“Black Canaan” is a short story by American writer Robert E. Howard, originally published in the June 1936 issue of Weird Tales. It is a regional horror story in the Southern Gothic mode, one of several such tales by Howard set in the piney woods of the ArkLaTex region of the Southern United States. The related stories include “The Shadow of the Beast”, “Black Hound of Death”, “Moon of Zambebwei” and “Pigeons from Hell”.
Originally published in Weird Tales, February 1935. Alternate title: “Moon of Zambebwei.”
The silence of the pine woods lay like a brooding cloak about the soul of Bristol McGrath. The black shadows seemed fixed, immovable as the weight of superstition that overhung this forgotten back-country. Vague ancestral dreads stirred at the back of McGrath’s mind; for he was born in the pine woods, and sixteen years of roaming about the world had not erased their shadows.
