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    Pigeons from Hell
    Pigeons from Hell
    Pigeons from Hell
    Audiobook1 hour

    Pigeons from Hell

    Written by Robert E. Howard

    Narrated by Cathy Dobson

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    About this audiobook

    Robert Ervin Howard ( 1906-1936) was an American writer of weird stories and horror fiction.

    Pigeons from Hell is a classic horror story set in a deserted old planters' house in the Deep South, where something unwholesome stalks the rooms. When two young men, Griswell and Branner, happen upon the old house on their vacation road trip and decide to stay there, terrible things begin to happen.

    Griswell awakes from a strange and terrifying dream and hears a strange and uncanny whistling. He sees Branner get up and walk out onto the landing and up the stairs, as though sleepwalking. Then there is a terrible scream...and Branner returns, carrying a hatchet dripping with blood and bits of brain.

    As Griswell looks on in horror, he sees that Branner's skull has been split in two...and that he is dead. Dead...but walking down the stairs with a bloody hatchet. In sheer terror he bursts through the window and flees the house.... But this is only the first episode of the terrifying tale.... Griswell is catapulted onto a roller coater of grisly adventures, each more horrific than the last.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Door Consulting
    Release dateJun 20, 2015
    ISBN9781467698801

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    Reviews for Pigeons from Hell

    4/5

    42 ratings4 reviews

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    • 2/5
      This one took me longer to get through, simply because, though it was recognizably REH, it was not a great representation of his best work.

      You'll only find one Conan story in here, and a mention of Bran Mak Morn, and other than that, it's various other stories he wrote. Now, personally, I don't care who he's writing about, I tend to enjoy his stuff.

      But this collection...

      There's a fair amount of racism here. And that on its own, while deplorable, was also very much of the times. I'm not saying that gives it a pass, and hey, he was tight with Lovecraft. So, it's there. Along with almost every black man trying to kill a white guy, there's also a fair share of other races doing the same. From Orientals to Native Americans, ain't no one as good as, or as tough as a good old white man. Howard is imminently better when he's writing about purely imagined races.

      There is also the usual women there primarily to be an object of sexual desire, but also to feed the hero that one piece of information he needs to overcome. Or, you know, they're out to destroy the hero. Women come in two flavours in Howard's stories...sexy or bitchy.

      But the things that I found got to me in this collection was the repetitive nature of some of the stories (at least three are more modern men who dream about events that happened deep in the past when they were bigger and meaner). The names John and James and Conrad and Kirby come up more often than they should in various stories that are not interrelated. And there's a hell of a lot of spelling/grammatical errors here as well.

      Overall, if this collection is picked up, it's probably best to space reading the stories out over a longer period of time, so the repetitiveness doesn't clog your brain.
    • 5/5
      Wow! One of the best pulp/horror stories I have EVER read. Nice twisty ending. I'm going to pick up Howard's entire horror collection.

      ps. I picked this up as a free e-book on the internet. Dinosaurs have nothing to with the story as the illustration above implies. Just axe hatchets, snakes, wolves, staircases, whistling entities, voodoo and Pigeons (from hell)!
    • 4/5
      Typical Robert E, Howard fare, by which I mean excellent story-telling and in a straight-forward, no-nonsense style!

      The title story of this collection is a very effective "haunted house" horror story - very creepy. Funnily enough, I was listening to the Pretenders' song, Back on the Chain Gang last night and realised that this story is most likely the source of a lyric that has always puzzled me: Got in the house like a pigeon from Hell: surely that phrase couldn't have occurred to two people independently! I'm still not sure how it relates to the rest of the song, though.

      Anyway, the rest of the stories are a mixture of historical adventures, atavistic throw-backs, Cthulhu Mythos and Western horrors. He uses the motif of a modern man haunted by the memories of an ancient ancestor several times in this collection, which is probably a reflection of the time pressures he was under to create stories to meet deadlines for his magazine publisher. However, the stories themselves are sufficiently different that the reuse of this plot device can be forgiven.

      I was really looking forward to reading the story that featured the Tyrannosaurus Rex and Pterosaur which grace the cover of my edition, but they don't make an appearance within - what a gyp!

      I've got a number of other REH books which I've had shelved To Read for the last 15-20 years or so. This year may well be the year when I make some headway into them!
    • 5/5
      Review from BadelyngeFirst published in 1938 not long after R.E.Howard's suicide, Pigeons from Hell is a Gothic Horror tale set in the deep south of the USA. Two friends decide to spend the night in an abandoned old plantation house. The story eschews the more traditional slow build of atmosphere and tension, choosing instead to scare the pants off you in the first few pages. It certainly succeeds. The rest of the story's fear is generated by apprehension about returning to the old deserted house that has already demonstrated its terrors. It is superbly told and very creepy. It also features one of Howard's recurring characters Kirby Buckner. If I was assembling a reading list to use for developing a horror writing style I'd certainly think about including this one.