First published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1967, “The Curse of the Golden Skull”, by Robert E. Howard, resembles a prose poem in the same vein as Clark Ashton Smith’s “Chinoiserie”. While there is a narrative thread throughout the short story, it does not, at first glance, map to conventional dramatic structure. The three sections, “The Curse of the Golden Skull”, “The Emerald Interlude”, and “The Orchids of Death” obscure the structure.
First published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1967, “The Curse of the Golden Skull”, by Robert E. Howard, resembles a prose poem in the same vein as Clark Ashton Smith’s “Chinoiserie”. While there is a narrative thread throughout the short story, it does not, at first glance, map to conventional dramatic structure. The three sections, “The Curse of the Golden Skull”, “The Emerald Interlude”, and “The Orchids of Death” obscure the structure.