Most fans of the works of Robert E. Howard probably know the basics of the short life and abbreviated career of the father of "Sword and Sorcery." In the decades since his death, Howard's personal story has become the stuff of legend, even as his literary legacy has grown into areas he never could have imagined.

Readers who have spent any time at all examining Howard surely have encountered his advocacy for the virtues of barbarism in a corrupt modern civilization. They probably have heard of his compulsive hammering at the typewriter, churning out piles of manuscripts in so short a time, and in the process creating such enduring characters as Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane.

Certainly his tragic self-destruction at the age of thirty resonates with all who learn of it, an act that reduced Howard the man to a mere troubled suicide, while at the same time enlarging Howard the writer's stature in the way of all creative types who die young, at the height of their powers.

In the decades since his death, however, the facts of his life have been twisted into a web of myth, half-truth, and outright lies.

The real achievement of Mark Finn's new biography Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, is to take that skeleton of myth and fable and restore to it the flesh of facts. That act alone would make this book notable and worthwhile. But Finn has also produced a compulsively readable and remarkably entertaining volume, a fact that should move the book into the "required reading" category, both for genre fans and for those seeking an in-depth look at the mind of a fiercely creative individual.

Blood and Thunder can be roughly divided into three parts, each with a somewhat separate but important story to tell.

In the first part, Howard's home state of Texas looms palpably real, as a character unto itself. And not just any Texas, but 1920s-30s oil-boom Texas, during a time when the state was overrun by roughnecks and fortune hunters of every stripe; crude men of easy violence who didn't read much but could appreciate a well-spun tale, or "tall lying," as they called it.

It was in this milieu that a young Howard, taking cues from his country-doctor father and the other natural storytellers of his community, first developed the skills he would later apply to his writing.

Readers with a burning interest in Howard's creations, but not in the man himself, will probably find themselves impatiently flipping pages through this portion of the book. Howard's more memorable characters don't come on the scene until a hundred pages in, and then we get only brief sketches of their careers and personalities.

This book is not a biography of Conan, or of Solomon Kane, or of Bran Mak Morn. This is a biography of Robert E. Howard, and by extension, of the Texas towns and townspeople that formed and shaped his life, his personality, and his writing. If readers are not interested in Howard's various odd jobs or childhood friends, they will not find the book's early chapters terribly engrossing, yet they are critically important in understanding the real Howard, and Finn covers that time period with a fine balance of detail and pacing.

By the middle section, however, Finn hits his stride. By now, Howard is in the process of becoming a working writer. When he makes "the deal" with his father to try his hand at writing for a year before agreeing to settle for a conventional job, the book perks up noticeably. By the time Howard begins his correspondence with the legendary H. P. Lovecraft, the tale has grown compelling. Even the less interesting aspects of Howard's life become engrossing, a sure sign of a well-constructed biography.

It is worth noting that throughout these chapters, Finn uses his meticulously conducted research to explode numerous distortions about Howard's early life. For example, some biographers and commentators have described a young Howard as an introverted weakling, mercilessly put upon by bullies at every turn. Finn, to the contrary, reveals a Howard deeply interested in boxing and a sort of primitive bodybuilding from an early age, a Howard who loved to mix it up with friends and strangers alike, and who usually gave better than he got.

In the final chapters of Blood and Thunder, Finn gives us a portrait of Howard in his final days. Just as importantly, he lays out for us what has become of both the stories the man wrote, and the man's own personal story, in the intervening decades since his death.

It seems nearly incomprehensible to consider that in Howard's lifetime, even as his fame spread across Depression-era America, the writer himself remained largely confined to tiny Cross Plains, Texas, constantly caring for his mother and largely ignorant of his own growing renown and reputation. Yet Finn paints a vivid portrait of this world and the people in it, helping the reader to draw meaning and understanding from it. Importantly, in the process, Finn unequivocally demolishes (once and for all, one would hope) vague rumors of an incestuous situation between the writer and his mother. Instead we see in Howard's family a loving but flawed relationship among loving but flawed human beings.

Finally, in the "Mythology" chapter, Finn recounts the efforts of those who sought to bring the late Howard's writing to a larger audience, and what those efforts have done to shape popular perceptions of Howard and his stories. In particular, L. Sprague de Camp stands out here as a remarkable figure, given that his publication of the Conan stories in artificially contrived volumes served as the first means of entry for many readers into the literary world of Howard.

Seizing the Conan material, de Camp rewrote, reordered, and repackaged it, with apparently the best of intentions. All the while, however, he was busy downplaying Howard's skills to the literary world, and refusing to understand how anyone could prefer publication of the unaltered texts. Finn gives us de Camp unvarnished, allowing us to sort out our own feelings about his actions and intentions.

With such an unusual and colorful life and body of work, one can surely see how both Howard the man and Howard as a literary force have proven particularly vulnerable to distortion over the years. Clearly, the need was there for a writer willing to do the necessary research, and willing to tell the truth about what he found, to tackle the subject. In Finn, a fellow Texan and a strong yarn-spinner in his own right, Howard has found his biographer.

With Blood and Thunder, Mark Finn gives us a fascinating and skillfully constructed account of the life of Robert E. Howard, and of the world that shaped his character and his writing. Finn's meticulous research and entertaining narrative combine to reveal a Howard both more complex and more real than in any portrayal of the man we have encountered before. This book contributes tremendously to its area of scholarship and will be an enjoyable read for even the casual fan.