Dr Hermes Reviews - ROBERT E. HOWARD
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SOLOMON KANE

[Illustration: a wonderfully moody portrait of Kane by Jeff Jones. This was used as front cover to the first of the three Solomon Kane reprints in 1971 by the long-defunct Centaur Press.]

"The Blue Flame of Vengeance"
"Red Shadows"
"Skulls In the Stars"
"The Moon of Skulls"
"The Footfalls Within"
"The Hills of the Dead"
"Wings In the Night"

"The Blue Flame of Vengeance" (Dec 15, 2001) Written around 1928 but never published in his lifetime, this was one of the earliest Solomon Kane stories by Robert E. Howard. It's unusual in that there is no supernatural element, perhaps a reason why WEIRD TALES never printed it. It also takes place entirely in England, another rarity in a Kane story. Later retitled "Blades of the Brotherhood", the yarn is told mostly around the viewpoint of Jack Hollinster, a typical Howard protagonist-- young, hot-headed and passionate, wildly over-reacting and quick to take offense, headlong in love with an idealized paragon of a girl. You really wouldn't want to have one of Howard's heroes as a relative or friend, as they go overboard at the slightest provocation and are eager to use violence to settle their grievances. Hollinster and his beloved Mary Garvin fall afoul of a local nobleman, Sir George Banway, and end up tangling with a band of genuine, no-fooling pirates who would just as soon cut your throat as say hello. Sir George and the pirates have been engaged in smuggling but before they close their operation, the plan is to abduct and abuse Mary, and bury Jack at sea after torturing him. The wild card in this game, though, is a certain Puritan who has been stalking the pirate captain like a hungry wolf circling a lamb. Solomon Kane is so well drawn, so extreme in his characterization, and so effectively portrayed that it's startling to realize Howard daydreamed the character up in high school. Unlike the more mercenary characters like Conan (motivated by normal self-interest), Kane is a prototype super-hero years before the genre flourished. (In fact, if Kane had somehow met Conan, he would have seen the Cimmerian as just another murderous pirate and frankly, the outcome of their clash would be open to debate.) Driven and restless, Kane seemed to be doomed to wander the world avenging wrongs and rescuing innocents, never quite knowing why. The religious imagery which the Pilgrim uses is a pretty clearly his way of explaining to himself why he acts likes this. Robert E. Howard had an innate gift for telling a compelling story, and his enormous repressed rage and energy charge his writing with a feverish quality not too many authors could match. In this early story, his vivid descriptions of settings and people are already there, as is his intense emotional reaction to his own story. The dialogue is heavily laced with phrases and jargon of the 16th Century, but nothing too archaic for the average reader to follow; it's a nice balance. TV shows like XENA and HERCULES, with their jarringly modern slang, could learn some atmosphere and mood from stories like this. But ultimately, the main appeal of a Howard story is its action. Kane engages in two duels here, a tense knife fight with the pirate chief and a sword fight with the vile nobleman. This is what Howard did better than any oher pulp writer I can name. The struggles are clearly described, with just enough detail, so that a filmmaker could easily choreograph them on film. The writer who comes closest to matching Howard in detailing fights would be Peter O'Donnell, but alhough he's skilled, he doesn't have Howard's obssessive enthusiasm. My only misgiving is that the very end is perhaps a bit too maudlin, as Kane gives a self-pitying, flowery speech about how there's no rest for him and walks off, despite pleas to stay. (Still, it worked for the Lone Ranger for decades.)

"Red Shadows" (March 2, 2005) The first published Solomon Kane story by Robert E. Howard (in WEIRD TALES for August 1928), this was written very early in his career (he would have been about twenty-one), and the inexperience shows here and there. "Red Shadows" has all the trademarks we expect from Howard. There are strong visuals with plenty of dark things creeping in the moonlight, exciting swordfights described with enthusiasm, vengeful gorillas and witch-doctors raising the dead and much more packed into just forty brisk pages. But the story also seems a bit disorganized. There are two separate climaxes as Kane battles the villain he has been chasing for years (the main thrust of the plot) and also has to face bare-handed a huge African native. The two challenges aren't tied closely together (the native doesn't turn up until nearly the end), and it's hard to say which one should have been the logical choice to finish the story. (Kane himself doesn't resolve the second climax, just observes it, which weakens some of the impact.) "Red Shadows" also has some extraneous prose, not something Howard later allowed himself too often. The dialogues between Kane and the scoundrel Le Loup go on for too long without any real point, and are sometimes a bit too affected. Asked by Kane is he is ready to meet the Devil, Le Loup studies his fingernails and says, "As to that, Monsieur, I must say that I can at present render a most satisfactory account to his horned Excellency, though really I have no intention of so doing - for a while at least." There is altogether too much of this precious banter from the bandit. Le Loup is not the most successfully developed of Howard's villains. On the other hand, Solomon Kane himself is rendered exactly right from the start. Howard had created this character in his high school daydreams and had been refining him mentally for years, so when Kane actually steps onto the page, he really seems solid and weathered. Kane has a lot of conflicting elements in his personality. He has the typical Howardian obsession for wanderlust and bloody revenge, but his overboard religious convictions make him wrap his passion in a veneer of Biblical quotations and rationalizations that he is only doing the work of the Lord. "Cruelty and tyranny to the weak sent a red blaze of fury, fierce and lasting, through his soul," yet he tells himself he is only doing his duty as God's avenger. I think Kane really believes he is merely an instrument chosen for divine retribution, but in effect he ends up as one of the earliest crusading super-heroes in pulp fiction. Kane spends years undergoing awful hardship to rescue an abducted English maiden or to avenge one who was murdered, and he also undertakes to free villages from attacks by supernatural creatures. Even in stories like "The Blue Flame of Vengeance" (retitled "Blades of the Brotherhood"), the sourpuss Puritan is battling pirates and bandits with no thought of earthly reward. It's just what he is driven to do. In "Red Shadows", Kane is in England when he happens upon a young girl who is dying of a dagger wound. The lass had been raped (in those days, "ravished" was the word used in fiction) and she barely survives long enough to tell her story to the Puritan. A band of marauders led by a man called Le Loup had sacked and burned her village, leaving her to die alone. It was only chance that Kane was wandering by and found in her last moments. ("Slowly he rose, mechanically wiping his hands upon his cloak. A dark scowl had settled on his somber brow. Yet he made no wild, reckless vow, swore no oath by saints or devils. 'Men shall die for this,' he said coldly.") After that, the bandit pack is hounded and steadily wiped out one by one by the most dangerous swordsman in England. Only the leader is left, the callous blaspheming French rogue called Le Loup. As they exchange words before the inevitable clash, Le Loup's wicked attitude really ticks Kane off. The Puritan is not one to make extravagant threats, but he says "Le Loup, take care! I have never yet done a man to death by torture, but by God, sir, you tempt me!" Even then, the bandit chief gets away by a ruse and Kane is hot on his trail again. We next see the two of them in Africa after years have passed. The Puritan has chased Le Loup all over the Continent, never quite catching up but never far behind. Finally, the fugitive takes up partnership with King Songa of a cannibal tribe (quite a comedown for a main used to luxury in Europe) when Kane confronts him. Unfortunately, it's as a prisoner as the Puritan has succumbed to the classic heroic setback of being beaned on the head and taken prisoner by his worst enemy. Well, things don't look promising for our hero as he is tied to a stake and about to do a Joan of Arc impression. But here is where Kane first meets the shrivelled up old shaman and fetish man, N'Longa. (He's the wizard who will give Kane that peculiar cat-headed staff.) Although he speaks English with a crude pidgin dialect, N'Long has a lot of strange wisdom. He can send his spirit to displace another's and take command of that person's body for a time, powerful ju-ju indeed. And, in a horrifying scene, N'Longa chooses to send his soul into the corpse of a man just killed on the altar of the Black God before them. Events move rapidly after that Night of the Living Dead moment, and Kane inevitably faces Le Loup in a clearing with swords drawn. Howard's skill at describing violent fights is not quite at its peak here, but he already has a way of making a swordfight come to life I don't think any other pulpster could quite match. We can't forget Gulka, the brutal "gorilla-slayer" who wants Kane as a sacrifice to his pagan god. Wounded and weak, his sword out of reach, the Puritan can only hope to make a brave defiant stand before the huge native kills him. But even as it all seems hopeless, Africa has one last surprise in store for Gulka... "Red Shadows" features a lot more racial slurs than usual. Gulka has an "apelike head", hands "like the talons of an ape, and his brow slanted back from above bestial eyes. Flat nose and great, thick red lips completed this picture of primitive, lustful savagery." You think some readers might find this a wee bit, well, offensive, Bob? Meeting an angry gorilla, "the negro was face to face with a thing more primitive than he." And yet, here's the weird thing. Robert E Howard seemed strongly drawn to the savage and uncivilized elements he described in such unfortunate language. He always seemed to think that the more primitive people were, the stronger and purer they were. Most of his stories showed modern civilized people as weak and decadent; his most famous character (Conan, of course) is a living example of a rough barbarian triumphing over more sophisticated types. In "Red Shadows", Howard goes on for many paragraphs about the allure and deeper wisdom which the African jungle holds and which modern men have forgotten. Even though Howard disparages Africans (and black people in general) he seems to admire aspects of them despite himself. He's almost as conflicted as Kane, whom he keeps sending out into the jungle as his surrogate.

"Skulls In the Stars' (Aug 18, 2002) From the January 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, this is a very short episode that shows neither Solomon Kane nor Robert E. Howard at their best. Still. it's enjoyable and quick-moving as a standard ghost tale. If there had never been another Kane story, "Skulls In the Stars" would be just another in the long list of good chillers that filled the pages of WEIRD TALES for its duration. But because the fighting Puritan went on to appear in great stuff like "Wings In the Night" and "The Hills of the Dead", not to mention the way the Conan phenomenon brought nearly all of Howard's work back into print, we can enjoy this story today without tracking down a rare and expensive magazine over seventy years old. We find grim, dour old Kane leaving a tavern in England and being warned to take the winding, marshy road rather than the straighter, safer road to his destination, Torkertown. He's told shudderingly that there is some horrible, laughing THING out there that rips its victims up. Well. Solomon Kane is probably the worst choice of a person to warn about some fiendish monster being too dangerous to face. Although he claims he's just doing his God given duty to investigate, you know his adrenalin is pumping and he just can't wait to track down this monster. Shortly thereafter, Kane encounters a vague, misty spectre which is nevertheless solid enough to kill a man. After his pstols and swords prove useless, our Puritan never thinks of trying to spin and run like a cheetah. No, he tackles the ghost barehanded, learns its secret and then goes on to sternly bring the phantom's killer to a grim justice. The best part of the whole story is a short paragraph that captures exactly what I like most about Howard's attitude and philosophy. Kane is grappling determinedly with a spirit that he can't even touch, although it's unfairly mauling him. But strangely enough, his bravery itself is a metaphysical force that can meet the ectoplasmic hate of the ghost on equal terms. ("...For man's only weapon is courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against such not even the legions of Hell can stand.") I always love moments in horror movies where ordinary people stand up, fight back and win. This sequence tells you a lot about why Howard's stories are still compelling and popular. In an H.P. Lovecraft version of this story, Kane would have fainted when he saw the ghost, had a nervous breakdown when he awoke from his swoon and spent the rest of his life shuddering at the memories. If Kane met a shoggoth, he would have found a way to maneuver it to the base of a cliff and roll boulders down on it, making an overheated speech about how the Earth needs to be cleansed of Satan's creatures such as these.

"The Moon of Skulls" (July 5, 2005) From the June and July 1930 issues of WEIRD TALES, this Solomon Kane adventure shows Robert E Howard in his early, most over-the-top style. The story is vivid and gallops along (only screeching to a stop once as an old man does some ranting about Atlantean glories and conveniently feeds Kane exactly what he needs to know). There's an epic scale in the presentation of a lost city, a villainess who Kane (and the author) finds seductive and repellent at the same time, and enough carnage to make the book twitch in your hands. And yet, the writing itself has a lot of rough edges that Howard would soon teach himself to refine. He really lays on the atmosphere an inch too thick; edit out just the words "red" and "black" and the story would be a page or two shorter. Right at the start, Kane stares at the shadow of a huge crag in the sunset, and "it loomed like a symbol of death and horror, a menace brooding and terrible, like the shadow of a stealthy assassin upon some candle-lit wall." This hammering on of the mood goes on for the entire story, and it becomes less effective after a few chapters. I have reservations about earthquakes that wait until just the right moment for the hero's advantage to happen, too. Sometimes I wonder if lost civilizations don't have a big lever somewhere marked VOLCANO or EARTHQUAKE that a high priest could pull when things get out of hand. Also, the final two pages consist of Kane indulging in a soliloquy about Providence and justice, including a quote from Isaiah, and this is a bit much. In a story like this, once the action is over and everything has been resolved, it's usually best to drop the curtain with a memorable closing line. A long-winded sermon diffuses the effect. (Although it's enlightening to see Kane describe himself as "Nay, alone I am a weak creature, having no strength or might in me; yet in times past hath God made me a great vessel of wrath and a sword of deliverance.") Kane is one of my favorite Howard characters because he's so borderline insane and contradictory but doesn't realize it. Minor misgivings aside, "The Moon of Skulls" is classic pulp adventure, lurid and brutal and compelling. The Puritan wanderer Solomon Kane is in Africa again, having spent years searching the world for a young English lass he knows was sold into slavery. In "Red Shadows", Kane also spent a good chunk of his life on the trail, hunting down the villain Le Loup. I sometimes wonder how old this guy was by his final appearance; it's easy to visualize Kane not as a hunky young brute but as a weathered, care-worn veteran with some gray in his hair and deep furrows in his face. It suits him somehow. Looking for Marylin Taverel, Kane has struggled deep into Central Africa and finally found a plateau shunned by the tribes for many miles around. This is the "kingdom of fear", from which the dreaded Negari warriors issue out on raiding parties, ruled by a hellish "vampire queen" Nakari. (Not a real nosferatu, mind you.) Being the single-minded fanatic he is, Kane climbs the mountain and essentially challenges the entire empire of madmen by himself. Fighting huge African spearmen, wrestling giant serpents in the dark, racing through hidden passages in castle walls, Kane has a lively time searching for a girl he isn't sure is in the area or even alive. It all builds up to a scene of quintessential melodrama as Marylin is stretched out on an alter and about to be a human sacrifice at the full moon, the moon of skulls. "In a wide open space before a great black tower whose spire rose above the crags behind it, two long lines of black dancers swayed and writhed... In front of the dancers rose the Tower of Death, gigantically tall, black and horrific. No door or window opened in its face, but high on the wall in a sort of ornamented frame there leered a grim symbol of death and decay. The skull of Nakura!" No subtle understatement from Bob Howard at this point of his career, he really lets you have it full blast. The city of Negari is impressive enough, vast in its scale with huge courtyards adorned with statues of dragons larger than elephants. At one point, Kane comes across an old man at death's door, who is the last survivor of the "brown people" of ancient Atlantis." His race's empire built this immense city ages ago but (over time) the African natives took it over and the Atlanteans dwindled. Carrying on antedeluvian rituals and horrid sacrifices they don't understand any more, the Negari have become a nation of homicidal maniacs aching to build themselves up again and go out to overrun the entire continent. Howard had a little ambivalence about black Africans. On the one hand, he saw them as innately more primitive and violent than white people, but then he LIKED the idea of being primitive and violent, so it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Barbarians and semi-civilized berserkers made up the bulk of his literary creations, after all. Queen Nakari is a bloodthirsty virago who orders her subjects put to death as the whim strikes her, who toys cruelly with her captive English girl, and dreams of sending her army out for slaughter and conquest. At the same time, she's a gorgeous woman (close to naked all the time, which doesn't hurt) with an exotic appeal that tugs at even the stern Kane. (Several of Howard's other heroes feel strong attraction to black women, at the same time remaining conflicted by the taboos of their time. It's an emotional tangle which gives the stories heavy erotic charge.) Despite comments about how splendid-looking and imposing the Negari warriors are, the derogatory remarks get to be a bit much for even a pulp fan to overlook. Okay, we're dealing here with barbarians who are living in a decaying city built by a long-lost sophisticated culture, that's fine. Imagine the Goths striding through the Roman Senate. It's not really necessary to keep harping that these Negari could never have built this place because they're black. ("He knew this was the work of a higher race. No black tribe had ever reached such a stage of culture as evidenced by these carving.") Even though I always want to read stories as close to the author's original intent as possible (and was delighted at these new Robert E. Howard collections from Del Rey*), I can sort of see why some of these references to "black apes" and "ignorant negroes" were edited out for paperback reprints to avoid offending potential buyers. I mean, "The black people who thronged that mighty room seemed grotesquely incongruous. They no more suited their surroundings than a band of monkeys would have seemed at home in the council chambers of the English king." I usually cut pulp writers of the 1930s and 1940s a lot of slack, as attitudes change and we need historical perspective, so on and so forth, but sometimes a phrase just jumps off the page and pokes you in the eye. ________ *The many illustrations by Gary Gianni in this series really deserve some praise... excellent work, very evocative and capturing moments from the stories much better than the way I had been visualizing them.

"The Hills of the Dead" (March 9, 2006) I like the way Robert E Howard presented vampires. As in his story, "The Horror From the Mound", they were NOT sexy, seductive Goth idols that negative-minded teenagers could admire. Howard's vampires were gruesome, silent, single-minded and dangerous; they were walking corpses out to steal the life from the living and this gives them a raw potency that Kate Beckinsale's decadent UNDERWORLD cronies can't match. In "The Hills of the Dead" (from WEIRD TALES, August 1930), it's clear from early on that the sour Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane is going up against an entire colony of the Undead. He's in Africa again, drawn back by a powerful fatalistic lure in the Old Land that he can't explain ("... over leagues of the blue salt sea she has drawn me and with the dawn I go to seek the heart of her."). Kane is cursed with wanderlust and crusading ideals, never to settle down and enjoy a peaceful life. (But considering all the pirates and monsters he destroys, his burden is to our benefit.) We start with Kane meeting his old chum N'Longa. This character is a withered, dried-up ju-ju man, a witch doctor of great age and forbidden knowledge. Although he usually likes to speak to Kane in a pidgin dialect that makes him seem a bit backward, when he switches to his own language, his speech is subtle and impressive. N'Longa can send his "ghost" out of his own body to wander hundreds of miles in a single breath, to speak with Kane in dreams, to possess the body of another (temporarily driving out that person's own spirit). The witch doctor seems sinister (and Kane has grave misgivings about consorting with one of Satan's minions), but he does good work. (Still, a guy that wears a necklace made of human finger bones.. you have to keep a wary eye on the likes of him.) Here is where N'Longa first presents Kane with the ju-ju staff. It's a steel-hard wooden stave, tapering to a point at one end and with a cat's hard carved on the hilt. The staff is one of a kind, ancient and proof against evil magic or creatures. (In "The Footfalls Within", we learn the story behind the staff.) Roaming far and wide, Kane eventually leaves the jungle itself to come upon some rocky hill territory. In his stoic fashion, he rescues a young African woman named Zunna from a charging lion (one musket shot, that's all it takes if your aim is guided by Providence.) He escorts her back to her village but they have to spend the night in a cave, and as he sits by the fire he has built, the Puritan receives two strange visitors. These are tall, lanky natives whose skin has a greyish tone to it, whose eyes seem to have a red glint and who regard him hungrily. Yep, it's the Undead and Kane has a few tense moments wrestling with the monsters until he discovers that the ju-ju staff is the best weapon he could have. ("His face set in grim lines as he raised it; then he drove it through the black breast. And before his eyes, the giant body crumbled, dissolving to dust as he watched horror-struck..." Even Solomon Kane is a bit taken aback at all this, and Zunna doesn't help ease his state of mind. She explains that there are hundreds of these Things swarming in the nearby hills. They don't drink blood but suck up the actual life force itself. These creatures are hundreds of years old, the remnants of a great race which once ruled the area from a great stone city. Now the city is falling into ruin, its silent inhabitants these walking dead who stalk out at night to prey on nearby tribes. Frankly, this seems like a bit much for even Kane to tackle singlehanded. He lies down with the ju-ju staff on his chest and meets N'Longa in the dreamtime. Then the voodoo master has Kane send the girl to bring back her lover, a good-looking man from her village. As Kane looks on aghast, N'Longa takes over the dude's healthy young body and goes with him on the mission to wipe out the city of the vampires. And it won't be easy... Howard puts his usual zest and enthusiasm into this story. It's packed with creative details, vivid images and sudden violence. The uneasy friendship between a God-fearing Puritan and an African witch doctor is intriguing, as Kane comes to trust and like N'Longa despite all his misgivings. As the voodoo man points out, if he were evil, wouldn't he just keep the youth's strapping healthy body instead of voluntarily surrendering it? N'Longa is one of Howard's more ambiguous and subtle creations and teaming him up with the fanatic Kane has all sort of possibilities. Kane has innate conflict between his violent adventures and his stern religious code, and N'Longa seems to be an ominous magician but he turns out to be a force for good. I would have liked to see another story or two featuring these two men working together. There's one new detail Howard adds to vampire lore, and it seems so obvious and right that I wonder why no writers thought of it before. Vultures regard the Undead as prey and go after them as the carrion they are. ("No fool vulture!" explains N'Longa. "He know death when he see it! He pounce on one fellow dead man and tear and eat if he be lying or walking!") I haven't read many vampire stories since Anne Rice glamorized them, but I wonder if other writers have picked up on this idea that vultures are the natural enemies of vampires. Howard developed Solomon Kane in daydreams as a teenager, and he wrote the stories early in his brief career. LIke Francis X. Gordon (El Borak), Kane is more of a traditional adventure figure than Howard's later barbarians would be. This gives the Kane stories a slightly more noble tone; after he shifted to Conan and Turlogh O'Brien and that crew, Howard's stories didn't have heroes and villains so much as they had gangs of cut-throats circling each other, with the reader cheering for the least vicious. This is undoubtedly the sort riff-raff "soldiers of fortune" you would find fighting over treasure and loot in real life, but to be honest, I still like to read about a little nobility and idealism in characters. (So I'm old-fashioned.) _______ *In "Red Shadows", Kane is pursuing a pirate chief in Africa and N'longa introduces himself with an offer to help the white stranger. The fetish man is doing this because Kane can help rid him of a hated rival. In "The Hills of the Dead," N'Longa is shown as much wiser and more altruistic. He freely gives Kane the valuable mystic staff (which once belonged to KIng Solomon himself and is said to date back to the sorceror-kings of Atlantis) so that the Puritan can use it to combat the supernatural creatures he will face. N'Longa also sends his spirit to possess the young African man so he can accompany Kane to wipe out the vampire colony. So Howard shows N'Longa in the wise mentor role. ("To Kane it seemed almost as if he looked into the far-seeing and mystic eyes of a prophet of old.") The broken pidgin makes the African wizard sound simple, but when he drops it and speaks in the river dialect Kane understands, he suddenly is much more solemn. ("My brother, shall I span all these years in a moment and make you understand with a word, what has taken me so long to learn?") I don't want to try to force too much into Howard's African themes; he wrote a lot of material which is bluntly offfensive. But characters like N'Longa and Saul Stark show there is more to him than first meets the eye.

"Wings In the Night" (June 10, 2004) From the July 1932 issue of WEIRD TALES, this is a charming little tale by Robert E. Howard. Set entirely on a bench in Central Park, two old men play chess and, as they reminisce about their lives, we gradually realize that they both fell in love with the same woman but neither wanted to stand in the other's way. No, wait. What the hell? That wasn't the Robert E. Howard story I just read. Okay, start over. "Wings in the Night" was the final Solomon Kane story published during Howard's lifetime, not long before Conan started appearing in WEIRD TALES and hogging all the carnage. I have to say, Kane makes his farewell appearance with style. This story has more slaughter and horror and suspense than usual even for a Robert E. Howard tale. Things get so atrocious that even the grim Solomon Kane (who has seen more bloodshed than a NYC paramedic) is reduced to stark raving madness by what he witnesses. "Kane's last vestige of reason snapped. He gibbered to and fro, screaming chaotic blasphemies...and he lifted his clenched fists above his head, and with glaring eyes raised and writhing lips flecked with froth, he cursed the sky and the earth and the spheres above and below... in one soul shaking burst of blasphemy he cursed the gods and devils who make mankind their sport, and he cursed Man who lives blindly on and blindly offers his back to the iron hoofed feet of his gods." He's pretty upset. What, you might ask, has reduced the dour deadpan Puritan to this state of screaming lunacy? SPOILERS AHEAD.... Kane is trudging through the unmapped jungles of 17th century Africa, not really knowing what keeps drawing him back to this country. As I interpret the stories, he returned to England at least once, where he seemed to have a comfortable life, but Africa kept drawing him back. It's not like he is initiated into a tribe and adopts their ways or even enjoys the sceney. All he ever finds are cannibals, vampires, monsters and lost cities... that sort of thing. Kane's a funny guy. Anyway, our wandering crusader finds a ruined village where all the people have been killed... but their possessions still were there, untouched. So it couldn't have been a raid by another tribe. What is really puzzling Kane is "why the thatched roofs of so many huts were torn and rent, as if by taloned things seeking entrance." As if all this wasn't creepy enough, a minute later the Puritan spies the skeleton of a man impaled on the brach of a baobob tree, sixty feet off the ground. Well, unsettling as this all is, Kane has no time for a forensic examination of the scene. He is being chased by a tribe of cannibals, who file their teeth to points and who are licking their lips at the thought of cooking this Englishman (just WHY did you keep going back to Africa, Sol?). After a long hard chase, as night falls, Kane finds himself grappling desperately with one of the man-eaters and then, completely unexpectedly, the cannibal is literally snatched up and carried off screaming by some winged monster of the night. The next day, after a night filled with terror, Kane meets one of the creatures and kills it with his pistol. The monster is mostly humanoid, gaunt and tall, with talons and fangs It would be a savage, deadly predator just from its powerful build but it also has something extra, "a pair of great wings, shaped much like the wings of a moth but with a bony frame and of leathery substance..." (Similar flying demons turned up ocassionally in Howard's stories, notably ALMURIC, and frankly they were a nice break from all those apes and big snakes.) Even as he is examining the brute, another winged man swoops down and seizes him, and Kane's war with the harpies begins in earnest. As things develop, the Puritan dscovers a settlement whose villagers have been so throughly tyrannized by the harpies that they routinely offer one of their own as a sacrifice, to be tortured and eaten. (These Bogonda are a peaceful bunch of nice folk, but they found themself at the mercy of the batmen and unable to escape because those darn cannibal tribes are surrounding their territory.) Now, because Kane did kill one of the fiends with his pistol, the natives make the mistake of thinking he can protect them; they refuse the scheduled sacrifice, and the winged creatures attack in a hellish orgy of slaughter that has blood and body parts being flung down from the sky. Feeling responsible for the massacre, this is when Kane goes completely berserk with an axe, ranting and raving. Although he kills six of the monsters and survives himself, he cannot save the Bogonda. The next day, coldly sane again, the Puritan plans a terrible trap for the harpies.... "Wings in the Night" is written with a lot of energy and intensity, going way overboard even for Howard. I get the feeling he really got into this story and gave it all he had at that point in his writing development. The grisly action and feeling of menace, not to mention the slightly gruesome way Kane eventually settles his grudge with the harpies, make this more a horror story than an adventure tale, although definitions are hard to set. Howard also gave a lot of attention to descriptive details, from mentioning how hopelessly tattered Kane's clothing has become after his wandering to the long sad story of how the inoffensive Bogonda became trapped for thirty years between a circle of cannibals and vicious flying brutes. Sometimes Howard was just pounding out wordage in hope of a sale (like some of his attempts at detective or Lovecraftian stories) but you can always tell when his heart was in it. This was a yarn he was aching to tell. But the part which stuck most in my mind when reading this as a kid was the origin of the winged monsters (called akaans by the Africans). An elder of the Bogonda tells Kane a myth of his people how the winged monsters had been driven into this country from their homeland ages ago by war chief named N'Yasunna. Kane almost has a stroke when he hears this. "For now he realized the truth of that garbled myth, and the truth of an older, grimmer legend. For what was the great bitter lake but the Mediterranean Ocean and who was the chief N'Yasunna but the hero Jason, who conquered the harpies and drove them not alone into the Strophades Isles but into Africa as well?" Kane has a staggering vision that all the terrors and monsters of classical times really existed as, after all, he has seen the harpies himself. "Africa, the Dark Continent, land of shadows and horror, of bewitchment and sorcery, into which all evil things had been banished before the growing light of the western world!" This is one of the most evocative paragraphs Howard ever wrote, and a lesser writer could have gotten a series of stories from this premise that could have run for years.