First published in Weird Tales, April 1926, 90 years ago as I read it…

Reading from The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, Del Ray, 2008, pages 6-26

Wolfshead is a fairly complex and highly atmospheric novelette, Howard’s standard story length. The tale is told in the first person to a group of Frenchmen by an evasive adventurer. This yarn concerned his visit to a Portuguese colonial outpost on the coast of West Africa on the Niger River. It appears to be set in the 1600s. The characters are appropriately ethnic, racist and abrasively polite. The natives are right out of central casting for a 1920s Tarzan flick, though they have real concerns, a legitimate axe to grind. And there is something horrible afoot, something stalking the colony, something that is also stalking the natives, something they suspect was brought by the colonists.

Wolfshead is a good taut read.

As demonstrated in his later Kane tales, Howard was fascinated with the unique capacity for violence of the man of European descent. He may depict the colonists as abrasively racist—as they would be—but also as a scourge on the African locals. Taken together with his seeming obsession during this period with blood memory and werewolves, I'm inclined to suspect the werewolf among the colonists—that has been feasting on them and the natives alike—as a metaphor for the evils of colonialism and the danger of taking the ethnic human out of his intended habitat.

Setting that supposition aside, as these themes are essentially built into such a setting, the fact that de Montour of Normandy, the man who slew le Loup the werewolf in The Forest of Villefere, after learning many things about le Loup’s life of adventure, has inherited the greater portion of his burden, makes it more likely that Wolfeshead is a prototype of Howard’s super-barbarian tales, in which men like Kull, Conan, Mak Morn and MacArt standout among lesser barbarians. There is also much of the coming Kane series, nearly half of which was set in Africa, about Wolfeshead. For the natives are not just jabbering, faceless extras, but a real striving people suffering at the hands of civilized interlopers. And, the civilized folk, have, as always in Howard’s tales, a traitorous element among their ruling elite.

As much as the themes of trails, barbarism and civilization intersect in Wolhshead, ultimately, it is a yarn about the struggle between the races of Man.

There is the strong lord of this distant wilderness outpost, the sly person of “rat-faced Carlos,” a sympathetic protagonist in the person of the narrator, a gathering of international guests, including the melancholy person of the cursed de Montour, all gathered in a stronghold setting that prefigures the wilderness fief of the marooned Zingaran lord of The Black Stranger, one of Howard’s later full-length stories:

“…for Barbary Pirates ranged the coasts, and the horror of native uprising lurked ever near.

“A space of about a half-mile on every side of the castle was kept cleared away and roads had been built through the marshy land. All this had required an immense amount of labor, but man-power was plentiful. A present to a chief, and he furnished all that was needed. And Portuguese know how to make men work!”

To get a look at that thematic crossroads where Howard’s brand of horror-adventure branched off from these two parent genres to begin taking form as what would be called swords & sorcery, Wolfshead provides a fine vantage.