David C. Smith was born on August 10, 1952, in Youngstown, Ohio. In addition to many essays and short stories, he is the author or coauthor of 22 published novels, primarily in the sword-and-sorcery, horror, and suspense genres.

In addition, Smith is the author of the screenplay Seasons of the Moon, based on his novel; has coauthored the play Coven House; and coauthored the screenplay Magicians, based on the David Trevisan novels. Smith is also author of the postsecondary English grammar textbook Understanding English: How Sentences Work.

Aside from writing fiction, Smith has worked as an advertising copyeditor and English teacher and for more than twenty years as a scholarly medical editor.

Robert E. Howard - The People of the Black Circle3.jpg

Something I consider occasionally is the fact that Howard’s fantastic fiction gained its second round of commercial success during the same moment in the late sixties and early seventies that The Lord of the Rings caught fire in the public imagination. This turn of events meant that Fritz Leiber’s earlier labeling of Howard’s quasihistorical gothic adventure stories as sword and sorcery coincided with the Gandalfian image of a sorcerer as a kind of Victorian-era Merlin, a sagacious spell caster in a large robe. Add to that the remarkable growth, within a decade, of Dungeons and Dragons and its Schools of Enchantment and rays of frost, and you have an image of the sorcerer that has proved to be remarkably durable in public perception.

Just because of this, however, it’s an interesting exercise to go back a hundred years and observe how Howard himself brought to life the magic-doers in his stories. The vital energy, emotional darkness, and philosophical underpinnings that give Howard’s fantasy fiction its gravity serve both his sword wielders and sorcerers equally well. Both exist in that Howardian demiworld in which one wrong step in any direction could set in motion a chain reaction of dangerous, deadly events.

Howard’s wizards and sorcerers are not uniform, and we can watch him go in different directions with these entities as he writes his stories year by year. Conan’s wonderful line in “The People of the Black Circle”— “A wizard has a dozen lives. Wound one, and he writhes away like a crippled snake to soak up fresh venom from some source of sorcery.”—was some years in coming, but it offers a kind of peak in the author’s personification of these characters, along with what for me is the most chilling line anywhere in the Howard canon, from the same story: “I think I will take your heart, Kerim Shah.” Chilling not just because it is a gruesome threat that is gruesomely fulfilled in the following paragraph, but also because these two men have a relationship; they have done business together, and the Master of Yimsha is not killing some stranger. This makes the magic and the death emotionally resonant.

Such emotional resonance is one of the strengths of Howard’s fiction because he saw his job as delivering a real punch for the readers of his yarns. Go back as early as we can, and we find he is waking us up by delivering such jabs. The werewolves of “The Lost Race” and “Wolfshead”—well done but not wizards in any sense—are soon superseded by N’Longa in “Red Shadows,” a true sorcerer. The punch here comes not only when he brings a recent corpse back to life to kill on his command, but also when he awakens from the deep state in which he put himself to achieve that remarkable feat: “Then N'Longa opened his eyes and stared up into Kane's, with the blank expression of a new-born babe. Kane watched, flesh crawling, and saw the knowing, reptilian glitter come back….”

N’Longa does not particularly cast spells, and it is late—in “Red Nails”—when we see one of Howard’s sorcerers do it in the manner in which we generally visualize it these days, that is, dramatically taking a stance, aiming one hand as if it held a six-shooter, and muttering ancient words so that a bolt of light or something similar finds its target. Howard’s earliest wizards are mystics—N’Longa, Tuzun Thune, Gonar—making use of dreams or mirrors that reach into dimensions of fundamental reality. The mystic apprehension of life and the concept that life is but a dream within a dream is one that held Howard’s attention for a few years, fostered at least in part by his and Dr. Howard’s interest in the writings of William Walter Atkinson, a leader in the New Thought and Mental Science movement of the time (and which essentially reappeared a generation or so later as the New Age esoteric movement of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies). The use of dreams no doubt also reflects Howard’s own personal experience.

The dream as a dramatic device is essential to “The Phoenix on the Sword,” in which the sage Epemitreus thereby comes to warn King Conan that “your destiny is one with Aquilonia. Gigantic happenings are forming in the web and the womb of Fate…” and marks the king’s sword with the sign of the phoenix to protect him when Conan battles the baboon-like demon sent by Thoth-amon to assassinate him.

Here we have a transition from the dreamy work of Gonar and Tuzun Thune to a more nearly solid or physical aspect of the sorcery and magic Howard employs in the Conan series. This deeply physical and actual sense of the unnatural manifest is certainly there in “The Shadow Kingdom,” and it’s there in the character of Atla, the were-woman of the moors in “Worms of the Earth.” Mysticism and a sense of wonder inform the remarkable “The Tower of the Elephant,” which itself comes alive for us as one strange dream or nightmare. But “The Phoenix on the Sword” offers us both the mysticism of Epemitreus and the actual, ground-level sorcery of Thoth-amon, the slave of Ascalante when we first meet him but very soon, by means of the powerful Ring of Set, returned to the front rank of Stygian sorcerers. This ground-level sorcery is ancient in its wisdom and abilities, born in the darkness of tombs and in the pages of diabolic tomes. Surely Howard borrowed from Clark Ashton Smith as well as H.P. Lovecraft in developing such a faux-historical dimension to these evils, in the same way that Talbot Mundy’s influence is present in “The People of the Black Circle.”

The evil sorcery in “The Phoenix on the Sword” imperils Conan’s throne, and a look at the seventeen Conan stories published in Weird Tales in Howard’s lifetime shows us that they fall very generally into two types, the personal adventure story and the imperiled throne narrative. The personal adventure stories are those in which Conan finds himself in an immediately troublesome situation—for example, “Queen of the Black Coast,” “Xuthal of the Dusk,” and “The Pool of the Black One.” In these, Conan largely fights monsters. The imperiled throne stories, by contrast, are those in which malignant sorcerers provide an essential service to the events. These stories are large scale; armies clash as thrones rock. These are also the stories in which Howard frequently provides useful details regarding the geography of the Hyborian kingdoms: “The Phoenix on the Sword,” “The Scarlet Citadel” (the Kothian wizards Tsotha-lanti and Pelias), “Black Colossus” (Natohk the Veiled One, or Thugra Khotan), “A Witch Shall Be Born” (Salome, who has created the monster Thaug), “The People of the Black Circle” (the Black Seers of Yimsha), and “The Hour of the Dragon” (the resurrected Thothmekri in the temples of Luxor, the vampire Akivasha, and especially Xaltotun, who means to upend the earth with the Heart of Ahriman).

I find it interesting that, by and large, Howard incorporated sorcerers into his stories of clashing armies and threatened thrones. Not exclusively, however, as mentioned; there are no outnumbered armies in “The People of the Black Circle,” although we definitely have an imperiled throne; and there are neither an imperiled throne nor landscape-sized waves of armies in “Beyond the Black River,” which deals with Aquilonian territorial aggression, or in “Red Nails,” which features two warring communities. Both stories present formidable figures in Zogar Sag, Tascela, and Tolkemec—who actually does have a magic wand that shoots a crimson beam of mummification—as well as monsters. The scale of both stories, however, is human, not imperial or majestic.

Am I right in judging that Howard’s tales of royal tumultuousness largely coincide with his using in them powerful sorcerers? These characters are essential dramatically in stories of such scale. Likewise, there is no need dramatically for such wizards in “Rogues in the House,” for example, or “The Devil in Iron,” or “The Servants of Bit-Yakin.” Howard’s superior powers of invention provide other elements to strengthen these stories. As a rule, if a small-scale yarn requires a crawling monster or weird creatures blowing on pipes and turning living people into shrunken dolls, he goes for it. What Howard is doing thereby is delivering the goods, bringing gut punches of utter strangeness, to readers who expected just those things when they read Weird Tales. These readers—of Weird Tales and the science fiction pulps—were, after all, the first generation to be able to indulge regularly in such wonders and adventures. Edgar Rice Burroughs had broken new ground with his stories of John Carter and Tarzan, but the really odd stuff was in the horror and sf publications. Those readers weren’t as jaded as we have become; audiences now are immersed in this stuff. But imagine reading “The Shadow Kingdom” or “The Scarlet Citadel” or “The People of the Black Circle” for the first time when there was nothing else around like them. Their sorcerers are essential both to story structure and to Hyborian Age history. And if I recall correctly (I could certainly be wrong), only the Black Seers of Yimsha dress in the proverbial wizardly robes. We could probably imagine the others attired similarly, although, as Salome says in “A Witch Shall Be Born,” “Skin as many as you like. I would like a dress made of human hide.”

Howard with his sorcerers, and in his fiction generally, therefore delivered the goods in the manner Farnsworth Wright intended for the stories he bought for Weird Tales. In The Eyrie for the August 1926 issue, Wright offered the following in introducing that month’s published letters:

“When it was first decided to put out a magazine that should be truly different from all others in the world, convincingness was made the essential test for all stories. Tales that amaze, yet convince; tales that thrill—and seem true. Some of the stories in Weird Tales are absolutely impossible (as far as we know what is possible and what is not), but even the impossible stories seem probable. They carry the illusion of reality.”

The illusion of reality. Tales that thrill and still seem true.

Howard did that. His sorcerers embody this and therefore are as real for us as Conan and Bêlit and giant serpents and clashing armies.

Perhaps I am jaded, but these stories provide for me something beyond the corporate, run-of-the-mill fiction we get so much of these days.

Something solid that takes me by surprise and still unnerves me with the very idea of what is happening.

Something as cold-blooded and shocking as…

“I think I will take your heart, Kerim Shah.”