Solomon is 90 Years Old This Month
By Gary;
It is Solomon Kane's 90th birthday and only a small number of hardcore fans care. Such is life.
When it comes to so-called "great" literature the snob Elites rave about the crap like the Grapes of Wrath or the Old Man and the Sea.
I say, fuck that old man and his fucking fish. I don't give a shit. The same goes for poor farm workers. Boo-hoo. Jimmy crack corn and I don't care.
Great literature to me is pulp fiction, adventure, mystery, science fiction and fantasy. The literature of the average man. . . . not the literature of the Elites.
The greatest of all pulp writers is the very, very late but still very, very great Robert E. Howard.
Conan the Barbarian was not Howard's first great creation. That was the Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane who was first published in August, 1928.
The original 1982 Conan movie was over the top quality and pure 100% Robert E. Howard. All other Howard productions since then have been average at best.
The exception is the 2011 film of Solomon Kane. At last there was a movie that lived up to Howard's vision.
If you are tired of the same old, same old then dive into Robert E. Howard.
Happy birthday Solomon.
Enter SOLOMON KANE - Razör vs. Comics
Robert E. Howard's Puritan Hero in one of his best poems.
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| Wings in the Night Perhaps Howard's Greatest Story Published July, 1932 .
And then Kane caught a glimpse among the trees that made his heart leap with a sudden, nameless horror, and a few moments later he stood before Horror itself, stark and grisly. In a wide clearing, on a rather bold incline stood a grim stake, and to this stake was bound a thing that had once been a man. Kane had rowed, chained to the bench of a Turkish galley, and he had toiled in Barbary vineyards; he had battled red Indians in the New Lands and had languished in the dungeons of Spain's Inquisition. He knew much of the fiendishness of man's inhumanity, but now he shuddered and grew sick. Yet it was not so much the ghastliness of the mutilations, horrible as they were, that shook Kane's soul, but the knowledge that the wretch still lived.
For as he drew near, the gory head that lolled on the butchered breast lifted and tossed from side to side, spattering blood from the stumps of ears, while a bestial, rattling whimper drooled from the shredded lips.
Kane spoke to the ghastly thing and it screamed unbearably, writhing in incredible contortions, while its head jerked up and down with the jerking of mangled nerves, and the empty, gaping eye-sockets seemed striving to see from their emptiness. And moaning low and brain-shatteringly it huddled its outraged self against the stake where it was bound and lifted its head in a grisly attitude of listening, as if it expected something out of the skies.
"Listen," said Kane, in the dialect of the river tribes. "Do not fear me—I will not harm you and nothing else shall harm you any more. I am going to loose you."
Even as he spoke Kane was bitterly aware of the emptiness of his words. But his voice had filtered dimly into the crumbling, agony-shot brain of the man before him. From between splintered teeth fell words, faltering and uncertain, mixed and mingled with the slavering droolings of imbecility. He spoke a language akin to the dialects Kane had learned from friendly river folk on his wanderings, and Kane gathered that he had been bound to the stake for a long time—many moons, he whimpered in the delirium of approaching death; and all this time, inhuman, evil things had worked their monstrous will upon him. These things he mentioned by name, but Kane could make nothing of it for he used an unfamiliar term that sounded like Akaana. But these things had not bound him to the stake, for the torn wretch slavered the name of Goru, who was a priest and who had drawn a cord too tight about his legs—and Kane wondered that the memory of this small pain should linger through the red mazes of agony that the dying man should whimper over it.
And to Kane's horror, the man spoke of his brother who had aided in the binding of him, and he wept with infantile sobs. Moisture formed in the empty sockets and made tears of blood. And he muttered of a spear broken long ago in some dim hunt, and while he muttered in his delirium, Kane gently cut his bonds and eased his broken body to the grass. But even at the Englishman's careful touch, the poor wretch writhed and howled like a dying dog, while blood started anew from a score of ghastly gashes, which, Kane noted, were more like the wounds made by fang and talon than by knife or spear. But at last it was done and the bloody, torn thing lay on the soft grass with Kane's, old slouch hat beneath its death's-head, breathing in great, rattling gasps.
Kane poured water from his canteen between the mangled lips, and bending close, said: "Tell me more of these devils, for by the God of my people, this deed shall not go unavenged, though Satan himself bar my way."
It is doubtful if the dying man heard. But he heard something else. The macaw, with the curiosity of its breed, swept from a near-by grove and passed so close its great wings fanned Kane's hair. And at the sound of those wings, the butchered man heaved upright and screamed in a voice that haunted Kane's dreams to the day of his death: "The wings! the wings! They come again! Ahhh, mercy, the wings!"
And the blood burst in a torrent from his lips and so he died.
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