Enjoying Some Solomon Kane!

This week I went back and re-read The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, a collection of Robert E. Howard's Kane stories, including both the stories published between 1928 and 1932 and a bunch of unpublished works discovered after Howard's untimely death and published in or around 1968.

Instead of taking place in a fantasy past, Howard uses Africa in the late 1500s as his fantasy setting. Most of these stories take place in the dark unknown reaches of Africa, long before Europeans had explored the continent.

Kane has a bad case of wanderlust and consistently finds himself venturing aimlessly into these forbidding lands, and he also has a tendency to be motivated by revenge or rescue of some maiden in distress. Kane has a hint of the errant knight in his manner, but he leans much more heavily on the righteousness and inflexibility of the Puritan.

Howard typically confines each story to the most important bits of the tale. He will skip huge amounts of time in a story to get from one confrontation to another. This method has both good and bad sides, keeping the stories short and sweet, but missing a lot of opportunities for more characters and development.

Kane is a tall, rangy man described as made of "spring steel" and "whalebone." He is an excellent fencer and a crack shot with pistol or musket.

The stories are dark and violent, with a strong sense of hopelessness, and the lurking evil of dark and dead gods and their followers. We get some crossovers with Kull's mythical Atlantis as well as some transplants of European and Mediterranean myths into the darkest corners of Africa.

The writing is full of vivid, deeply metaphorical descriptions of places, people, and actions. It almost ranges into flowery sometimes, but manages to stop short of that line. There is some dialect and patois, as well as some old words, but one thing Howard likes to do in these stories is throw in some very obscure words, as well. We get lots of descriptions of Kane's state of mind, and frequent dialogue to push forward the story. Howard's description of gore is powerful, unflinching, and pervasive. I don't often see stories that describe a man's scalp as half hanging off as he fights for his life.

Some of these "short" stories are actually pretty long for that name. They range up to nearly 80 pages for the longest Kane story.

The plots move in unexpected ways sometimes, which keeps things fresh, interesting, and unpredictable. Dark magic and the worship of dark magic causes unexpected things to happen, and madness and misunderstanding play large roles in some of the stories.

The edition of the book that I have is full of illustrations, nice little ink drawings by Gary Gianni.

Unlike a lot of stories written around the same time, while beautiful women in various states of undress appear frequently, they generally do not affect Kane the way a typical pulp protagonist would react, and the descriptions tend toward the non-graphic. The Alien novels I read and reviewed recently reveled in being graphic, but the Kane stories treat nudity almost with sterility. "She was naked except for..." is about as graphic as Howard gets, which is still pretty tame by 1920s pulp standards.

These are excellent short stories, ranging from solid action/adventure fodder to genuinely thoughtful and unique tales. The descriptions by Howard are so good that the stories are worth reading just for those. The poetic elements lend a bit of an old, epic feel to the Kane world, which I enjoyed. Later stories make use of the "transplanted myth/ancient thing" method to create some very cool plot points.

I haven't read much Conan but my impression is that I like Kane better in general. I like the character more, and his adventures are more grounded, though still with a good dose of fantasy.

For spoilers, see the appropriate chapters in the embedded video above. I put a separate chapter for each piece from the book.

Grab the book here.

A Slow But Excellent Police Procedural in 1960s Japan! "Inspector Imanishi Investigates"

This book cover lies! Some guy at the Los Angeles Times called this book "A superb thriller... tantalizing," but I don't think he read the book.

Because Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates, a.k.a. Suna no Utsuwa, a.k.a. Vessel of Sand as the book was called in Japan, is not a thriller. It's a police procedural and a very good mystery, but its pace is far too slow and it spends far too much time on cold leads and dead ends to be a thriller.

Dream-Quest of the Unknown Xenomorph?! Reviewing the Aliens novel, "The Female War"

Finally got a chance to read the third book in this Aliens omnibus: The Female War, by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry. Every time I read one of these, I learn something new, and this time it was that these books--all three of them--were novelizations of comic books, and not the other way around, as I thought when I reviewed the first two.

Anyway, this book continues the story of Billie and Wilks, with surprise ending guest from the previous book, Ripley! People are having a new kind of dream about the aliens on Gateway station, and this book is about figuring out what the dreams mean and what can be done about them.

Horrifying, Fascinating, Excellent: Monster by Naoki Urasawa

This manga series was adapted into an excellent anime in 2004--that's where I first learned of it.

The anime was never licensed here in America, but the manga was. The manga is hauntingly good.

It's a complex story spanning something like 4000 manga pages, with lots of different themes and motifs. At its base, it's the quest of a doctor to right the wrong his own righteousness created. It's full of mystery, the shadows of tyrannical dead governments, life on the run, and questions of morality and philosophy. There are segments of high tension and dread, and equally well-handled scenes of explosive action.

The Skin-Crawling Island of Dr. Moreau!

I was going through some Amazing Stories and found out that they reprinted H.G.Wells's classic The Island of Dr. Moreau. I had never read it before, so I thought I'd give it a try!

The book was originally published in 1896, and there's a famous 1996 film that I never saw, but I did hear a bit about. Still, I knew little enough that the story was a bit of a surprise.

It combines a shipwreck story--a popular form back in the day--with dark, biological science fiction. It's written from the point of view of Edward Prendick, an English natural historian.

A Leap at Literary Chaos; A Look at some Harlan Ellison (Part 1?)

I recently picked up a collection of Harlan Ellison stories--it's called "Greatest Hits" but you know what that means: it's stories people other than Ellison think are "important," rather than necessarily "good."

I've never read much Ellison up until now. I read "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" once after watching the Retsupurae of the game.

Starting with the illiterate NPR headline and the (I imagine he rolled in his grave when they added the un-Ellisonly) warning about "outdated cultural representations and language," I was a little wary, but kept moving forward.

An Old Cultural Phenomenon: The Prisoner of Zenda Review!

I was writing an essay and I needed a name for a fictional European country. If you've seen my videos, you'll be familiar with the "Read Mises" poster in the background, and I thought of his "Ruritania" that he used for some of his examples.

But I was struck with a thought: Surely, Mises had the creativity to come up with a fictional country name, but did he? After a little digging, I found that the name Ruritania dates back to this adventure novel from 1894, by Anthony Hope. This book was so popular that it spawned a slew of imitators, satirists, and parodies, but the name "Ruritania" also got used in scholarly writings, too!