This early work by Robert E. Howard was originally published in 1934. 'The Valley of the Worm' is a story in the James Allison series and tells the tale of a Texan who recalls his past lives as ancient heroes. Robert Ervin Howard was born in Peaster, Texas in 1906. During his youth, his family moved between a variety of Texan boomtowns, and Howard - a bookish and somewhat introverted child - was steeped in the violent myths and legends of the Old South.

This collection contains all of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian stories published during his lifetime, contextualized with biographical details of their author.

The Gods of Bal-Sagoth is an adventure-fantasy story by Robert E. Howard, first published in 1931. The tale follows Turlogh Dubh O'Brien, an Irish warrior and mercenary, who finds himself caught in a storm at sea and cast ashore on a mysterious, uncharted island. There, he encounters Athelstane, a Viking prince who leads him to the legendary lost city of Bal-Sagoth. The city, once ruled by an ancient, god-like race, is now in decline, its people divided and warring among themselves.

In Conan and the Emerald Lotus, the seeds of a deadly plant grant sorcerers immense power, but turn its users into inhuman killers. In the exclusive, long-awaited sequel Conan and the Living Plague, a Shemite wizard seeks to create a serum to use as a lethal weapon. Instead he unleashes a hideous monster on the city of Dulcine. Hired to loot the city of its treasures, Conan and his fellows in the mercenary troop find themselves trapped in the depths of the city’s keep. To escape, they must defeat the creature, its undead followers, then face Lovecraftian horrors beyond mortal comprehension.

In a meteoric career that spanned a mere 12 years, Robert E. Howard single-handedly invented the genre that came to be called sword and sorcery. From his fertile imagination sprang some of fiction's most enduring heroes. Yet while Conan the Cimmerian is indisputably Howard's greatest creation, it was in his earlier sequence of tales featuring Kull, a fearless warrior with the brooding intellect of a philosopher, that Howard began to develop the distinctive themes and the richly evocative blend of history and mythology .