That Penguin Classics—or even "Modern Classics" (possible motto: "we're not saying these will really stand the test of time, don't hold us to anything") chose to publish a Robert E. Howard "sampler" may seem strange, but that they chose John Clute to edit it and write the introduction does not. He has his fans and detractors, but his eminence in the field of genre criticism is, to my mind, self-evident, if only (but not only) due to his being co-editor (and major contributor) to both the standard genre encyclopedias, of Fantasy (first American ed. 1997) and Science Fiction (1993, update 1995).

From the volumes of material Howard completed in his short career, Clute has made an intelligent and satisfying selection of thirteen stories, most published between 1929 and 1936, while Howard was alive. His initial selections follow Howard's fictional chronology, from distant to more recent: two stories of King Kull, his first barbarian hero; two stories of Bran Mak Morn, his Pictish barbarian in Roman Britain (in one of which Kull appears from the distant past); a story of Turlogh Dubh, a Gael fighting the Norsemen, in which Bran Mak Morn, long after his death, plays a part; and a story of Solomon Kane, a dour Puritan swordsman. We then get two "contemporary" horror stories, including his best, "Pigeons from Hell" (1938), and, slightly out of chronology, a novella-length Western. Then we go back to the prehistoric Hyborian age, and to Howard's star, Conan, who gets his own section with four stories, two of them novella-length.

In a world where the supposedly high-quality, actually shoddy, but still prestigious Library of America has published three Philip K. Dick omnibuses (2007, 2008, and 2009), a Lovecraft collection (2005), new collections of horror stories (both 2009, edited by Peter Straub) to (supposedly) rival the old Wise and Fraser Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944), and compilations of old noir by Hammett, Chandler, and others, and where the rules about what is and is not respectable to like or even to analyze academically have blurred and changed, perhaps it isn't so strange Penguin has made this choice, speaking in terms of both commerce and prestige. And they already have a longish track record in genre, having published several collections of Lovecraft, one of Dunsany (2004), and one of American "supernatural tales" (2007), under, variously (perhaps depending on the country), the imprints Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Classics, and Penguin 20th Century Classics. But an intriguing and immediate question (at least for me) is, Just who is this particular collection of pulp fantasy for?

The people who like Howard's work will have, or want, more than this; those who don't won't want any. So presumably it's for those who want to try him out, see what the fuss is about—maybe slum a little, as Penguin Classics' primary audience is probably not the genre fantasy buff, and I suspect this title might be shelved in the "Lit and Fiction" section of most bookstores. It is, de facto, aimed at people who like to read, or at least will read, short fiction.

The readers and writers of short fiction—especially, but not exclusively, genre fiction—have been in a sort of pas de deux, as I've argued in this space before (so I won't rehearse the whole argument again), where the stories become more literary as readers drop away, leaving the more literary-minded, so that the stories become more literary and for that reason (or other reasons—say, TV, movies, and videogames) even more readers drop away, and so on and so forth. Presumably Penguin is trolling for open-minded mainstream readers and, secondarily, for genre readers not familiar with Howard, who might stumble on him in this format. So let's assume that the readers being aimed at A. are not already fans of pulp; B. may have tastes tending to literary, rather than popular, fiction (whether in or out of genre); C. whether genre readers or not, are not very familiar or comfortable with popular works written seventy years ago or more (which is like saying, "They [the readers] are alive now").

But Howard wrote Sword & Sorcery; he practically invented it. Admitting that you like Sword & Sorcery, even among those who read short genre fiction, is in the realm of literary taste a bit like saying you need your mullet trimmed and you wish they'd let you smoke your menthol cigarettes right IN the Walmart, dammit. S&S from the pulp era may represent a bit of a culture shock for contemporary literary readers.

For these readers, Clute supplies some reasons to appreciate the stories in his introduction, which is tightly-written, trenchant, intelligent (naturally), not obtuse (happily), impassioned, and firmly on Howard's side, without a trace of apology or condescension. He matches Howard's famously passionate writing with an impassioned, but clear-eyed, appreciation.

However, I don't think he provides help where it might be most needed—for instance, with Howard's heroes. The sine qua non for appreciating or reading pleasurably most pulp fiction, as most pulp fiction has a strong central hero, is the willingness to take that hero seriously, on his own and the author's terms. As narrative moved almost exclusively to the novel and short story within the 19th century (epic and narrative poetry dying out), it became more and more difficult to take a straightforward hero seriously, especially one heroic by dint of his mighty deeds. Early twentieth century modernism, and the devaluing of "honor" and such elevated concepts in WWI, put paid to that hero, more or less. The "hero" became a "protagonist," someone generally admirable or sympathetic, or at a minimum, someone whose viewpoint we could share.

But the earlier type of hero, going back to poetic epic, didn't disappear, anymore than did the dinosaur; I believe he (usually he) went "underground" in the 19th century, hidden in plain sight, into popular literature. Or perhaps we could say, he remained in popular literature (and later, movies) after "high" literature developed an antipathy to him, sort of the way the dinosaur still remains with us, fried regular or extra crispy. This split over the hero may be one contributor to the separation of "high" and "popular" literature; it's at least a marker of it.

I think even some readers of genre short fiction will have to work to overcome that split. It might sound easy enough, but the devil is in the details. In the very first story in this book, "The Shadow Kingdom" (1929)—generally the first Kull story one encounters (first in the Lancer collection of 1967), on the second page of the story, Kull is described as "a true warrior King," astride a stallion (no mares for warrior kings!). "That is Kull, see! . . . . what a king! And what a man! Look at his arms! His shoulders!" says an onlooker (p. 9). Another character considers his "Nerves and sinews of steel and fire, bound together with the perfect co-ordination, the fighting instinct, that makes the terrible warrior" (p. 15). All this may recall, for the less sympathetic reader, the Miles Gloriosus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), who, having exclaimed that he is his own ideal, moves Zero Mostel's Pseudolus to exclaim, "Those are the mightiest thighs that I ever have theen!" If your eyes roll at the mere mention of "thews," you might have a problem.

Besides all those muscles, the reader may also scoff at the hero's invulnerability and the suspense-killing requirement that he always win. More subtly, we may mistrust the hero's inflated level of autonomy and agency, from the sense that life doesn't work so simply, that you can't set it right with a gun or an axe, and that the people who think you can solve complex issues with a gun are best characterized by Goering.

Descriptions of the hero's melodramatic deeds may seem lurid to the reader we've been imagining. Here's Steve Corcoran, hero of the western "Vultures of Wahpeton" (1936) in a gunfight:

His turn was a blur of motion too quick for the eye to follow and even as he turned his gun was burning red.

The man who had drawn died on his feet with his gun still pointed toward the ceiling, unfired. Another stood gaping, stunned, a pistol dangling in his fingers, for that fleeting tick of time; then as he woke and whipped the gun up, hot lead ripped through his brain. A third gun spoke once as the owner fired wildly, and then he went to his knees under the blast of ripping lead, slumped over on the floor and lay twitching.

It was over in a flash, action so blurred with speed that not one of the watchers could ever tell just exactly what had happened. (p. 268)

That's pulp, and the type of fiction I would give the overall name "adventure melodrama," bringing in not only Sword and Sorcery but Planetary Romance, the sort of non-fantastic adventure fiction written by Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy, and even the Western.

Some readers may be put off by another "pulpish" aspect of these stories—elements of salaciousness, sleaziness, even an appeal to perversity, such as a nod to sadistic lesbianism in "Red Nails" (1936). Using Howard's biography, one might say that the stories express the pace and heightened tone he longed for when faced with the toils of the commonplace, and that the excessive psychosexual elements mirror that urge to escape the quotidian. On the other hand, sex sells. The Margaret Brundage Weird Tales covers that accompanied many of the Conan stories emphasized their sado-sexual aspect, to the disgust of some readers, but to increased sales ("Afterword: Robert E. Howard and Conan: The Early Years," by Stephen Jones in The Conan Chronicles Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle, pp. 541-2, 544-5). You can find the same sort of raciness all over the pulp world, and beyond, in this period. It's rife in the (at the time) very popular Jules Le Grandin stories of Seabury Quinn, in the extremely popular comedies of Thorne Smith and fantasies of A. Merritt. Even Edgar Rice Burroughs' Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars, wore nothing but bangles, the oviparous little minx. When Howard lets go, he expresses an unfettered but not especially prurient eroticism, as in "Queen of the Black Coast," where, as Clute aptly says, "Eros is unsweetened for once, entirely naked and without stint" (p. xvii).

Howard's writing could be crudely melodramatic, but to say that it's neither wooden nor incoherent already lifts it out of the ruck of most pulp fiction. More often than not, he writes with an extraordinary intensity and what seems like a Scheherazade-like need to captivate and convince—himself perhaps, or the reader. These stories seem to issue from an almost trancelike state of belief that, along with his ripe imagination, helps account for their compelling nature. And, of course, as a pulp writer, he lived and died—almost literally—by his ability to entertain.

The rewards for the reader who successfully suspends disbelief in the hero and overlooks purple or melodramatic prose are significant: vicarious excitement and entrée into a world of imaginary marvels. Howard becomes, as Clute says, our "hypnopomp, " our guide into dreams (p. x), and we adventure among wonders.

While Clute is enthusiastic about Howard's imagination and storytelling powers, he seems to base his bid for reader sympathy in Howard's life. Early in the introduction he brings in the idea of the Implied Author, "the speaker of the tale," saying that most of us "incorporate the Implied Author more deeply into the dreamwork of the act of reading than simply understanding that it is not the 'real' author, in his or her existential entirety, who speaks to us" (p. x). But he then proceeds to the real Howard, reading his biography (or psychology) into the stories, and backwards from the stories to the biography. He notes, for instance, that in Howard's stories there took "preliminary shape" "a crude but powerfully affecting contrast between the kinetic hero caught like Laocoon or Gulliver in the coils of the mundane world, and the debilitating allure of civilization," which was later "articulated in the correspondence with [H.P.] Lovecraft." He characterizes it as "dangerous nonsense" but notes that it energizes some of the fiction (p. xvi). "Vultures of Wahpeton," for instance, gives a sense of the "profound entrapping starkness of the world" (p.xvii). He reads Howard's sense of entrapment from the life and the correspondence to the fiction, and once having found it there, back from the fiction to the life. The "lost world dystopia" of "Red Nails," a novella which takes place almost entirely within a city-sized building, he believes foreshadows the end of Howard's life—he hears him in this story "singing us across the Styx" (p. xviii).

I don't (and I don't see the significance he sees in "Wahpeton," either). At the end of "Red Nails" Conan, laughing, says, "There's nothing we can't conquer. . . . we'll show the world what plundering means!" But that's just the text, and we know what happened to Howard . . .

Perhaps I was too deeply marked in youth by the New Critics, but I find interpretation by means of biography an iffy practice, and more so when we're told the work foreshadows what happened in the life (we're always right!). At best, the stories tell us about the life (but we already know about it), and the life reflects on the stories (but if what it indicates is truly there, why do we need it?). Then what? Does the life in fact call up a sympathy for, and interest in, the writer, which carries over to the stories? No matter what the life was like, it's what's in the stories that counts. If Lester Dent was a tortured soul, should that make me like Doc Savage better?

There is an elegiac and even tragic sense in much of Howard's writing (both Kull and Bran Mak Morn appear in stories long after their worlds are gone), and at least a whiff of bleakness about Conan, as there would be about any worshipper of the harsh god Crom. But while Howard's heroes are alive—and sometimes even afterward—they cannot be defeated. They can suffer, as when Conan is crucified in "A Witch Shall Be Born" (1934). But they can't, ultimately, be stopped.

I think Clute also overstates his claims for the depth and meaning of Howard's fiction. You can get a secondary meaning out of anything, including aspirin commercials; it's the sort of thing anthropologists do all the time. But the pulps tended to tell stories of good and evil, or at least, "them and us." The good overcomes the evil through violent, direct, and as often as not, extra-legal means, while the reader watches with a vicarious thrill, enjoying the self-righteousness and the (probably) rare feeling of power. This is precisely the kind of story that doesn't have a secondary meaning, doesn't need a secondary meaning, and most importantly, if it did have a secondary meaning, would risk being, to that extent, less true to itself, to its own type, to what its author meant it to be.

There aren't usually hidden meanings in pure adventure melodrama amenable to analysis and interpretation. There are no epiphanies. The effects are not obliquely produced in the reader; they lie patent on the page, and affect the reader directly, like nudity. They don't induce ideas, they embody them; they don't give visions, they are the visions, which the reader shares in. They induce vicarious excitement and a sense of wonder.

But hero tales do have certain tell-tale characteristics and tropes, a certain—hmm, what might be a properly Clutish term—how about, a certain protocol of archetypes? But it's the kind of material suitable for analysis by the formalism of Vladimir Propp or the archetypal interpretations of Joseph Campbell rather than a close reading based in author biography. But those are unlikely to engender reader sympathy.

A more fruitful way to look at pulp hero stories is to consider their possible derivation from allegories of spiritual romance ("romance" in the sense of "tale of adventures"), which feature heroes of varying degrees of invincibility, depending on their spiritual purity or their relative closeness to a spiritual source or sponsor or to a moral code. A prime example is the Old French Grail cycle, in which only the completely pure Galahad can pass through every trial and illusion and look on the Grail. Exemplars of this sort of hero could be multiplied from ancient sources—Achilles (a tragic version); Hercules; in the Indian epics, heroes who achieve invincible power through meditation and spiritual enlightenment (or gods, such as Krishna); and in the Gospel of John, a Christ who passes through his trials relatively untouched and unperturbed.

The heroic figure divorced from the spiritual context, as he is in popular literature, devolves to a figure that, all else lost, holds to a code of behavior or a set of rules, and still he's darkened by his contact with, by living in, a fallen world. At times he seems, or even is, more an avatar of an avenging fate than a representative of divine power through spiritual purity. Such heroes, divorced from a spiritual context, often signal their otherworldly origins in ways besides their relative invulnerability: unusual stature (Conan), a remarkable birth/provenance story (Tarzan), direct hints that the hero is of the divine (Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser), and even unusual coloring or appearance. The Satanic-looking, yellowish-eyed Sam Spade, who abandons emotion to follow his code through a random and dangerous world, reveals his roots in both allegory and popular literature; the poignance of his story is that he's an avenging avatar with a rigid devotion to a code who appears not in a romance (though it has the trappings of one) but in the real world (the legendary falcon is a leaden fake), among fallible people, and therefore seems, even to himself, almost pathologically harsh. Howard's heroes are dark, violent Galahads in very fallen worlds; or we could say they are more like the dark side of a Galahad, not a redeeming but an avenging power, somewhere between a fury and Christ, but Christ harrowing hell.

But no argument based on the meaning or significance of these stories makes the proper case for their worth or the rightness of their inclusion in a series of "classics." One has to argue the opposite. It's not insulting to say that these stories don't have meaning of the sort we've been taught to look for by academics and literary critics of "modern" mainstream literature, from, say, the 1920s until right about now. It's insulting to think that they should. Howard's work is not remarkable or great in that modern sense, for insight into character or for lyrical prose (though he could write it). To think that it should be is like saying that the Gershwin songbook is okay, but it would really be good, and worthwhile, and attain some significance if it more closely resembled the works of Charles Ives, and that the real satisfaction is to be found in the work of Ned Rorem and modern art song.

No, Howard's stories are classics of their type, and their type, at its best, is worth knowing, appreciating, preserving for its own sake, because the stories have the intrinsic beauty of any finely-made example of something, a perfect, even transcendent, example of its type.

It's a tautology, but one that bears stating: Howard's work is remarkable, exceptional, even great, in precisely the way it is exceptional, and in no other way. He is a superb "hypnopomp."

The depth, richness, and sheer creativity of the world Howard builds around Conan are deeply engaging and enjoyable. The vibrancy, fecundity, and power of his imagination are impressive. One has the sensation of reading something that is archetypal, pure, the living heart of a certain kind of imaginative fantasy.

And the purest example of that is "Queen of the Black Coast," included here, which Clute calls the most perfect story Howard ever wrote. I couldn't agree more, but I'll go one further and say that it's an apotheosis of an entire era and mode of fiction so broad it hardly had a name then—not just pulp or genre or fantasy, or Sword & Sorcery (a term not yet invented), but simply fiction or, perhaps, popular fiction, as the great divide between popular and elitist was well under way.

In "Queen of the Black Coast" Howard seems inspired by his own imagination to a writing that, despite some carelessness, at times achieves true lyrical beauty. You can feel him letting go, letting his imagination and narrative powers run at their highest, fullest (yet controlled) rate of power, and in doing so, he approaches a kind of Platonic ideal of melodramatic fantasy-adventure.

The machinery does creak a bit: an infodump is wedged into a Lotus dream that also conveniently takes Conan out of the action so that the plot can proceed. We know from something Belit, the titular "Queen," has told him the general outlines of what will happen. But even with its occasional corniness and obvious plot, it's exhilarating, a sheer joy.

By calling this an apotheosis, I don't mean to start an invidious debate about whether this really is IT, the only, the be-all and end-all, of this kind of writing. I'd rather have people conversant with the period have the pleasure of coming up with their own choices than disputing mine. But nothing comes to my mind that is more essentially an exemplar of the gorgeous, seductive dreams rendered by popular fantasy. It's an apotheosis in the way the best of the Gershwins or Cole Porter is of popular song, a high point now unrepeatable because the grand mass culture that nourished it, the field of hundreds or even thousands of lesser examples that yield place to it while allowing and supporting its existence, no longer exists.

The artists of an age can, for the most part, only produce art the age supports—even a rare poetic talent would have a hard time emulating Dante, Pope, or Byron in our age (we'll grant Emily Dickinson as the exception that proves the rule). Congruently with that, the highest fruit of popular art, the work that apotheosizes or even transcends its mode and genre, can only arise from a broad, fertile field of lesser work. But whole categories of such work simply end, and perforce, take their best with them. There will never be a resurgence of cel animation with painted backdrops, and so passes the best of Warner Bros., Fleischer, Disney, and MGM shorts. There will be no widespread resurgence of the American musical, no new American songbook; there will never be other Gershwins or a new Cole Porter. And there will never be another Robert E. Howard.

Bill Mingin, a graduate of Clarion West, has published twenty-two short stories, with more forthcoming, and over two hundred and fifty nonfiction pieces, including reviews in Publishers Weekly. He currently reviews audiobooks for AudioFile Magazine. He's married and lives in central New Jersey, where he runs a small book-export business.