Reading from The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, 2008, Del Ray, NY, pages 35-40, originally published in Weird Tales, May 1928

With The Dream Snake Howard’s horror fiction had begun to take on the trappings of the ghost story. The ghost story is related to the racial memory or ancestral dream tale, but is generally tied to a place, often a place where a person or people came to grief. The ghost story is a tale of cross-generational guilt of a lingering nature, without the vibrancy of the racial memory story that is more akin to a werewolf or vampire tale, in that it is one of propagation rather than dissipation.

In Sea Curse a captain and his mate of little repute return to a small English seaside town minus a well-regarded man. The missing man’s woman places a curse on the captain in which she sees an ancient ship of ghostly avengers rowing up out of the deep, only to disappear, with the evidence for the captain’s crimes washing up at their feet.

Howard mixes witchcraft and the ghost story in this tale. As he delves further into the subject of racial and place-specific human guilt he will begin meshing the elements that informed his epic fantasy works later on. This and the next few pieces in the collection are set in the English countryside that would produce the character of Solomon Kane, arguably his best and most conflicted major protagonist.