Robert E. Howard wrote Conan,Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and other characters between the pages of Weird Tales and its contemporaries in fast, visceral, self-contained adventures.
You picked up the magazine, you got a story, and by the time you put it down you were already hungry for the next one. This format was the original delivery mechanism of sword and sorcery. It allowed for short, sharp hits of adventure told in strange lands, shadowed in dangerous sorcery, written on behalf of a protagonist with a weapon and a flexible moral code all able to be told in the space of one evening’s read.
The Heroic Legends Short Fiction Program picks up that thread with monthly ePub releases featuring Howard’s iconic characters in new stories by established fantasy and horror authors.
Each one is priced at $1.99, roughly what a pulp magazine cost in the 1930s, adjusted for inflation. Actually less.
Far from nostalgia-bait, this series lets its writers step into one of the richest fictional worlds ever created and tell new tales inside it. And the results, now over two years and nearly twenty stories deep, make a strong case that the short fiction format and Howard’s characters still belong together.
Why The Heroic Signatures ePub Program Works
The format does what Howard’s originals did: it drops you into the action, builds a world in a few sharp strokes, and gets out before the momentum fades. No trilogy setup. No worldbuilding preamble. Just the story.
And the program goes wider than you might expect. Rather than cycle monthly Conan stories, this series lets other characters have their place in the sun that they deserve.
Bêlit, the pirate queen of the Black Coast, has headlined multiple entries as a viewpoint protagonist. Solomon Kane’s grim Puritan crusade has taken him into new corners of a hostile world. Bran Mak Morn, the last king of Howard’s doomed Picts, has returned. El Borak, Howard’s Texan gunslinger-adventurer in Central Asia, has gotten his first new fiction in decades. And with Kull of Atlantis and Cormac Mac Art now entering the lineup, the program is reaching into parts of Howard’s universe that have been dormant for a generation.
The writers behind these stories bring range. The roster deliberately pulls from across fantasy, horror, and sword-and-sorcery so that authors with different sensibilities can each bring something distinct to Howard’s world. Some stories lean into classic pulp adventure. Some lean into the weird, atmospheric horror that was always part of the Hyborian Age’s DNA. Some push into territory Howard himself never explored.
That variety is the point. Not every story will be every reader’s favorite, but the program keeps swinging and, when it connects, it connects hard.
Writer Spotlights: Stephen Graham Jones and John C. Hocking
Two authors in particular anchor the program’s credibility.
Stephen Graham Jones, the NYT bestselling author of The Only Good Indians and My Heart Is a Chainsaw, kicked off the entire series with Conan: Lord of the Mount. Jones is a writer who blends horror, myth, and lived Indigenous experience in ways that few others can. His first entry was sword and sorcery at its most elemental: Conan, alone, against something ancient and monstrous. What Jones gets, and what makes the story land, is that Conan isn’t a cartoon brute. He’s cunning. He’s driven by a code that doesn’t map neatly onto modern heroism. Jones wrote a character instead of a brand and set the tone for everything that followed.
John C. Hocking, on the other hand, is a different kind of anchor. Where Jones came in from the literary horror world, Hocking is a name that carries deep weight inside the sword-and-sorcery community itself. Winner of the Harper’s Pen Award for sword-and-sorcery fiction, author of Conan and the Emerald Lotus and its long-awaited sequel Conan and the Living Plague (released together as Conan in the City of the Dead), Hocking has spent years inside the Hyborian Age. His entry, Conan: Black Starlight, is a full novella that is atmospheric, tightly paced, and dripping with horror elements that feel genuinely earned. He doesn’t try to imitate Howard’s voice. Instead, he writes stories that feel like they belong in the same world, in clean, propulsive prose that respects the source material without being enslaved to it.
Between them, Jones and Hocking represent exactly what the program is built to do: bring writers who understand these characters and give them room to tell new stories worth reading.
What’s Ahead
The program is still growing. New titles release regularly, the character roster keeps expanding, and the pipeline stretches well into 2027. What started as a year-long experiment has become an ongoing library of new sword-and-sorcery fiction.
And, at $1.99 per story, the barrier to entry is essentially zero. Pick one up. See if it hooks you.
Here’s what’s available now, and what’s on the way.
Available Now
| # | Title | Character | Author |
| 1 | Lord of the Mount | Conan | Stephen Graham Jones |
| 2 | Black Starlight | Conan | John C. Hocking |
| 3 | The Hound of God | Solomon Kane | Jonathan Maberry |
| 4 | The Child | Conan | Brian D. Anderson |
| 5 | The Shadow of Vengeance | Conan | Scott Oden |
| 6 | Shipwrecked | Bêlit | V. Castro |
| 7 | Red Waves of Slaughter | Bran Mak Morn | Steven L. Shrewsbury |
| 8 | Lethal Consignment | Conan | Shaun Hamill |
| 9 | Terror from the Abyss | Conan | Henry Herz |
| 10 | Banquet of Souls | Solomon Kane | Steve Savile |
| 11 | Bone Whispers | Bêlit | Michael A. Stackpole |
| 12 | The Halls of Immortal Darkness | Conan | Laird Barron |
| 13 | The Siege of Lamakan | El Borak | James Lovegrove |
| 14 | Comrades | Conan | Brian D. Anderson |
| 15 | The Talons of Deep Time | Kull | Francesco Dimitri |
| 16 | The Amulet of Nakamar | Conan | Brendan Deneen |
| 17 | The Lair of the Mari Lwyd | Solomon Kane | Shaun Hamill |
| 18 | Marked for Death | Conan | Tim Waggoner |
| 19 | Where the Whitethorn Meets the Black | Solomon Kane | Cavan Scott |
Coming Soon
| Title | Character | Author | Expected |
| The Treasures of Tortage | Conan | Robbie MacNiven | March 2026 |
| The Undoomed Man | Kull | Adam Rose | April 2026 |
| Untitled | Cormac Mac Art | Matthew John | May 2026 |
| Untitled | Kull | George Mann | June 2026 |
| Untitled | Conan | Ryan Cahill | September 2026 |
| Untitled | Conan | Tim Lebbon | November 2026 |
The tradition that Howard started almost a century ago in the pages of Weird Tales is with teeming with new characters, new writers, and new stories, all contained by the same world and energized by the same fire that lit the genre into existence nearly a century again.
Pick up where you left off, or start anywhere. Conan won’t wait for you.
All Heroic Legends ePubs are available wherever digital books are sold.
