Robert E. Howard 19 min read

Hastening through a forbidding, sunless forest in ancient Britain, the Briton Cororuc dreads the bandit chief Buruc the Cruel, but stumbles instead upon a hidden, lost race older than his own people.

Robert E. Howard's 1927 story, one of his earliest sales, is an atmospheric horror and lost-race tale. Vivid, brooding, superbly told. Read it for early Howard steeped in Celtic legend and cosmic dread, an ancient Britain haunted by a vanished, malignant people beneath the hills, an evocative tale that foreshadows the mythic power of his later work.

In its time

Published in 1927, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

19 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

G. O. Olinick