People of the Dark

"People of the Dark" is a short story by Robert E. Howard, first published in the June 1932 issue of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. It is notable as the first appearance of Howard's famous character Conan, though the "Conan of the Reavers" in this story seems to belong to a different continuity than "Conan the Barbarian".
==Plot==
The plot centers on a love triangle between the narrator, John O'Brien; an Englishman, Richard Brent; and the woman they both love, Eleanor Bland. O'Brien plans to murder Brent out of jealousy, and plots to ambush him at a remote cavern on the English coast called Dagon's Cave, once known as the Cavern of the Children of the Night, reputed to have been carved by a hidden atavistic society known as the Little People. Howard describes these survivals in frankly racist terms:
O'Brien enters the cave, which he had overheard Brent saying he had planned to explore, musing on the Little People: "Legend said that this cavern was one of their last strongholds against the conquering Celts, and hinted at lost tunnels, long fallen in or blocked up, connecting the cave with a network of subterranean corridors which honeycombed the hills." The narrator slips and hits his head, giving him a vision of a past life when he was Conan of the Reavers, a black-haired Irish barbarian fighting with the Briton Vertorix over the love of the woman Tamera--earlier incarnations of Brent and Bland.
(This Conan is Irish, not Cimmerian, and hence is thousands of years more recent in fictional chronology than the more familiar version of the character--though both swear by the deity Crom. The Cimmerian would make his debut later the same year, in "The Phoenix on the Sword," published in Weird Tales in December 1932.)
Conan's attempt to kill his rival is interrupted by an attack of the Little People, one of whom is described at race-baiting length:
After Vertorix and Tamera throw themselves to their apparent deaths rather than allow themselves to be taken by the Little People, O'Brien returns to the present and realizes that Brent and Bland were always meant for each other, relinquishing his homicidal jealousy.
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Robert E. Howard works