By the time, he was 30, Robert E. Howard already had created several staples of pulp culture. Then he killed himself.

In Mark Finn’s well-researched BLOOD & THUNDER: THE LIFE & ART OF ROBERT E. HOWARD, we get a glimpse this most complicated man. Most of Howard’s youth was spent moving from town to town, never getting to settle for too long, thus causing him not to have many friends his own age and becoming very close to his mother, as his doctor father traveled a lot. It’s not until the Howards settled in Cross Plains, Texas, that Howard literally started to grow.

At that time, he took up boxing so he could fit in with the roughneck atmosphere of a boomtown. Howard hated school and wanted only to write. Finn does an excellent job of showing Howard as a sheltered man who was rough-and-tumble, to say the least. We mainly learn about Howard from Howard himself, with excerpts from his letters being reprinted in the text.

Finn tries to dispel the element of racism in Howard’s writing, but let’s face facts: Like most people of that time, Howard held racist ideas, plain and simple. There’s no reason to defend it; it’s understandable of the location and time he lived.

The author points out Howard was trying to represent himself as larger than life, going into great detail to showcase Howard’s attempts at getting published and the subsequent rejections. Those writings included the early boxing stories on which Howard thrived, then the action heroes of Kull, Solomon Kane and – of course – Conan the Barbarian, with whom Howard become bored real quick.

Finn also goes over Howard’s influential relationship with H.P. Lovecraft, as well as one with a girl by the name of Novalyne Price, which, years later, would be made into a film. By the end of the biography, we learn the extent of Howard’s depression resulted him to take his own life, so despondent he was with his mother dying.

BLOOD & THUNDER is a fascinating read about a man who did more by the time he was 30 than most of us will do our entire lives. The irony is that he chose to cut his so short. –Bruce Grossman

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