The Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane – Robert E. Howard, 1998 ★★★½

Wrath of a Godless Puritan

Many action heroes offer at least some depth of character; few put their gut-wrenching angst on display like Solomon Kane.

A Puritan unable to rest while there is evil to confront and defeat, whatever the odds, Kane makes for uneasy company, torn between steadfast religious convictions and violent engagement with a world which mocks his belief in a compassionate Creator.

Robert E. Howard is best known today as the creator of Conan, but Kane may be his most enigmatic character, certainly his most existential one. Del Ray presents every original Kane story Howard produced between 1928 and 1932, along with some fragments and poems that only deepen his mystery.

While Kane’s issues dominate the later stories, where he travels to Africa as a pathological do-gooder of sorts, the recipe of action and doubt is established with the first story in this collection, “Skulls In The Stars,” set in Kane’s native England. There he is embroiled in an episode of great cruelty and deep vengeance, which is the norm for these tales.

After all is over, there is this exchange:

“Nay, sir,” one of the villagers spoke, “you have done but the will of God, and good alone shall come of this night’s deed.”

“Nay,” answered Kane heavily, “I know not – I know not.”

Kane as depicted by Dark Horse Comics. Howard describes him in "Red Shadows": "That forehead marked the dreamer, the idealist, the introvert, just as the eyes and the thin, straight nose betrayed the fanatic."
Image from https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-caw-sirens-call24-2009may24-story.html

Many of Howard’s creations, like Conan, have a catch-as-catch-can approach to morality, if they consider it at all. Not Kane. His problem is that he cares too much.

In “The Footfalls Within” he gets so caught up trying to refrain from premature action while watching a line of people force-marched into slavery that he bites down on his forearm “until his teeth met in the flesh.” Other stories have him spending years chasing down the murderers of people he never knew in life.

“It has fallen upon me, now and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives,” he explains in “The Castle Of The Devil,” one of four unfinished stories included here. The more you read, the more you realize that voice Kane takes orders from is himself.

To me, Kane is by far Robert E. Howard’s most fascinating and intelligent character, yet as a fan I hasten to add that his stories individually are less than the sum of their parts. None rise to the level of the best Conan stories, or Bran Mak Morn’s “Worms Of The Earth,” or two dozen or so other tales Howard wrote. But each Kane piece adds to the legend and make in the aggregate for a hell of a read.

They can be grouped in two categories, the first being the European-centered adventures. Here Howard puts Kane in a series of standard Robert Louis Stevenson-style yarns that employ a Zorro-storybook vibe over the proceedings, with Kane a dark-clad defender of the weak and avenger of wrongs.

The title page of the Del Ray book shows Kane encountering various characters found within. Gary Gianni's art is a consistent pleasure of Savage Tales, bringing out both the darker and storybook sides of Kane.
Image from https://www.amazon.com/Solomon-Kane-LInt%C3%A9grale-Collector-Fantasy/dp/B08928J6Q3

“The Right Hand Of Doom” establishes his modus operandi when he hears an ominous noise at the window of a neighbor’s room:

Someone or something had entered the chamber next his, and its sleeping occupant might be in danger. Kane did not halt to weigh pros and cons but went straight to the chamber door and opened it.

There are fantasy elements to these early Kane stories, but the term “sword and sorcery” doesn’t quite fit, not as well as they did the King Kull tales Howard was crafting at the same time.

“Red Shadows” is my pick for best Kane story. It’s certainly the most important, not only because it kicks off the Africa leg of the Kane saga (the setting for most of Kane’s adventures which follow), but because it was the first Howard tale to make the cover of Weird Tales, the magazine that launched him to a wider public and established his reputation as a master of eerie fiction.

The story opens with Kane chancing upon a dying woman, who he soon learns was violated and left mortally wounded by a French pirate, Le Loup. “Men shall die for this,” Kane vows, and men do, but not for the moment Le Loup, who absconds for Africa. Kane pursues him, encountering all sorts of strange magic but never veering from his course of vengeance. Howard writes: “Cruelty and tyranny to the weak sent a red blaze of fury, fierce and lasting, through his soul.”

The first Weird Tales cover to feature a Robert Howard story, from August 1928. Six more Kane tales appeared in the pulp magazine over the next four years, though this was Kane's only story to make the cover.
Illustration by C. C. Senf from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weird_Tales_August_1928.jpg

“Red Shadows” also introduces N’Longa, the juju man who becomes Kane’s one true friend, though here he is more of an opportunistic ally. It also sets up Africa as a major character in its own right, who speaks to Kane in odd moments:

There is wisdom in the shadows (brooded the drums), wisdom and magic; go into the darkness for wisdom; ancient magic shuns the light; we remember the lost ages (whispered the drums), ere man became wise and foolish…

The African stories go on like that, with this ominous undertone of something deep and unsettled which draws Kane in. Howard’s attitude toward Africans is at times openly contemptuous, and his racial attitudes are problematic not only for the carefree way they chafe against our own culture but how they weigh down otherwise decent stories with maunderings about white European/Aryan supremacy.

However ugly, the racial aspect of Howard’s writing sometimes benefits a story, channeling Kane’s unease at being the lone Caucasian in a land he cannot understand. N’Longa occasionally appears in some form to offer needed help, which Kane does appreciate in his cold way, and his antipathy toward slavers and other predators of the peaceful villages he encounters is affecting, sometimes even pathetically so.

Solomon Kane as I and many others would be introduced to him, in the pages of a 1970s Marvel comic book. Kane never took off like Conan did, but Marvel kept trying.
Artwork by Howard Chaykin from http://beachbumcomics.blogspot.com/2016/09/men-shall-die-for-this-solomon-kane.html

“Wings In The Night” is another fine Kane story, which puts the hero in the role of frustrated protector against an inhuman menace. It recalls Howard’s better-known “The Garden Of Fear” and features some of the most harrowing prose Howard ever penned:

With a great piece of his scalp hanging loose, his chest and shoulders cut and ripped, the world had become a blind, red thing in which he was aware of but one sensation – the bulldog urge to kill his foe.

The story whips its way to a harrowing, unforgettable conclusion, only gaining momentum as it continues.

Two other tales, “The Footfalls Within” and “The Hills Of The Dead,” are just a cut below, not as well-crafted but imbued with that Howard quality of primitive power that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. “Hills Of The Dead” does especially well with what amounts to an early zombie story and a welcome return of N’Longa.

Howard produced the Kane stories from 1928-1932, just before switching to Conan. At times, you can see Howard repeating himself with another village under evil superhuman threat, or Kane following some horror into the jungle. As good as Africa was for building the character, Kane seemed stuck in unrooted-wanderer mode.

After decades of waiting, Solomon Kane hit the big screen in 2009, with James Purefoy (above) as Kane. An attempt at recapturing the grim tone of the stories, it was not a box-office success and spawned no sequel, but it has its fans.
Image from https://www.npr.org/2012/09/27/161547317/solomon-kane-hellbound-and-down-in-old-england 

But none of these stories are terrible, and only one, “Moon Of Skulls,” is poor, or perhaps just under-inspired. Howard had a bad habit of long expositions where some strange being pops in out of nowhere to relate a backstory at length, and he does this twice here. “Moon” also pushes Howard’s racism more than the other stories. It wasn’t a hatred for other races, rather a need to emphasize imagined supremacy, but it does grate.

The Del Ray book also includes two other full-length Solomon Kane stories: “Rattle Of Bones,” (set in Germany’s Black Forest, featuring a nifty double-betrayal plot) and “The Blue Flame Of Vengeance” (a throwback to the style of “Red Shadows” set in Kane’s English homeland which only saw publication decades after Howard’s death but holds together fine as a throwback yarn.)

Four story fragments are also included. Howard never saw fit to finish them, and after reading them I can understand why, as they don’t seem to blaze any new ground. The concept for “The Children Of Asshur” reappears as an El Borak tale, “The Lost Valley Of Iskander,” but the rest seem like dead ends, with only one, “Death’s Black Riders,” setting an introductory mood that seems promising:

The huge trees shouldered each other like taciturn giants, and their intertwining branches shut out the light; so that the white moonlight turned grey as it filtered through, and the trail which meandered among the trees seemed like a dim road through ghostland.

In "Hills Of The Dead," Kane battles waves of zombies: "He – could – not – kill – them! These words beat on his brain like a sledge on an anvil as he shattered wood-like flesh and dead bone with his smashing swings."
Image from https://www.gamesindustry.biz/funcom-acquires-conan-ip-holder 

Also included are several poems, which further examine the grim, fatalistic soul of Kane, giving him a surprisingly rich backstory. We learn of his unhappy dealings with Queen Elizabeth and Sir Francis Drake, and discover a hint of a romantic life left behind.

The last poem in this collection, “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming,” was apparently the last thing Howard ever wrote about Kane as it was published in 1936, the same year Howard killed himself. Here we see Kane ready to take his rest after a lifetime of lonely sojourns; then abruptly he decides otherwise and bolts for the sea again:

He heard the clamor of the winds,

he had harked to the ocean’s roar.

It is a fitting note for Kane to go out on; haplessly doomed to wander an unfriendly cosmos, restless with disbelief but unable to stop himself.