"The Children of the Night" (1931) by Robert E. Howard, with Notes and Comments, on Fantastic Worlds

[jordan179]

"The Children of the Night"

© 1931

by

Robert E. Howard

There were, I remember, six of us in Conrad's bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to a Missale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants

Comments

[eric_hinkle]

Great review of one of the lesser-known Howard stories here. I always had a fondness for the tales where he used ancestral memories/reincarnation as a way of setting the story up, even if it could get cumbersome at times.

And Howard/Machen's Little People - yeah, now those were fae I always enjoy seeing. I have to wonder if the rather paranoiac Richard Shaver drew on those stories in any way when he developed his ideas about the Dero and their cruel technological magic. They were a lot closer to the classic original image of nasty murderous little goblins beneath the hills than the precious Victorian image. (It's interesting to note that the other father of so much modern fantasy and RPGs, Tolkien, also loathed the cutesy fairies, despite usually writing in a much more hopeful style than Howard's.)

[jordan179]

Howard was I think directly inspired by Machen's stories of nasty and vile (rather than awesome or cute) Little People in creating the "Children of the Night" (also known by other names), and made them the degenerate and probably half-human spawn of the Serpent People he'd already created for his Valusian stories. Heck, we're fighting them to the present day. Yo Joe!

Tolkien of course had both noble elves and nasty goblins in his stories, and it's interesting that they are kin -- the Orcs were twisted from the Elves by Morgoth.