Skull-Face

Steve Costigan, a hard-knuckled American sailor wandering the fog-shrouded docks of San Francisco, stumbles into something far older and deadlier than any barroom brawl. An ancient Atlantean sorcerer has risen from his tomb beneath the Pacific, his flesh rotted to skull and sinew, his mind still burning with a thousand-year lust for world dominion. Behind him stands a cult of surviving Atlanteans, their bloodline purer than kings, their patience finally rewarded. Now Costigan must pit his fists and his courage against powers that predate history itself, aided only by a woman who claims descent from the lost continent and a sword that once sang in the courts of a drowned civilization. Robert E. Howard packs more viscera, violence, and globe-trotting peril into a single novel than most writers manage in a career. It's pulp adventure at its finest: bone-crunching fights, shadowy conspiracies, occult horror, and a hero who solves most problems with his fists and the rest with sheer, stubborn American grit. Not subtle. Never boring.