For the Kull stories,
Howard, for the first time, created a ‘Pre-Cataclysmic’
age of the earth, an age long before the dawn of recorded history.
Atlantis and Lemuria had not yet vanished into the seas, but they
were inhabited not by the advanced, utopian civilizations claimed
by the occultists, but by savages. It was the Thurian continent
that boasted grand civilizations, as well as mysterious pre-human
races. The first published Kull story, ‘The Shadow Kingdom,’
deals with one of these pre-human races, and is a masterpiece
of pure paranoia. It centers upon a conspiracy by a race of Serpent
Men to kill the king and, by taking on the semblances of Kull
and his chief councilors, to seize control of the ancient kingdom
of Valusia. In this story Kull first meets Brule, a Pictish warrior
who will become his friend and comrade-at-arms throughout the
rest of the series. Together they uncover and foil the conspiracy
in a climax that shows Howard at his apocalyptic best. Only one
other King Kull tale was published during Howard’s life,
‘The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,’ a poetic fable heavy
on metaphysical contemplation, which was published a month after
‘The Shadow Kingdom.’ Although Howard completed at
least six other Kull stories, some of which are fine examples
of the sword and sorcery genre, none saw publication. In 1934,
when H.P. Lovecraft praised the Kull tales and urged him to write
more, Howard said that he believed if he tried to write another,
the “artificiality... would be apparent.” After Howard’s
death, Lovecraft commented to fellow pulp scribe E. Hoffmann Price
that “the King Kull series probably forms a weird peak”
in the young Texan’s career, a judgment in which other writers
of heroic fantasy have concurred.
If 1928 was Howard’s breakout year in Weird Tales, 1929
was a watershed for another reason. In that year the 23-year-old
writer began to sell to other magazines, initially with strange
tales of pugilism. Under the by-line John Taverel, Howard penned
‘The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux,’ a story which combined
boxing and ghosts, published as ‘The Apparition in the Prize
Ring’ in Ghost Stories. In July, he finally had a story
published in Argosy after years of trying: ‘Crowd-Horror’
is a psychological thriller about a slugger who is transformed
by the yells of the crowd from a clever and skillful boxer to
a wild-swinging brute. More importantly, in July 1929, Fight Stories
published the first of his Sailor Steve Costigan stories, about
a roistering merchant seaman who battles his way around the world
as he is caught up in one comic mishap after another.
Several critics have noted that Howard’s writing can be
divided into ‘periods.’ Though they overlap to some
degree, these periods may reveal something about Howard’s
style and methods. The most well-defined phases are those during
which he wrote boxing stories, culminating in the Steve Costigan
series; heroic fantasies, culminating with Conan; oriental adventures,
culminating in El Borak; and western yarns. He was still ‘in’
the western period at the time of his death. A close reading of
Howard’s letters and stories reveals that he would develop
an interest in a subject and immerse himself in it so thoroughly
that he adopted a new persona, or fictional identity, the voice
through which he spoke as a writer. While something of the pattern
can be seen in his early writing, it is most apparent in his ‘boxing’
persona, Steve Costigan.