Today's story is a mixture of horror and fantasy, a dark tale with ghosts, eldritch gods, and human greed. I give you...

Robert E. Howard is best known for creating the iconic character of Conan the Barbarian, as well as other heroic figures, like Kull and Solomon Kane. Howard's descriptive prowess and strong character writing do show up in this story, about a haunted folklore scholar being blackmailed by an foolishly greedy treasure hunter. The pair find the titular cairn by the sea, and slowly discover the horrific truth buried beneath.

Like I said, the voice and characters within this story are great, even if the narrator's interactions with others is a little stiffly written. Honestly, it might be more accurate to say that the writing of the characters is stronger than the "dialogue." What I mean by that is the writing for each character is great as standalone prose, carrying with it the same poetic style that Howard puts in most of his stories, but when characters interact with each other it seems a bit off, like the interactions themselves are just poorly thought out glue holding together the big, beautiful blogs of spoken prose, which themselves turn out to just be exposition.

The imagery of the story works well with the plot, creating a strong sense of foreboding doom that bursts into a panicked rush towards the end. There's also a flashback that carries the usual strongly made descriptions of violence, devastation, and gore that can be found in most Howard stories.

I will say that the exposition is heavy and, while forgivable at first, starts to get a little out of hand as the story goes on. The main character is a scholar, so its not surprising that he'd know a lot about the artifacts and history of the area it is set in, but it completely drops the ball after the story's flashback. The vehicle for the flashback is brought up as an example of psychic phenomenon, which was never previously mentioned or hinted at prior to this. The flashback itself is probably the best part of it, which makes it a shame that its sort of shoehorned in.

Overall, the story is strongly written and interesting, but sadly not overly engaging. It suffers from a poorly assembled plot full of coincidence, exposition, and handwaves that work against the strong prose, characters, build up, and mood. I give it a 3/5, servicable but definitely not the best Robert E. Howard story.

I'd prefer to hide these parts of my short story reviews under the spoiler tags, but Goodreads Support has informed me that they don't currently work. Until then, I'll be hiding these spoilery bits exploring the monsters and horrors of the stories I review between two large, bolded warnings.

Now, on to business. As it turns out, the horror buried beneath the Cairn is in fact Odin, though he's remarkably different than his normal depiction. In the context of the story, he is a being born of the dark, one made into a deity by the grim Norsemen who live in darkness and violence. When he is resurrected, thanks to a sprig of holly worn by the story's villain, he sheds his more humanized form to reveal a creature made from pure cold and blackness, the very things his people, as I said, live in. This makes him two things; an elemental being, and an example of the rarely used subgenre of Mythic Horror, that being the use of mythical entities or tropes and mixing them with elements of horror. Here the concept of Odin is mixed with Celtic tradition, the ravager and the victim, in order to create a new story of dark fantasy. What other elements of ancient myth can be brought out to create new and fantastic stories?

Cairn's themselves are an ancient tradition that is just begging to be put into horror and fantasy stories. You can go the route that Howard takes in this story, having them be the burial place of something eldritch and terrible, or you can play with the idea, maybe subverting it to where a noble pagan entity is trapped and unable to stop some impending tragedy. Maybe the power that is kept there is fermenting, growing stronger in preparation for its inevitable release, or maybe the stones used to make the cairn possess some dark magical power themselves. Cairns carry strong emotion and imagery due to their relation to death, as well as their inherent ancientness, so it can be drawn on to strengthen the imagery and mood of your own story.