Solomon Kane (Time-Lost]

by Robert E. Howard

From the back "...the third and final volume in the series involving Robert E. Howard's first sword and sorcery hero. Here is the first Solomon Kane story to see print, "Red Shadows", a novelette which originally appeared in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales magazine. It is a tale of swordplay and sorcery, of sixteenth century France and of darkest Africa..."The Right Hand of Doom and "Rattle of Bones" are two short stories of stark horror...

Unknown Binding

About the author

Robert Ervin Howard was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror."

He is well known for having created—in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales—the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can only be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

—Wikipedia

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Storm Bookwyrm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps its just the particular stories in this particular book, but of Howard's characters that I know, Solomon Kane is not my favorite. It is interesting and refreshing to have a Howard Character who is a straight-up good guy; Conan of course often did good deeds, but more often simply because the bad guy tended to be in his way, and defense of the innocent was incidental. With Kane however he deliberately sets out to avenge the unfortunate victims of cruelty and injustice, which is nice.

But, with most of these stories, I found Kane to be almost a side-show compared to whatever more interesting thing was going on. In Right Hand of Doom Kane just watches while a wizard's hand strangles a man to death, and does much the same in Rattle of Bones. Red Shadows has a strange detour to see to in the form of an African wizard working his vengeance against his ungrateful boss, after which the story resumes with the grudge-match Kane has with his quarry. Blades of the Brotherhood felt the most like a 'real story', and though I liked it Kane once again was just a side-character, coming in to kill a pirate he hated while the real story happened adjacently.

All in all, I found Solomon Kane to be less engaging of a character than Black Agnes, and his exploits to be less imaginative than the fantastic feats of Conan. Still, determined as I am to one day consume everything Robert Howard has created, I will be having a look at what else 'the puritan' has been up to!