The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Robert E. Howard

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane is a collection of all of Robert E. Howard’s stories featuring 17th century Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane.

Solomon Kane considers himself to be a Puritan but he’s not quite what you might think of when you hear the word. He is a man with a very high sense of duty and he can be ruthless. He’s a man driven by conscience. He is however prepared to entertain the possibility that sometimes duty is complicated and sometimes it ends up feeling like the wrong thing to do. He is a man who understands moral complexity. And it’s something he worries about a lot.

Kane is a hard man but he’s as hard on himself as he is on others and he detests cruelty. He particularly detests people who try to find spurious moral justifications for cruelty and injustice.

This is Robert E. Howard, a man some would dismiss as a mere pulp writer, creating a fascinatingly complex character capable of a degree of self-doubt and self-analysis.

Solomon Kane sees himself as an agent of God, as God’s avenger. His mission in life is to destroy evil men. He is a fanatic, but unlike most fanatics he possesses a capacity for kindness.

One of the things I like about Solomon Kane is that he’s not Conan in 17th century garb. He’s a very different kind of character. He’s more serious-minded, a bit more introspective, and he has a strong sense of moral purpose.

These stories sometimes involve the supernatural, and sometimes not.

In Skulls in the Stars Kane is on his way to Torkertown. He is warned to take the swamp road rather than the much shorter much easier road across the moor. Danger and death lurk on the moor road. Naturally Kane takes the moor road.

And he encounters something uncanny and terrifying. Can an emotion be made flesh? Perhaps some emotions can. Emotions like hate. Kane finds an answer to the danger but it makes him uneasy. Good story.

The Right Hand of Doom is a neat little tale of a necromancer who promises to exact revenge on the man who betrayed him. A story in which Kane wants to see justice done but in which he recognises that justice can be used as an excuse for mere revenge, or hate, or cruelty. A solid story.

Red Shadows (originally titled Solomon Kane) is a novelette. Kane encounters a dying girl. She had been raped and brutalised. Kane has never set eyes on this girl before but now he has appointed himself her avenger. Avenging her will take Kane across the seas and all the way to Africa where he will encounter some formidable magic. Interesting that the African voodoo witch-doctor/black magician N’Longa turns out to be one of the good guys. Howard gives this novelette a certain epic quality - Kane doesn’t care if it takes him years and he has to visit every corner of the globe. He has promised vengeance and he keeps his promises. N’Longa also gives Kane a wooden stuff. It is fabulously old, made of an unknown wood, with magical powers. That staff will crop up in later Solomon Kane stories. Great story.

Rattle of Bones begins with Kane and a Frenchman he has met on the road through the forest taking a room at an inn. It is the Cleft Skull Inn and it looks as inviting as its name suggests. I can’t tell you much more without revealing spoilers except that Solomon Kane will not get much sleep this night. And it’s a revenge story with a twist. Good story.

The novella The Moon of Skulls takes Kane back to Africa. It is the last stage in an epic quest that has taken years. Kane is searching for an English girl kidnapped by slavers. He has reached the fabled kingdom of Negari, ruled by the dreaded black queen Nakari.

He discovers that Negari has a bizarre history, a history that goes back to another land, a time of legend, a vanished civilisation. He finds a city in the heart of Africa but dark deeds are done there. And the Moon of Skulls, the full moon, is approaching. After that there will be no way to save that English maiden.

Kane will be offered immense power and will be tempted, although only for a moment.

Kane will be captured, he will witness scenes of torture and depravity and he will inflame the lusts of Queen Nakari.

There’s action aplenty, there are chases through secret passageways, there are horrific secrets to be revealed. A splendid tale of adventure.

The Blue Flame of Vengeance begins with a duel. A young man named Jack Hollinster has challenged Sir George Banway, a nobleman with an evil reputation. The duel ends inconclusively but indirectly it leads to a meeting between Jack and Solomon Kane. Kane is out for revenge as well but Sir George is not his target. Kane has been pursuing the notorious pirate Jonas Hardraker.

Jack’s lady love is kidnapped so Kane will have to rescue her as well as settling his account with Hardraker.

Plenty of action in this tale and a second duel, this time with knives. A fine story.

The Hills of the Dead takes Kane back to Africa, but he can’t explain why. He has no mission to fulfil. He is simply drawn to the place. An encounter with a frightened young African girl named Junna will however present him with a mission. Her tribe is being menaced by the dead. They are the dead of a vanished tribe and they are vampires of a sort. Junna’s tribe lives in terror. Ridding the land of these vampire-like creatures is task worthy of Solomon Kane.

It is however a task that is beyond him. Kane fears no living man but these walking dead are impervious to both sword and pistol. Kane reluctantly comes to the conclusion that magic must be fought with magic. He knows nothing of magic, but N’Longa knows a great deal. N’Longa is a mighty ju-ju man. He is also, as a result of the events recounted in Red Shadows, Kane’s blood brother. N’Longa might have the magic necessary. And while Kane abhors magic he knows that N’Longa is a good magician.

This is unequivocally a tale of the supernatural and a full-blown horror story. And a very very good one.

Wings in the Night is a very dark story, even for Robert E.Howard. Kane is in Africa, being pursued by cannibals. He comes across a village that has been ravaged and devastated and he finds unspeakable horrors. Flying creatures like men with wings, vicious and bloodthirsty.

He takes refuge in a village where the priest tells him of the full horrors of the bird-men.

The tribe sees Kane as a god who will deliver them from the evil of the bird-men. That’s what Kane fully intends to do but his fine resolutions lead to further horrors and to madness. A great story.

The Footfalls Within is a very simple tale. Kane is tramping through the jungle in Africa. He sees a party of Arab slavers driving a group of African slaves. The slavers are just about to commit an unspeakable act of cruelty towards a young girl. There are fifteen Arabs accompanied by seventy armed African guards. The odds against Kane are impossible. Kane attacks anyway and is captured.

The slavers, dragging Kane along with them bound and tied, find an ancient mausoleum. Kane knows that opening the mausoleum would be a mistake - he can hear footfalls within the tomb although nobody else hears them. It turns out that opening that mausoleum is a very big mistake indeed. Probably the weakest Solomon Kane story but still at least moderately creepy.

Final Thoughts

The weaker stories in this collection are still very good. The better stories are superb, Robert E. Howard at his best. And the better stories outnumber the weaker ones by a comfortable margin.

These tales are definitely sword-and-sorcery but being set in the 17th century and more often than not in Africa give them a unique feel. Very highly recommended.

Robert E. Howard's Almuric

Robert E. Howard wrote a vast number of short stories but only a handful of novels, including Almuric which was serialised in Weird Tales in 1939 (three years after the author’s death).

Esau Cairn is a young American of immense physical strength although unfortunately afflicted with a rather short temper. He becomes enmeshed in a web of deceit spun by crooked politicians and he has resigned himself to facing execution on trumped charges. He is given a surprising opportunity to save himself, although at a terrifyingly high price. A scientist acquaintance has discovered a means of transporting living beings, including people, across the vast reaches of outer space. The only problem is that such trips are strictly one-way. Esau Cairn however is willing to accept the price.

He finds himself on the fantastically distant planet Almuric. It’s a planet on which everything seems to resemble some earthly equivalent, but not quite. There is always a slight difference.

For a solitary man, unarmed and unequipped with any tools (it is only possible to transport living things across space), existence on this primitive planet is a challenge. Esau Cairn is however a man of remarkable determination and endurance as well as strength.

There are several human-like sentient species on Almuric. The Guras are somewhat bestial in appearance but they are brave warriors. They’re the sorts of barbarians who appealed to Howard’s imagination, with a certain degree of honour. Their women are very different. The Guras have evolved a rather extreme sexual dimorphism. The men are powerful, hairy and apelike while the women are smooth-skinned, gentle and very feminine. And for all their apparent barbarism the Gura men treat their women with extravagant kindness (apart of course from occasional physical chastisement which they seem to accept).

The Yaga are more worrisome, winged cannibal men of exceptional cruelty. Their queen, Yasmeena, is beautiful but terrifying and frighteningly capricious.

There are other man-like creatures, varying in intelligence and savagery. Many of these have been enslaved by the Yaga. The Yaga are particularly fond of carrying off the women of the other sentient creatures. You might expect that these maidens would be facing the proverbial Fate Worse Than Death. In fact they’re facing horrors that are almost unimaginable. The depraved Yaga certainly use their captive women as sex slaves but they have other uses for them as well.

Esau Cairn will face many dangers and countless horrors but he will also find love in the person of the gentle but high-spirited Altha.

Almuric is very much in the mould of the sword and planet adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Howard could not match the extraordinary inventiveness of Burroughs but his writing has its own strengths. Few writers have ever been able to match Howard when it came to savage action scenes. He also had a gift for atmosphere, especially for creating an atmosphere of skin-crawling horror. And of course Howard had the ability to create great barbarian heroes, mighty warriors but with a degree of gentleness towards women and with the intelligence and instinctive wisdom to complement their physical prowess. Esau Cairn might be a 20th century American but he is in fact a natural barbarian (which is part of the reason he finds himself exiled from an Earth on which he was never able to fit in).

There’s always a touch of horror to Howard’s fantasy tales, and almost always there are hints of sadism and cruelty, often with sexual overtones. It’s all combined with odd dashes of chivalry. Almuric has more than its share of such qualities. Naturally there’s non-stop violence, some of it pretty hair-raising.

This is a sword and planet rather than a sword sorcery tale so there’s no magic but there are monsters. Howard, who had no great interest in science fiction, solves the problem of finding a plausible way to transport his hero to a distant planet in the simplest possible manner. He doesn’t explain it at all.

This is a short novel but aside from having lots of action it also has copious amounts of plot. The pacing is breakneck and there are no dull spots.

It’s hardly great literature but it’s fun and it’s blood-drenched excitement. It’s pretty much typical Robert E. Howard in other words, and that’s certainly no bad thing. Highly recommended.

Robert E. Howard's Marchers of Valhalla

Marchers of Valhalla contains eight tales by Robert E. Howard. Both the title and the cover suggest that these will be sword and sorcery stories but actually they’re a rather varied collection. This volume is in fact a good example of Howard’s ability to write an exciting story in just about any pulp genre.

The Grey God Passes and the title story are really the only pure sword and sorcery stories in this 1977 Sphere paperback. Out of the Deep and Sea Curse are horror fantasy tales linked with the lives of those who live by and for the sea. A Thunder of Trumpets takes us to British India during the Raj, whilst The Valley of the Lost and The Thunder-Rider are western stories, although very different western stories. 

Both The Thunder-Rider and ‘For the Love of Barbara Allen’ involve the idea of reincarnation and past lives, an idea that seems to have interested Howard deeply.

Most of the stories here deal with the past. Not in the sense of being set in the past, but in the sense of the past being something that still exists in some way. A past that refuses to die. A past that can come back and haunt the living. And not just haunt individuals, but even whole societies.

While none of these stories can be considered to be part of the Cthulhu Mythos it’s still quite obvious why Howard and Lovecraft admired each other’s work and influenced each other considerably. While their styles were quite different they were clearly on the same wavelength. The conflict of civilisations, the struggle between civilised societies and barbarism, the fragility of civilisation, the sense of the past as a living entity, the common interest in the reactions of the civilised mind to sudden eruptions of horror or violence or to events that are disturbing and not rationally explicable - all these factors serve to illustrate how close these two writers were in the way they viewed the world.

Howard could never have written a dull story if he tried. Everything he wrote grabs the reader right from the start and he knows how to keep the reader’s interest. Highly recommended.

Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon

The Hour of the Dragon (also published as Conan the Conqueror) was Robert E. Howard’s only Conan novel. Written in 1934, it reworks some material from earlier short stories and was published in serial form in Weird Tales in late 1935 and early 1936. It shows that Howard was quite capable of writing in the longer format although for a pulp writer a novel was not a particularly attractive proposition, short stories being much easier to sell. 

The novel takes place during the period after Conan had become King of Aquilonia. Conan loses his kingdom and spends most of the book trying to regain it. This has the advantage for the author of offering opportunities to show Conan as a king commanding armies and also undertaking the kinds of solitary adventures we expect from a sword and sorcery hero, in which he must rely entirely on his own wits and his own strength and indomitable courage. The Hour of the Dragon was written at the suggestion of a British publisher and Howard’s idea was presumably to offer an overview of Conan’s character and accomplishments as both monarch and lone hero.

Conan’s problems begin with a plot by ambitious neighbouring rules and would-be rulers and a sorcerer who undertakes a particularly daring feat of magic - he brings back to life an infamous sorcerer, Xaltotun, who had died three thousand years earlier. The world of Hyboria had been very different in Xaltotun’s day. The dominant kingdom had been Archeron, a kingdom now only dimly remembered for its cruelties. Xaltotun is a sorcerer of immense powers, powers that exceed those of any sorcerer living in Conan’s age. 

Xaltotun is restored to life by a magical gem, the Heart of Ahriman, a gem that ironically provides the only possible counter to the long-dead wizard’s magic. The gem can nullify Xaltotun’s sorceries, which is why the newly revived wizard is determined to keep it in his own possession. He would prefer to destroy it but unfortunately for him such a thing is impossible.

With the aid of Xaltotun’s evil magic Conan is stricken grievously ill on the eve of a crucial battle and Conan’s armies are defeated and routed. Valerius is placed on the throne of Aquilonia. Valerius and the king of neighbouring Nemedia plunder the land unmercifully. They believe they are safe to do so, Conan having perished in the decisive battle that lost him his throne. They would be a good deal uneasier if they knew the truth, that Conan is most certainly not dead.

Conan might be alive but regaining his throne seems all but impossible. Even a mighty hero like Conan is powerless against Xaltotun’s evil magic. Conan will find however that he has some unlikely allies in the shape of an elderly witch and a shunned religious cult.

In the process of trying to regain his kingdom Conan will find himself having to take up some of his old occupations, such as thieving and piracy.

In the person of Xaltotun The Hour of the Dragon has a memorably nasty villain who proves to be a very formidable opponent indeed. There are some notable lesser villains as well but they are overshadowed by Xaltotun, and indeed they are themselves very much afraid of Xaltotun.

There’s everything you expect in a Conan tale - an abundance of action, some romance, plenty of hints of sex and it’s all done in Howard’s inimitable style. Very few writers have ever approached Howard’s ability to handle action scenes or his ability to maintain a breakneck narrative pace. Almost as impressive are his knack for achieving a mood of brooding evil and his skill in creating an atmosphere of extravagant barbaric savagery and splendour.

Howard was very much a pulp writer and he can be accused of the usual sins of pulp writers - he wrote quickly and was not overly concerned with polish. Nonetheless this is a well-constructed and immensely entertaining adventure tale by the greatest of all sword and sorcery writers. Highly recommended.

The Haunter of the Ring and Other Stories

Robert E. Howard will always be best remembered for his sword and sorcery tales, especially the Conan stories, but his work was extraordinarily varied. He wrote westerns, adventure stories, gothic horror and even detective stories. The one thread that connects all his work however is horror. Even when he wrote detective stories he still added a dimension of the horrific.

Wordsworth’s paperback The Haunter of the Ring and Other Stories is an excellent sampler of his non-sword and sorcery output, with a very strong emphasis on the gothic and the macabre.

It includes his classic Pigeons from Hell. There are a couple of werewolf tales. There are three detective stories, remarkably dark and gruesome.

Many of the stories deal with reincarnation or with what appear to be memories of past lives, or perhaps dim collective memories stored in certain arcane objects or certain accursed places. They are stories of events so horrible or so cataclysmic that the echoes remain centuries later. The Children of the Night and The Black Stone are notable examples, the latter a truly superb story, as is The Cairn on the Headland.

Black Wind Blowing is another impressive tale of dark deeds that return to haunt the present.

Thee are quite a few tales that draw on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, not surprising since Howard was an important member of Lovecraft’s circle. The best writers in Lovecraft’s circle had a remarkable ability to influence each other without merely copying each other. They had their own voices and were confident enough in their own abilities to absorb influences without being swamped by them. The Children of the Night and The Fire of Asshurbanipal both draw on Lovecraft’s Mythos but with a definite Robert E. Howard flavour. Howard’s style is more violent and there’s a disturbing eroticism you won’t find in Lovecraft.

Howard was fascinated by the ideas of cultures in collision, and especially by conflicts between cultures at different levels of development, or between cultures of differing levels of barbarism. This is something that drives many of his best tales and he had the ability to capture the feel of cultures with wildly different ways of looking at the world compared to our own.

There’s plenty of horror here. While there’s more violence than there is in Lovecraft Howard’s horror does resemble Lovecraft’s in the sense that it’s not the physical threat you really have to worry about - it’s the cosmic horror that brings madness and undermines the very foundations of reason.

This is a fine collection - highly recommended.

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

I’m rather partial to Sword & Sorcery novels, and for me the greatest of all Sword & Sorcery writers was Robert E. Howard. His stories are immensely entertaining, and astonishingly dark and doom-laden.

One of his better known creations is the Puritan swordsman and adventurer Solomon Kane. He’s kind of like a 17th century gothic Batman, righting wrongs and pursuing obsessive vengeance. None of Howard’s characters are particularly happy, and Kane is no exception. He does, however, have a purpose in life which he pursues with single-minded zeal.

I’ve just finished a collection of Howard’s stories about Kane, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane. I don’t think the overall standard is quite as high as that of the Conan tales, but there are still some absolute gems to be found here. My favourites are Hills of the Dead and the astoundingly gloomy Wings in the Night. If you have a taste for this sort of thing then you must read the Solomon Kane stories. If you’ve never read Robert E. Howard and want to give him a try then you’re better off starting with the Conan stories.