This week I sat down with a collection of Kull stories by Robert E. Howard called Kull: Exile of Atlantis. I read and reviewed The Shadow Kingdom a while back, and I thought it might be fun to go through a bit more Kull and see what I thought.
One of the first weird things about this collection was how many of the stories were fragments or untitled drafts. In the Miscellany section at the end of the book, it's explained that Kull was not very well-received by the magazines of the day, and Howard only managed to sell a few of the stories... one of which he reworked into a Conan story to get it over the bar. Not only that, but even Howard had peculiar feelings about Kull. When a Kull story "happened," it just flowed out onto the paper. But when Howard tried to consciously write a Kull story, he would often get lost or end up writing something closer to Conan instead.
The stories themselves are fascinating as a precursor to the adventure stories we all know and love. Yes, the collection I read calls the Kull stories "tales of adventure" on the cover but really they're much closer to fables or parables in a lot of places, albeit with unusual twists. There's no real hint of the "hero's journey" or much of the plot structuring we expect in fantasy and adventure stories today, and indeed which Howard perfected in Solomon Kane and Conan. Sometimes, when the stories seem to begin some kind of interesting plot, Howard abruptly ends the draft and leaves it a fragment.
As such, I found these stories engaging in an unconventional way. They're full of mysticism and studded with interesting ideas worth mulling over.
And of course they're all written in Howard's inimitable style, a bit deliberately antiquated but flowing with vivid, though often somewhat vague, descriptions. If you enjoy adventure and fantasy stories, the Kull stories are engaging especially because they are so out of the ordinary. And frankly, there's not that much of them, so you can finish them all easily in a day.
The Internet Archive has a borrowable edition with many of the short stories here.
For more spoilers and details, check the Spoiler Section of the embedded video.
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