a youth, despite their ideological underpinnings.

[Gregory Mele · Rating 4 out of 5]

A harder read as the stories (Yellow Menace), settings (Jim Crow Deep South) and magazine markets REH wrote for means you have to confront a lot of ugly racism, anti-Semitism, etc. I will say that Howard was certainly racist by any modern standard, but no Lovecraft, and his letters make it clear that his first person narrators should not always be mistaken for him; this is particularly true in Black Canaan; nor is a man who admired both bulshevism and labor riots the libertarian neo-fascist modern critics might cast him as.

The stories are good, but also a reminder of how nakedly, casually discriminatory the 20s were. We should neither cancel that nor try to sanitize it, but learn from it and admire the work that was good, where it was good.

[Madison McSweeney · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a Robert E. Howard fan, this is not a collection I would recommend.

This volume contains a handful of good stories ("The Black Stone" in particular is excellent) and Howard's skill at building atmosphere and suspense is on full display. However, the majority of these stories haven't aged well at all and are not enjoyable to read.

Readers looking for a warts-and-all view of Howard may be interested, but anyone else should probably just stick to Conan.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

By now, I have read almost all of Robert E. Howard's work, but "Skull-Face" has been one story I have not read--until now. And it's a somewhat different story than any others he wrote. The focus here is on the villain--Kathulos, or Skull-Face. It seems clear to me that REH is copying Sax Rohmer's criminal mastermind, Fu Manchu ( who may have been influenced by Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty ). I checked to make sure that Fu Manchu came before Skull-Face--and he did. The first Fu Manchu was "The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu" published in 1913. Howard's "Skull-Face" appeared in the pulp magazine WEIRD TALES as a serial from October to December 1929.
Of course, Rohmer's villain was a sinister "Oriental" who represented "the Yellow Peril," the fear of many Westerners that Asian people threatened to take over the world. In the US, this led to stopping immigration from Asian countries in the 1920s. Howard's villain appears to be Egyptian and is interested in leading Africans, Arabs, and Asians in eliminating "the white races." A lot of racist stuff here, but this is a pulp magazine selling in the 1920s....So Howard was probably also influenced by Rohmer's 1918 "Brood of the Witch Queen." In this one, the villain is an Egyptian mummy restored to life. As it turns out, Kathulos is actually an immortal Atlantean sorcerer--which could have been a tie-in to Howard's King Kull or even Conan, but that possible connection isn't made.
I give it **** because it's another action-packed REH story. I like the hero, Stephen Costigan, who is a hashish addict in a London opium den at the beginning of the story. I also like it that London is used as the setting with a lot of running around in secret tunnels under the city.
At the end of the story, we're not sure if Skull-Face is really dead--which leaves an opening for a sequel. And there is a sequel--"Taveral Manor" begun by Howard but not finished by him. Richard Lupoff completed the story and I'd like to find it. But unlike Fu Manchu, Skull-Face was not to get his own series of stories.