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Title: The Thing on the Roof
Author: Robert E. Howard
Narrator: Cathy Dobson
Format: Unabridged
Length: 24 mins
Language: English
Release date: 07-09-15
Publisher: Red Door Audiobooks
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Classics, American Literature
Publisher's Summary:
Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) was an American writer of weird fiction and horror stories.
The Thing on the Roof is a gruesome tale of Tussman, a scholar and explorer who becomes obsessed with finding a hidden treasure which he believes to be buried beneath the altar of the ruined Temple of the Toad in the jungles of Honduras. He only needs to obtain an original edition of 'The Black Book' - a mysterious volume by an eccentric 18th century explorer - to obtain the clues he will need to access the crypt.
'The Black Book' is obtained, and Tussman sets off to Central America...but the adventure takes a very different turn than he could ever have imagined.
Members Reviews:
Two Stars
Quite a few typos in it. For instance, Lopez lives in a but.
Weird Tales - and billed as such
This is the third volume in a series (of 4) collections of works from the old Weird Tales magazine by Leo Margulies for Pyramid Books. Its quite a little collection:
The Man Who Returned * Edmond Hamilton
Spider Mansion * Fritz Leiber
A Question of Etiquette * Robert Bloch
The Sea Witch * Nictzin Dyalhis
The Strange High House in the Mist * H. P. Lovecraft
The Drifting Snow * August Derleth
The Body-Masters * Frank Belknap Long
Pigeons from Hell * Robert E. Howard
If you have read any horror, or even genre fiction broadly, you should know all of those names. What's more, these are not exactly the least of their works: Stephen King was impressed by Pigeons from Hell as a true American horror story, and it is pretty good, and really creepy in a Southern Gothic way. Dyalhis' Sea Witch was excellent and moody, Hamilton's piece a nice little non-supernatural horror story, and if you don't like spiders, don't read Leiber's contribution. There is also a short introduction looking back on Weird Tales as a magazine, which is interesting if not groundbreaking (today, nearly 50 years after it was written).
This is a great way to get to read these works in print for not a lot of money, assuming you can find it secondhand.
Terrific Characterizaetion
There's nothing quite like reading a Robert E. Howard story. Love his characterizations and that does not disappoint here. He captures his characters in a way few outside a much longer winded Stephen King can. Good pacing, great descriptions, fine action. Not at the level of Howard's Conan stories, but then what is?
Old Fashioned and Uneven
Pyramid Books published three paperback anthologies of stories from _Weird Tales_ in the early 1960s: _The Unexpected_ (1961), _Weird Tales_ (1964), and _Worlds of Weird_ (1965). All three credit Leo Margulies as the editor. But according to _The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction_ (1995), Sam Moskowitz ghost edited the last two. This seems likely. The first book consists of more modern-- and generally better-- stories. The latter two books are more old fashioned and uneven in quality. But perhaps they come a bit closer to giving the reader the flavor of the magazine during its golden years.
_Weird Tales_ (1964) consists of eight stories published between 1931 and 1942. The stories are: Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Returned," Fritz Leiber's "Spider Mansion," Robert Bloch's "A Question of Etiquette," Nictzin Dyalhis's "The Sea Witch," H.P. Lovecraft's "The Strange High House in the Mist," August W.
