For the final post this year—I’ll be off for the winter break—let’s dive into some REH lore for a bit.

Robert E. Howard wrote “The God in the Bowl” in March 1932; it was his third Conan story after “The Phoenix on the Sword” and “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” and the second Conan story, along with “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” to be rejected by Weird Tales. It was posthumously published in September 1952 in the second issue of Space Science Fiction, together with a remark by H. P. Lovecraft (to which I’ll get back soon).

Naturally, Howard’s manuscript was “revised for publication” by the indefatigable meddler in style L. Sprague de Camp, to the detriment of everything, and with one the dumbest edits in the history of dumb edits—he turns a character’s foreshadowing remark, “The god has a long neck,” into “The god has a long reach.” De Camp’s version, of course, found its way in this form into the first volume of the terrible Lancer edition.

Howard’s original manuscript version appeared for the first time in 1975, in the collection The Tower of the Elephant by Donald M. Grant, and then in 2002 in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, the first of the three volumes of Ballantine/Del Rey’s Conan collection. (The best collection you can get for your money, and enjoy, by far.)

The story itself is rather curious—it’s set up as a locked-room murder mystery, and maintained as such with an uncommon quota of dialogue. But instead of solving the case as expected through reasoning, Conan eventually clears everything up by killing everybody off. For the story’s introduction in Space Science Fiction, de Camp added a remark from a letter to Robert E. Howard written by H. P. Lovecraft, who had just read several manuscripts sent to him by REH:

Wandrei and I have read these tales with keen interest & appreciation. Best wishes for their ultimate publication! Dwyer seems to have enjoyed them greatly, too. The climax of “The God in the Bowl” is splendidly vivid!” —HPL

The accompanying full-page illustration in Space Science Fiction, finally, is attributed to Schecterson. I couldn’t find any biographical details, and only four other illustrations they did in 1952/53 for SSF, Science Fiction Adventures, and Astounding SF.

See you in 2023. Enjoy your holidays, whichever they are!