Robert E. Howard is likely more famous now as the creator and original author of Kull and Conan the Barbarian tales, though he missed out on the action figure market by several decades, dying in 1936. Sword and sorcery (for which Howard is arguably responsible) is too pulpy for me but Howard was also a devotee of and correspondent with H.P. Lovecraft, an early result of which is this tale set squarely in the Cthulhu universe. Howard has his own interesting biography as a lonely Texan, detailed in the indie movie The Whole Wide World with Vincent D'Onofrio and Renee Zellweger. I haven't seen it since it was new in 1996, but remember liking it in a kind of pastoral indie way, while mixing up Howard in my mind with Lovecraft (who hailed from Rhode Island, not Texas, for one thing). Howard can be an awkward writer, making mistakes like confusing "gleam" and "glean," even as he strains after the dense Lovecraft poetics. The line between fan fiction and its sources can be thin in these circles. With "The Black Stone" (published in Weird Tales so arguably not fan fiction at all), Howard chipped in a mythical text that quickly became Cthulhu canon, along with Lovecraft's Necronomicon by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. Howard named the author of his book Friedrich von Junzt and the book Nameless Cults (or "the Black Book"). Leave it to Lovecraft to later apply the German (appropriately, of course) for an altogether better and more ominous title (because German), Unaussprechlichen Kulten. "The Black Stone" is based on a familiar Sherlock Holmes type of investigator figure, the unnamed first-person narrator, who depends less on observation and deduction and more on library research and good luck. Indeed, conducting investigation in the field (a remote Eastern Europe setting), he is at once extraordinarily unprepared and lucky. In other words, "coincidence be thy name, plot development." For example, this guy knows things happen on Midsummer Night but somehow he forgets that he is traveling at that time of the year. How fortunate, come the night in question! Despite its quasi-Transylvania setting, the story feels very much like American horror, like Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, with its shock troops of devil worshipers in the moonlit wilderness. One nice detail is that even though there is a horde of them, they are silent. A sacrifice is nearly as vivid as one in the movie Midsommar, and pumping mist all over it as ghostly and unreal and dreamlike somehow only makes it more disturbing. And then there is one of those Lovecraftian reveals of stupendously enormous scale as the Black Stone, the giant obelisk in the wilderness that draws forth the ghosts to worship on Midsummer Night, is revealed as ... well, I would let you find that out. For me "The Black Stone" is fan fiction, but for all that it's not a bad romp.
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