Robert E. Howard is best known for his cinema and comic book worthy creation, Conan the Barbarian. Though he remains among the few authors of the pulp era of the 1920s and 30s to have sold hundreds of millions of books, comics, and movie tickets after his death, you will be hard pressed to find his work on the few remaining book shelves in these United States. Howard is reviled as a racist and sexist author that committed the unforgivable crime of failing to transcend the norms of his age.

Howard’s work is supposed to promote the taboo values of, masculinity, slavery, sexism and racism. His primary literary charge is that his female and nonwhite characters are nothing but crude stereotypical templates. However, as shall be proven in the following examination of his horror literature—and, unknown to most of his fans and critics, he was, first and foremost, a writer of atmospheric horror—Howard crafted, in his brief and prolific career, empathetically wrought, realistic, and striving female and nonwhite characters. Indeed, one who does not come to his work with the preconceived notion that all white male authors are genetically and hormonally driven to write according to the crudest misconceptions in order to promote Caucasian patriarchy, might well suspect Howard of being overly vested in the crafting of female and nonwhite characters.

As a writer of horror adventure who has received numerous reader and editorial complaints which charge that I have inaccurately represented women and nonwhites as real vested agents of their own destiny, I am well placed to empathize with Howard on this account. Indeed, many of the tales that shall be reviewed in this examination of his work were not sold, and remained unpublished for decades, and often a half century or more. In the early 21st century, just as in the early 20th century, the author who presents stories from the viewpoint of, and including, realistically nuanced male and female characters, and characters of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, is destined to be reviled for the crime of not producing race-based and gender-biased fantasies.

I recently had two conversations with two very different moviegoers about a bad piece of storytelling on film, which I nevertheless regarded as an enjoyable bit of masculine fun. The movie Mad Max: Fury Road, was a violently seething compromise between masculine adventure and the necessary feminist theme required of a major studio release.

The plot was stupid, and the ending was what a woman needs to see to hug her date after a viewing. Along the way, the story continually foisted unlikely heroines upon the viewer, and then cleansed them from the plot by denying them any effectiveness. The only three characters vested with agency in the film were the villain, the hero, and a supporting character—who was the only transformative character in the entire bad idea, and saved the film in my eyes.

The two extreme reactions I got to this movie were one female and one male.

The female viewer was angry that the women accomplished nothing, that men were needed to win freedom, to win a ridiculous high speed battle, to throw engine blocks and play flame throwing guitars. I countered that since there is only one world women’s MMA champion, and that she was busy filming her own bad movie, that this could not be helped.

In short, this highly intelligent woman was angry that her feminist fantasy was not depicted in the purity indicated by the masculine online outrage attending the release of the sequel to the iconic road warrior trilogy. She obviously never read about the most successful pirate in history, a Chinese woman who ruled through wile, not might, for whom tens of thousands of men did physical things at her whim.

The man who saw the movie, was another highly intelligent viewer, who was in such a rage over me recommending a movie to him in which old women attempted to assert themselves via the use of one of the only weapons suitable to a woman’s quest for combat power—the rifle—that he was unable to discuss any aspect of the story intelligently. When I indicated that all of these combative women—every single one of them—were defeated, and that the only thing that propelled the logistically unsustainable struggle to this fairytale feminist happy ending was the intercession of violent men, he simply scoffed and raged about the proper place for women being as meek sexual property.

This viewer was angered, that in the midst of this unreal tale, that his fantasy of total male domination was not put forth. I did not have the chance to point out that the toughest warriors in all of western history had strong minded combative women: the Spartans, the German tribes that slaughtered Varus’ Roman legions, the Vikings who credited female angels with bearing warrior souls to heaven.

What these two viewers exemplify are the frustrated yearnings of a citizen of an insane world for a fantasy of reassuring purity, not some blend of fantasy and realism, which good horror necessarily is.

The writer of today faces the same prejudices as the writer of Howard’s day, with mainstream readers recoiling from any depiction of a nonwhite or female villain, just as reactionary whites and masculinity advocates cannot abide the depiction of a diverse racial cast or of striving female characters. For the reader interested in realism in fiction, or in the question of the monolithic political correctness currently smothering any attempts at realism in fiction, whether in print or on film, Dark Art of an Arуan Mystic will illuminate the white, black and red corners of our collective imagination with that most hated and rejected shade of illumination, the gray of truth, which is sought by few and accepted by none.