Red Shadows

This early work by Robert E. Howard was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Red Shadows' is a story that follows the adventures of the puritan explorer Solomon Kane. Robert Ervin Howard was born in Peaster, Texas in 1906. During his youth, his family moved between a variety of Texan boomtowns, and Howard - a bookish and somewhat introverted child - was steeped in the violent myths and legends of the Old South. At fifteen Howard began to read the pulp magazines of the day, and to write more seriously. The December 1922 issue of his high school newspaper featured two of his stories, 'Golden Hope Christmas' and 'West is West'. In 1924 he sold his first piece - a short caveman tale titled 'Spear and Fang' - for $16 to the not-yet-famous Weird Tales magazine. Howard's most famous character, Conan the Cimmerian, was a barbarian-turned-King during the Hyborian Age, a mythical period of some 12,000 years ago. Conan featured in seventeen Weird Tales stories between 1933 and 1936 which is why Howard is now regarded as having spawned the 'sword and sorcery' genre. The Conan stories have since been adapted many times, most famously in the series of films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Robert E. Howard was an American pulp writer best remembered as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian and one of the founding figures of sword-and-sorcery fiction. Born in Texas in 1906, Howard grew up fascinated by history, frontier violence, boxing, ancient civilizations, and the hard lives of people shaped by danger and struggle. He began publishing in pulp magazines while still young, and Weird Tales became the central home for much of his most important work.Howard's fiction ranges across fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing stories, westerns, detective tales, and weird menace. His characters include Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Sailor Steve Costigan, and many others, but his work is unified by its driving energy, vivid physical action, dark atmosphere, and powerful sense of doomed civilizations. He wrote with unusual speed and intensity, producing a large body of work before his death in 1936 at the age of thirty.Although Howard's life was short, his influence has been enormous. Conan became one of the most recognizable figures in fantasy, and Howard's fusion of myth, violence, horror, adventure, and heroic fatalism helped shape modern fantasy, gaming, comics, film, and pulp revival publishing. His best stories remain alive because they move with raw force: fierce, brooding, violent, and charged with the feeling that civilization is always temporary and the wilderness is never far away.