Shadows Bend
David Barbour and Richard Raleigh
Ace, 311 pages
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Though Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, and H.P. Lovecraft, originator of the Cthulhu Mythos,
carried on a lively correspondence, they never actually met. According to L. Sprague de Camp, biographer of both
men (as quoted in the Afterword of Shadows Bend), their admirers "have ever since thought it a pity
that these two exceptional men failed to shake each other's hand". But what if Howard and Lovecraft had
met? And what if the impetus for their meeting had been a series of events eerily resembling Lovecraft's own weird
fiction? That's the premise of Shadows Bend, which propels Howard and Lovecraft on a supernatural road trip,
with nothing less than the future of the world at stake.
The book begins with Lovecraft on a bus, traveling to Texas to enlist the help of Howard, whom he thinks is the
only person who might possibly believe the frightening tale he has to tell. Arriving precipitously at Howard's
home in the middle of a violent storm, Lovecraft blurts out his story. A collector of antiquities, he recently
acquired a Kachina doll whose features, strangely, recall those of the Old Ones of his fiction--ancient, powerful
extraterrestrial beings that became trapped on earth and now lie sleeping in deep hidden places. Inside the doll's
clay head he discovered a bizarre alien Artifact, imprinted with the face of Cthulhu, most powerful of the Old
Ones. Since then he's been pursued by horrible nightmares and a sense of being watched, and by the dread that elements
of his invented mythos are somehow taking form in the real world.
Howard agrees to help, and together they set out to consult their friend, fellow weird fiction writer Clark Ashton
Smith, who claims to have found an actual translation of the Necronomicon--a book that Lovecraft always
believed he himself invented, as part of the imaginary world of his stories. Along the way they're joined by a
mysterious red-haired woman named Glory, and encounter an ancient Indian shaman, who has strange things to tell
them. Dodging attack by hordes of maddened animals, eluding pursuit by two ghastly minions of Cthulhu, it becomes
clear that Lovecraft's fear is fact: his fiction isn't fiction at all, but a glimpse of a dark, hidden reality,
now emerging to menace all the world.
While there's enough adventure and paranormal weirdness here to satisfy most horror buffs, with an appropriately
climactic subterranean confrontation at the finish, Shadows Bend is clearly aimed primarily at fans of Howard
and Lovecraft. Barbour and Raleigh, who have obviously done their homework, present these two very odd men in lavish
detail--from Howard's quick temper, dependence on his mother, and ineptness with women, to Lovecraft's hypochondria
and many personal eccentricities. There's lots of Cthulhuvian lore as well, linked not entirely convincingly with
Hopi mythology to explain why a gate to the netherworld might be located under the Southwestern desert; and Howard
gets to behave in a Conanesque manner when confronted by various menaces.
Despite all the detail, though--or perhaps because of it--the characters never really come alive. This goes not
just for Howard and Lovecraft, who seem less like flawed human beings than contrived compendiums of quirks and
oddities, but for Glory, whose complicated mix of background, personality, and motivation never adds up to believability.
Clunky writing doesn't help matters, nor does a badly sagging midsection (though the plot does hold together pretty
well at beginning and end). But what's really missing from this book is any real sense of the friendship between
Howard and Lovecraft. Their differences are made clear, as are the ways in which they might annoy one another with
their various peculiarities, but Barbour and Raleigh never manage to convey a genuine feeling of warmth or connection
between them. Most of the time, they just seem like bad-tempered strangers in a car, rather than allies bonded
by a long correspondence and a shared passion for imagined worlds, not to mention the terrible experience and forbidden
knowledge of the fictional events of Shadows Bend.
Readers interested in another view of Howard may want to seek out the 1996 indie movie The Whole Wide World,
which covers more or less the same time period, and offers (in my opinion) a more complete and sympathetic portrait
of this fascinating and unhappy man.
Copyright © 2000 Victoria Strauss
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