Robert E. Howard. The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan (1974)

     Robert E. Howard. The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan (1974) Howard wrote far more stories than he ever sold, and often plagiarised himself, changing stories to suit different markets. This collection includes one published, seven unpublished, and two accepted but never published stories (the magazine went out of business.) I read the introduction, which retails these facts, and part of the first story. Howard tries to reproduce the dialect of a lower class fellow who is good with his fists. The attempt fails. It takes more than the odd “phonetic” misspelling to convince me that I’m listening to a sailor with more wit than education. So I stopped reading.
     Howard is best known for his Conan the Barbarian series; the movie adaptations made Arnold Schwarzenegger famous. If this book is any indication of Howard’s talents, the movies are much better than the books. Howard is good at imagining content, but his execrable style makes the tales almost impossible to read. Readers whose main interest is in what happens next won’t be put off. Readers who want a sense of living in a well-imagined universe will find it hard to read Howard for other than “academic” reasons. It’s a good thing that writing style doesn’t transfer to a movie, except perhaps for dialogue, which in the Conan movies is mercifully brief. (2002)