also the author of Living in Fear: A History of Hor-
ror in the Mass Media(1975) and several book-
length stories of the history of comic books. The
quality of his fiction has been consistently above
average, but he has not been prolific enough to
draw a large following.
“The Dark Man” Robert E. Howard(1931)
Although Norse legends have been the basis of a
number of classic fantasy novels from Poul Ander-
son’s Broken Sword(1954) to Grendel(1971) by
John Gardner, Celtic fantasy has proven to be a
much more popular source for most fantasy writers.
Robert E. HOWARDinvokes both cultures in this
classic, rather long story about an outcast Irish
warrior named Turlogh Dubh unjustly accused of
collaborating with the Danish raiders who never-
theless feels the call of his native blood when the
Irish princess Moira is carried off by Thorfel and
his henchmen. Turlogh, who is powerfully built
and described as black haired and of dark com-
plexion, might at first seem to be the dark man of
the title, but Howard soon tells us otherwise. Fool-
ishly pursuing Thorfel in a small fishing boat, Tur-
logh runs ashore on an unknown island where he
finds the remains of a party of Danes who fought a
battle with a lesser number of odd looking, smaller
men, and no one from either party survived.
Among the bodies Turlough discovers a five-foot
statue that, though made of stone, seems inordi-
nately light, so he decides to bring it with him as a
good luck charm.
His decision proves to be a wise one. Despite
a terrible storm, he is guided to the exact location
where Thorfel and his men are carousing and
where he plans to marry Moira forcibly by means
of a captive priest. Two of the Danes find the
statue, but they have great difficulty moving it
because of its immense weight and because they
seem prone to painful accidents in its presence.
Turlogh steals into the keep and watches as Moira
indignantly refuses to marry Thorfel and then
mortally wounds herself rather than become his
slave. Enraged, he charges in to do hopeless bat-
tle but survives thanks to the intervention of a
force of warriors similar to those who originally
guarded the statue, who identify themselves as
Picts. Although the fair maiden is not saved, she
dies honorably, and Turlogh returns the statue of
the Dark Man to its rightful owners. They insist
that the statue is the home of the spirit of a great
leader of their kind, Bran Mak Morn, who is the
central figure in a short series of stories by
Howard. The strong, silent, outcast hero would
become a staple of Howard’s subsequent fiction
and one of the prototypes for sword and sorcery
ever since.The Dark Tower SeriesStephen King
(1982–2004)
Although Stephen KINGis obviously best known
for his horror fiction, he has also gathered a con-
siderable amount of favorable attention for the
Dark Tower series, an elaborate, idiosyncratic fan-
tasy sequence that he asserts was influenced by the
movie The Good, the Bad, and the Uglyand indi-
rectly the works of J. R. R. TOLKIEN, all wrapped
around imagery from Robert Browning’s classic
poem about Childe Roland and the Dark Tower.
The first title was The Gunslinger(1982), incorpo-
rating pieces earlier published separately. Years
later King revised the text to make it more consis-
tent with the later volumes, adding considerably to
the personality of the primary protagonist, Roland
Deschains.
When we first meet Roland he is traveling
through a blasted wasteland peopled with humans,
mutants, monsters, and machines searching for the
Dark Man, who he finally meets in the closing
chapters. The first volume is particularly episodic,
but the next, The Drawing of the Three(1987), is
much more coherently a single story. Roland is still
traveling to the tower, the linchpin that holds back
the forces of Chaos in the universe, but now he
travels through a series of doors into 1980s Amer-
ica, where he must recruit three companions to be-
come fellow gunslingers. The Wastelands(1991)
takes them back into the postapocalyptic world,
where they meet a cyborg bear and where Roland
begins to wonder if he is losing his sanity. The story
ends with a startling cliffhanger.
Wizard and Glass(1996) resolves that crisis
and continues with a fast-paced sequence aboard
a sentient train that is apparently psychotic. The78 “The Dark Man”