Where to Start With Robert E. Howard by Bill Ward Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was a giant and a father to giants, his literary creations so potent that they have informed popular culture and permeated mass consciousness down to the present day. But their very ubiquity can obscure and deceive – if two people strike up a conversation about Conan, are they actually talking about the same Conan? What’s going on with all of these other writers penning stories of Howard’s heroes, and do they need to be read in order? Out of the dozens of reprints and collections over the years, just where do you actually start? Because Howard’s creations are commercially valuable they have been distorted and, in my opinion, abused by various copyright holders, publishers, and editors over the years. While the full story of his publication history is well outside the purpose of this introductory essay (and not without plenty of bright spots to balance out some of the bad), there are a few salient points to keep in mind for the Howard novice. For one thing, differing copyright laws in various countries (specifically the US and the UK) sometimes mean that public domain versions of Howard’s stories are available for free (or cheaply repackaged in ebooks of potentially dubious quality) – and sometimes they aren’t. Often the stories are a less-than-desirable version. When it comes to many of the bargain basement editions of Howard, especially those in ebook, the old adage of you-get-what-you-pay-for applies in earnest. There is also the confusion generated by the thriving Conan pastiche industry. Repackaging Conan over the years, presenting his story as a great epic complete with numbered volumes and an overall story arc, and ladling in a generous amount of filler stories penned by weaker writers or cobbled together out of unrelated and unpublished Howard stories (!), not only completely misrepresents the character, but raises a barrier of entry to the uninitiated. As a kid, I honestly thought I had to read the books in order, and since I’d only come across a few random volumes – none of them marked with that magic number ‘one’ – they just sat on my shelf, unread. Many assert that the deCamp and Carter pastiches opened the door to Conan for an entire generation of fans, and perhaps that’s true –...