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of Robert E. Howard's Kane stories, including both the stories published between 1928 and 1932 and a bunch of unpublished works discovered after Howard's untimely death and published in or around 1968.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.