Heroic Fantasy offers sword-swingers all kinds of monsters to fight: dragons, harpies, ape creatures, just about anything you can imagine. The Sword & Sorcery hero (along with the Epic Fantasy hero) sometimes face off against killer plants. The history of the plant monster in Horror fiction dates back to 1869. Writers like Robert E. Howard were familiar with either the Victorian version or the Pulp version of these deadly green killers. It is only natural they should take seed in tales of the fantastic.
Plant Yothga
It is no surprise that our first example was created by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Sword & Sorcery. The Plant Yothga from “The Scarlet Citadel” (Weird Tales, January 1933) is Howard’s first of three. The Cimmerian is a prisoner in the Scarlet Citadel. He escapes his cell and finds Pelias in another chamber.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 2: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.