Review of The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

The Book Itself

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane collects together all of the stories, poems, and fragments that Howard wrote about the Puritan adventurer. This is a book that has been sorely needed and I have been looking forward to this for a very long time. The last paperback edition of Kane materials has been out of print for some while and was a typical, mass-market fantasy offering (i.e. cheap). The previous edition was prettier, but heavily edited and bowdlerized. This new edition is complete and scholarly (though not so much as the previous release, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian), but much more importantly: full of weird, pulpy goodness.

Add one other thing: Gary Gianni’s illustrations. One of the few disappointments that I had with the earlier, Conan volume, were the illustrations. I have never cared for Mark Schultz’s work and found the illustrations in the Conan book to be uninspired. Not terrible, just uninspired. Or, perhaps, uninspiring. And also perversely obstinate in that when the women are described in the text as being unclothed, Schultz draws them with clothes, but when they are described as being even-somewhat dressed, he renders them as naked. I found that particular minutia to be endlessly befuddling, though others may not.

Gianni’s work in this book, however, is perfect. I don’t believe in perfection and I will still call it perfect. The line drawings permeate the text and I use that term advisedly: they seem to be a part of the stories that have always been there. There are organic to the text. They remind me strongly of Sydney Paget’s work in the original publications of the Sherlock Holmes stories. They seem to come from Howard’s era without being obviously retro. And the full plates make the whole volume seem a lost edition of the Classics Illustrated series of bygone days. The Solomon Kane stories are solid, pulp adventure work that can stand without illustration; however, these illustrations add so much to the stories, that I can’t imagine them without them anymore.

My one complaint about the physical object is the laminate binding. It looks keen and glossy, but it bends out of shape quite easily and curls up at the edges. My copy of the earlier, Conan book (with the same binding) is so curled as to resemble some weird, elder, butterfly-demon. Many may not care about this.

Who Is Solomon Kane?

To summarize the character: Solomon Kane is a late 16th century wanderer from the English West Country. He dresses as a Puritan and evinces some Puritan traits: he doesn’t seem to drink or dance or play cards; he certainly doesn’t fool around with women; and he sometimes speaks in KJV Bible-style. We learn fragments of his background, usually in the poems: as a younger man he sailed with Francis Drake on his circumnavigation and was apparently one of the infamous “Sea Dogs” which harried the Spanish. He was eventually captured and tortured by the Spanish in a near-apocalyptic battle in which his mentor died. Possibly as result, he spent some time as a Turkish galley slave. He was once connected to the community of his native Devonshire and was friendly with several important families. He loves England and Englishmen, but never stays there for very long.

Kane travels the world; usually with no fixed purpose, unless he has fastened upon some mission and then he travels the world with single-minded purpose. He is enraged by oppression, cruelty, and violence against the weak; such acts fill him with a blindly need for retribution. In these moments, I was struck by how he functions as an Elizabethan-version of The Shadow: he stalks his prey in Red Shadows (the first story to be published) with a cold, implacable fury; he appears out of the shadows and destroys the weed of evil with his two smoking pistols and his deadly rapier. Gianni’s illustrations caught this mood and may have helped me to see this aspect of the character (Gianni has previously worked on the Shadow).

Kane’s Savage Tales and Historic Savagery

The Solomon Kane stories can be unequally divided into the European stories (only a few) and the African stories (the bulk of the page count), with the afore-mentioned Red Shadows as the bridge. In the European stories, Kane wanders aimlessly, waiting for God to point him to some direction. He typically wanders into some troubled situation and sorts things out with a few well-placed rapier thrusts. The European stories are generally the earlier ones and the least interesting. The Right Hand of Doom and A Rattle of Bones are not-particularly-engrossing mysteries with non-very-shocking resolutions. They are not bad stories, but are unexceptional. They do become more interesting upon reflection after having read the African stories, as they provide some sense of what Kane was before he went to Africa. He’s entirely more confident and self-assured in Europe. He’s The Shadow.

But the African stories are where Kane shines. Even though they are later than the European stories, Howard must have had them in mind all along as Red Shadows sets up the African wanderings. I won’t reveal any specifics, but it is fairly clear at the end of the story. In Africa, Kane begins to discover himself. Or maybe it would be more precise to say that he begins to discover how little he knows himself. He is drawn to Africa and wanders it, but not as the self-possessed superhero of the European stories. He is, instead, treading into the Lovecraftian territory of the mind. Everything is weirder in Africa (to use the adjective favoured by both authors). Scarier. Older. No wait: more ancient. More vital. More primal.

Africa is also Lost World Country and Kane has Tarzan’s tendency to discover lost cities in the jungle. Tarzan is a figure that I found cropping up again and again in my mind and not just because of the scenery. Like the best Tarzan stories, the best Kane stories can be read as a kind of meditation on the nature of identity and alienation (see Beneath The Surface below).

This brings me to one of the stumbling blocks for modern readers: racism. The Africa stories are dripping with unpleasant racial qualities—the African are described with stereotypical (not to mention not factual) details emphasizing their likeness to apes (after all, what the heck did Bob Howard of Cross Plains Texas know about Africa? I’m reminded here of Edgar Rice Burroughs very famous gaffe of putting tigers into deepest Africa. Except that tigers probably weren’t offended by that). When Kane encounters lost cities, the masters of the cities are always emphatically not black Africans and Kane always notes that the surprising degree of sophistication in the architecture couldn’t possibly be the work of the natives. There is a bitter rant about miscegenation in The Moon of Skulls (although it is spoken by a fairly unsympathetic character).

So there it is. What do you do about it? Well, let me suggest a course: nothing. Howard was a product of his time and place. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, a small-town hick in the middle of nowhere in a time when Eugenics was a respectable science and everybody knew the races were different and arranged in an ascending order with whitey at the top. I realize that this is a delicate issue, but when one is confronted by an historical work that one finds to have unpleasantly immodern values, the only real choices are either to accept that this was the history or to try and shout the thing down. I fall on the first side of the debate. I also believe that there’s nothing wrong with Huckleberry Finn, either, so you might have to consider that.

In addition, I’d like to suggest that Howard was not as sure of himself on this issue as he thinks he is. Here again, I am reminded of Burroughs. Both were confronted with contradictory value system: they prized vital, primitive, warrior manliness over sissified, civilized folk, but they also inherited their cultures racial attitudes. This was a problem for them both since the Africans whom they were supposed to despise, seem to exemplify what they value (this is their representation of Africans, of course, not real-world Africans).

Burroughs somewhat got out of it by creating the Waziris, Tarzan’s bad-ass followers, who were cool and not-at-all debased (not as cool as Tarzan, but who is?). Howard could skirt it in Conan, because the people there didn’t quite belong to any real-world ethnicities, although the analog’s are pretty apparent. In the Kane stories, he doesn’t get any “out”. But you know that he’s wrestling with it. Kane can’t shake Africa out of his system anymore than Howard can. They (Kane and Howard) know that they ought to reject it and stand above it by the standards of his time, but they can’t. In this regard, it is revealing that the only single time Kane ever notices a woman sexually, she is a black African.

Beneath the Surface

Conan is the iconic Howard creation and is sometimes thought of as the first pulp fantasy character, but Solomon Kane predates Conan by some years (as do several other characters for that matter). And although the Kane corpus is considerably smaller the Conan’s, it is the more interesting in my opinion. While Conan’s world is a sort of reverse-alternate history (supposedly the “real” history of the world and one half-remembered and distorted in our myths and legends), Kane’s world is our 16th century, albeit one in which horrors stalk out-of-the-way places and in which a suspiciously large number of ancient cities in the jungles. My point is that Conan’s Hyborian world is a fantasy world with some real-world elements, while Kane’s is the real world, with some fantasy elements.

And the effect is subtly different. As a reader, I experience no surprise when Conan encounters demons, sorcerers, or horrors from the Outer Darkness. And can never quite figure out why he does seem surprised. When Elizabethan-era Kane hops a ship from Portsmith, talks about his days with Francis Drake, and then wanders into the African jungle to encounters demons, sorcerers, and horrors from the Outer Darkness, I experience surprise. Even the third or fourth time this happens, it just feels different.

Kane is also the more involving character, which is not to say more complex, but rather more complicated. Conan is complex in that we see him mature from a self-involved young thug into a concerned and relatively human ruler of the world’s greatest nation. Yet he is not complicated: his motives are generally obvious, or at least, accessible, to himself and to the reader. Kane undergoes little in the way of development and we never really know how he became who he is (there’s a little history in the some of the poems, including a teasing reference in Solomon Kane’s Homecoming to a girl he left behind, which is the only suggestion that Kane might have any romantic impulses whatsoever).

But Kane is complicated in that he is alienated from his own motivations. Several times, Howard tells us that Kane is a “fanatic”, but never what he is fanatical about. He also tells us that Kane frequently determines his motivations retroactively. That is, that he acts on a mysterious impulse, which he then decides must be devotion to God or God’s promptings. But that strategy fails him in Africa and he can’t quite seem to work out a satisfactory explanation of why he is there.

Kane’s alienation from himself and self-perception are frequently expressed through his belongings. In one story, it is noted that he wears a dashing, green sash around his otherwise Puritan-drab waist. The most interesting example of this device, however, is his ju-ju stick. Kane is initiated into his African sojourn by the gift of this weird (there it is again), arcane item. What this thing really is remains a mystery (although one story purports to explain it). He never knows what is does or why. More importantly, he really doesn’t know why he carries it. Kane realizes that as a good Puritan, he ought to ditch the witchcraft-spawned, magic device, but he doesn’t.

And that’s Solomon Kane. A mystery. An powerful artifact with an imagined origin. Almost a void who tries to fill himself with zealotry and violence and never succeeds.

Ultimately, I think that Kane is a man at war with the emptiness of the cosmos. He repeatedly stares into the Outer Darkness to discover cold, empty stretches of Time and Space. Mankind’s journey is a cosmic accident; morality a sham; religion a play. What makes Kane intriguing is that he fights against this knowledge. He is a Gnostic who rejects the gnosis. He wears his black, Puritan garb against the emptiness of the universe. He risks his life to defend the innocent as a challenge to God and his absence, and then he interprets his own actions as proof of God’s existence. His fury and self-righteousness in the face of oppression stem not from God’s vessel (as his says repeatedly), but because God allows these things to happen by his absence.

When viewed with the knowledge of Howard’s own end, it is hard not to see Solomon Kane as the author trying desperately to face up to his owns fears and devise a strategy for dealing with them. Kane violence can’t cure his existential horror and, sadly, neither could Howard through his work.

Gaming Kane

What does this book bring to the gamer? At the surface level, there’s lot of good bits to steal. I mean, to be inspired by. Wings in the Night is a great scenario that could be dropped into lots of different kinds of games and the akaana would be fantastic opponents. If your tastes run to Lost Cities, there are some keen ones to use.

On a stylistic level, reading Howard reminds one of how action should be portrayed, whether in books or games. Things happen. Fast. Furious. Bloody. Kane never visits an equipment shop nor does he weight the merits of this gun’s range versus another one’s speed. He picks up a gun and starts shooting people. If, as a GM, you are strapped for colorful exposition during combat scenes, you could just lift a few lines from one of these stories and your player’s will feel very violent and very cool.

Notice also Howard’s framing of scenes. When things might bog down, something happens. A dead guy lurches to life and strangles someone. A man-bat swoops down and eats someone. A millennium-old fortress crumbles. That doesn’t mean that everything is action. Howard can work the mood too: the evocative character of wandering the African Hinterland or an ancient city built by a lost race. But unlike, say, Clark Ashton Smith, who sometimes confused mood with story, something will eventually happen. And it will be messy.

The unfinished pieces show us that when Howard’s attention was waning, he gave up on the story. These fragments aren’t bad stories; they could have been developed into great stories. But the narrative force is lacking. The posthumously titled Children of Asshur is abit too much like a low-end Tarzan story and you can feel Bob getting bored. he throws in a fight scene, but it is extraneous and he gives up on the thing. It reminds me of many gaming scenarios with good ideas and settings that nevertheless don’t take off.

Player’s of historical games, particularly historical fantasy, can pick up some notes on using fantastic elements in a historical setting. The hints about the “Sea Dogs” (Elizabethan privateers looting the Spanish treasure ships), got me thinking about some game ideas. As did Drake’s circumnavigation.

Finally, for those who like a dose of meaning, Solomon Kane shows how you can combine real thinking about the nature of the universe and the Self with all-out action. Philosophy and Fisticuffs. Meditation and Maiming. Gnosticism and Eroticism. Now that’s what I call a good bunch of stories.