 |
Robert E. Howard
wrote gripping horror stories, giving a unique twist to the traditional
monsters of gothic fiction – vampires, werewolves, and ghosts.
But he was also a pioneer of cosmic horror, joining his friend
H. P. Lovecraft in imagining that humankind was preceded on the
earth by powerful, grotesque entities whose ancient age of dominion
is memorialized today by strange cults. In remote corners of Arabia,
Hungary, Britain, and Honduras, hidden doorways still provide
access to these terrible beings – Gol-goroth, the Children
of the Night, the Guardian of Xuthultan, and others. A few arcane
books of ancient lore point the way to these portals of hell.
Pity the hapless scholar or adventurer who unwittingly turns the
key.
The 19th Century scholar Von Junzt wrote of it in his book, “Nameless
Cults.” In the wild mountains of Eastern Europe stands a
black stone monolith, relic of an unimaginable past. A poet, Justin
Geoffrey, once visited the monolith and went mad. Tonight, a venturesome
student of the occult finds his way to the haunted glade and witnesses
a grisly
ritual that summons an intruder from Beyond.
Struck unconscious by an accidental blow from a stone-age ax,
O’Donnel remembers a past life as Aryara, a warrior of a
primitive Celtic tribe in pre-Roman Britain. Aryara has a bloody
debt to repay; the reptilian Children of the Night slaughtered
his band of fellow hunters, and only he survived. Aryara’s
vengeance leads to a lethal reckoning and to the revelation that
the Children’s inhuman legacy may have survived into the
20th Century.
Bedouin legend whispers of Kara-Shehr, the City of Devils, lost
in the trackless sands of the Arabian desert. Soldier of fortune
Steve Clarney finds the forgotten citadel and its treasure, the
priceless ruby known as the Fire of Asshurbanipal. The outlaw
sheik Nureddin also lays claim, but human greed pales before the
foul, hulking obscenity that was conjured out of hell to guard
the gem thousands of years ago ... and watches over it still.
What lies beneath the stone cairn on the headland of Clontarf,
where the Christian Irish defeated the pagan Vikings in pitched
battle a thousand years ago? The unscrupulous extortionist Ortali
plans to uncover the secret. In a dream that spans dark gulfs
of time, his blackmail victim John O’Brien discovers that
the ancient myths of the Norsemen hid monstrous realities. One
of those realities slumbers underneath the cairn, dead but not
dead, waiting to return to slavering life as Ortali unknowingly
toils to free it.
|