It’s difficult to say exactly what sort of fiction Robert E. Howard thought he was writing.  Certainly some of
it falls into immediate categories – the western, the historical adventure, the fight story (a genre that has all
but vanished) – but many of his stories defy easy categorization.  We call his work now “sword and sorcery,”
but that name was coined only after other writers, either through coincidence or through that sincerest
form of flattery, copied his settings, his characters, his writing style.
   One thing is sure; Howard wrote some extraordinary horror stories.  Recall: Justin Geoffrey crouching at
the top of “The Black Stone”.  The elephantine trampling of “The Thing on the Roof”.  That moment from
“Pigeons from Hell” when the hero and the sheriff ascend to the second floor of Blassenville Mansion and
their flashlight goes out.  Some really fine moments of horror in Howard’s work!
   Like most of Howard’s best work, “The Horror from the Mound” appeared in Weird Tales, specifically in
the May, 1932 issue.  It was reprinted in Skull-face and Others (Arkham House, 1946) later in Wolfshead
(Lancer, 1968) and most recently in Trails of Darkness (Baen, 1996).  (Parenthetical Aside #1:  Wolfshead,
along with The Dark Man and Others, contain the majority of REH’s best weird fiction.  Both volumes have
more than their share of good horror stories.  They are often overlooked by Howard fans that cannot see
beyond his sword and sorcery yarns.)
   The story is both usual and unusual in its relationship to Howard’s other work.  The unearthing of things
long buried in search of gold is a common occurrence in Howard’s work and in weird tales in general.  The
warnings against fooling around with treasures locked in the earth goes at least back to Beowulf.  
Guardians of forbidden gold descend from Fafnir.  The lure of hidden riches and the peril of things, or ill-
fortune that guard them, is plainly a theme for some reason important to Western man.  (Parenthetical Aside
#2: This parallels nicely another common weird fiction theme: the quest for hidden knowledge.)
   Howard’s hero, a cowboy named Steve Brill, is a typical Howard hero.  If anything, he is more pragmatic
and hard-headed than the average.  His ancestors have fought cyclones, wolves, and wild Indians, and he’s
not going to run from anything coming out of an old Indian mound.  Howard’s use of the two-fisted, practical
hero is effective in some ways.  While the protagonist’s lack of credence in the supernatural in some ways
acts to distract the reader’s own suspension of belief, the moment the hero breaks down, gives way to fear,
the reader is swept along.  If something is bad enough to frighten one of Howard’s iron men, the average
reader, made of lesser metal, is bound to be frightened.
   Still, the juxtaposition of the practical cowboy against a horror from ages past makes one of the finest
moments in the story even finer.  The paragraphs as Brill is digging into the mound, where night falls over
the hills are some of the nicest I can recall reading in Howard.  By attention to detail, Howard captures
perhaps the first unease Brill feels, and enforces the misgivings the reader has had all along:

But now he was suddenly aware that the darkness had come on him.  In the young moon objects were dim and
shadowy.  His mustang nickered in the corral whence came the comfortable crunch of tired beasts’ jaws on
corn.   A whippoorwill called eerily from the dark shadows of the narrow winding creek.  Brill straightened
slightly.  Better get a lantern and continue his exploration by its light.

    One other aspect of the story is, unfortunately, typically Howardian.  This is the treatment of Juan Lopez,
the Mexican laborer.  Howard was a racist.  Granted, nearly everyone white in the South was in 1932, and, in
many ways, Howard appears very liberal by comparison.  Still, he makes use of rather unfortuanete
stereotypes in his stories.
   Juan Lopez, and inferred throughout the story, all of his kind, is lazy, superstitious and ignorant.  (Dios be
thanked the good priest taught me to write when I was a child!)  He works the land owned by other men like
Steve Brill.  Apart from any damage this image of a minority or the use of derogatory slang might have done
to the hypothetical reader of WEIRD TALES in 1932 (I believe this damage to be very slight, if it exists at all),
the use of a stereotype weakens the story; Lopez strains one’s credibility throughout.
   The “Horror” on the other hand, doesn’t.  Howard builds his story well, laying a realistic background for
action which will extend out of the ordinary.  It is his choice of setting for “Horror from the Mound” that
most recommends the story.  Too often in his work – most of the pulp writers were guilty of this – he sets
his stories in locales he knows about only through books.  In his sword and sorcery stories, realistic setting
is not important.  Crom knows what Cimmeria looked like, but modern England or Europe have a tangible
reality about them.  The horror stories set in these places have a lack of detail about them; they are
characters and a plot played on a stage almost bare of scenery.  Not so in “Horror”.  Howard used the
country around him.
   And he used it quite effectively.  Texas is a big state.  Within its borders it contains just about every type
of terrain found anywhere in the U.S.  It was among the lands earliest visited by the Spanish explorers in
their quest for gold and fabled cities.  Before the Spanish explorers, Indians peopled the canyons and the
hills and coastal waters with spirits benign and malevolent.  Howard utilized the past of Texas well.  
Legends of buried treasure abound in the lore of the state, so it is believable when Steve Brill breaks into
the mound for gold he only suspects to be there:

For some strange reason, the thought entered Brill’s chaotic mind that the land was new to the Anglo-Saxon, it
was in reality very old.  That broken and desecrated tomb was mute evidence that the land was ancient to man,
and suddenly the night and the hills and the shadows bore on Brill with a sense of hideous antiquity.

    Curiously, when the horror is revealed it is a European vampire.  After speculation about what Indian
thing inhabits the tomb, Howard throws the reader a curve with his Spanish bloodsucking nobleman.  The
description of the vampire when it is revealed to Brill verges on surrealism in its detail:

His fear-glazed eyes took in the tall, vulture-like form – the icy eyes, the long black fingernails – the moldering
garb, hideously ancient – the long spurred boot – the slouch hat with its crumbling feather – the flowing cloak
that was falling to slow shreds.

    One other advantage of the Howard action-oriented hero is the direct confrontation it makes possible
with the monster.  Where a Lovecraftian hero might faint or gibber in R’lyehen, Howard’s inevitably fly into a
Berserker fury.
   And if they lose the fight, they usually take their eldritch opponent with them.  In this case, Brill emerges
victorious from the fight, having broken the back of the ancient horror, into the cool night.  The vampire
burns, again proving the purifying power of fire, well-attested in European witch-lore.
   “The Horror from the Mound” is unusual for Howard in its choice of a Texan setting for horrific
happenings (there are other examples of this, though), and in its use of a vampire, rather uncommon
creatures in REH’s fiction.  This may have been a deliberate play on the reader’s expectations, substituting
a vampire for a monster truly born out of the “hideous antiquity”.

Copyright 1976 Damon C. Sasser
A Sense of Hideous Antiquity
by Bill Wallace
REH: Two-Gun Raconteur
The Definitive Howard Journal