Chadzilla ROARS!!! (The Official Blog of Chadwick H. Saxelid, Writer)

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane - by Robert E. Howard

Although all of the stories, poems, and fragments that are collected in The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane involve the same character, the stories themselves are a wide ranging lot.  There are straight forward adventure yarns, lost world fantasy stories, and supernatural horror tales.  Two of the horror tales, Rattle of Bones and The Hills of the Dead, were included in the anthology The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, which I read earlier this year. 

Of the two above mentioned stories I thought, at the time, that Rattle of Bones was the better tale.  I still do, but reading this anthology gave me a greater appreciation of The Hills of the Dead, since I was able to read the short novel Red Shadows (original title: Solomon Kane) that first introduced the African setting and shaman character N'Longa, Kane's Blood Brother.  While I might have a greater appreciation of Hills, I thought that the completed stories that followed it in narrative continuity, Wings in the Night and The Footfalls Within, were both superior.  Wings is a superb and vicious, very vicious, monster yarn, while Footfalls features something that could best be described as Ambrose Bierce's "Damned Thing" viewed through a Lovecraftian prism.  I consider both to be superlative examples of Howard's boundless imagination and energetic storytelling style.

The first two stories in the collection, Skulls in the Stars and The Right Hand of Doom, are closer in tone and style to Rattle of Bones.  Both are stand alone mysteries with a chilling supernatural element.  The Blue Flame of Vengeance, also known as Blades of the Brotherhood, is a straight forward adventure story involving a love triangle and bloodthirsty pirates.  It's fun, but it suffers in comparison to the previously mentioned tales.  

Suffering even more is the tale of Solomon Kane's second adventure on the dark continent of Africa, The Moon of Skulls.  While this lengthy serial (it qualifies as a short novel) has moments of pulse pounding action, it also suffers horribly from being dragged out as a serial.  It just seems to take forever to get to its rousing payoff.

Those are the completed stories.  The collection also features several fragments of uncompleted Solomon Kane tales:  The Castle of the Devil, Death's Black Riders, Hawk of Basti, and The Children of Asshur.  Castle and Riders both offer intriguing set-ups for stories, while Hawk and Asshur both suffer from the bloat that made The Moon of Skulls insufferable for me.  These fragments should be interesting to Howard completests, but I doubt that I will be returning to them.

That leaves the trio of Solomon Kane poems.  The One Black Stain, The Return of Sir Richard Grenville, and Solomon Kane's Homecoming (with variant).  While Howard's ability as a poet is clearly visible, I will be the first to admit that I am not all that fond of reading poetry.  Despite poetry "not being my thing" I do have to say that the heartache inducing Homecoming is the perfect note on which to end the collection.  Kane a hopeless prisoner to his unquenchable wanderlust and no man knowing his road.

I like to think that he is still out there, somewhere, vanquishing evil and engaging in pulse pounding adventure.  After reading the stories, fragments, and poems in this collection, I think you will feel the same.

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Born on a battlefield and orphaned by a ruthless warlord (Stephen Lang) seeking to resurrect his dead sorceress wife, Conan (Jason Momoa) grows up to live the simple life of a barbarian.  He lives, he loves, and he slays, and he claims to need nothing else to make him happy.

But that is not true.  Conan also hungers to avenge the murder of his father and the slaughter of his village.  When he sees one of the men responsible, Conan begins an epic journey toward his final revenge.

I did not walk into Conan the Barbarian expecting much.  Director Marcus Nispel (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th) does not have all that stellar of a movie making record.  His two biggest hits are simplistic remakes of already commercially established franchises.  Everything else he has done, including Conan the Barbarian, has been a critical and commercial flop.

Well, truth be told, his take on Conan is more than a mere flop.  It is a complete and utter disaster.

Granted I do not know all that much about Conan, so far I have only read Robert E. Howard's horror stories, but what little I do know about the character tells me that this movie does not do him justice.  Jason Momoa seems game (and more than able) to play a ruthless rake that lives for battlefields and booty calls.  It just that the script by Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood gives Momoa nothing whatsoever to work with.  Whenever Momoa is not swinging a sword and slaying an endless number of antagonists in the film's seemingly endless number of battle scenes (all of which look like they were cut from any number of the countless shot-with-a-shaking-camera in a mud pit or sand trap action movie from the last ten or so years) he looks lost and confused as to how to act.

The reason for this, despite the movie being the second take on Conan's origin story, is that the narrative focus is less on Conan and more on the evil Khalar Zym (Lang) and his incestuously suggestive sorceress daughter, Marique (Rose McGowan, who goes to great lengths to leave her teeth marks on each and every chunk of scenery she shares any screen time with).  Lang and McGowan's performances are just the right kind of over-the-top silliness one would expect in a cinematic adaptation of a pulp sword and sorcery series.  If Conan had been allowed to cut loose with the same amount of gusto to be the ruthless badass so beautifully described by Vincent D'Onofrio in The Whole Wide World, then I would have left the theater a whole lot happier.  Maybe even satisfied.  But that was not the Conan I saw, and I left the theater unhappy and disappointed.

One and a half star out of four.

Classic Moment of Cinema: The Whole Wide World (1996)

Now THAT is a kiss!

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

When I was younger I thought that the critics and artists that would complain (almost incessantly, it seemed at the time) about how the growing level of graphic violence in horror films and literature (and yes, I do mean literature) was both cheapening and ruining the genre had no idea what they were talking about.  Horror was (and should always be) about the visceral, the shocking, the stomach churning.  

I am older now (much older) and far more knowledgeable about the genre than I was back in my youth.  (Although I am nowhere near as knowledgeable as my good friend Shane "Remo D." Dallmann, who could qualify for a doctorate degree in film genre studies if he chose to.)  Now I find myself not only understanding what all those whining critics and artists were complaining about, but also agreeing with them.  Although many of my own writing qualifies as horror, I find myself more comfortable using the descriptive "dark fantasy" in "polite" company and, far more often than not, I want less sex and violence and more Charles L. Grant styled "quiet horror" when I crack open a new book.

Which brings me to The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, a collection of dark fantasy stories from the creator of Conan.  While many of the stories in this collection do qualify as what is today considered horror, a great many of them are simple adventure fantasies with some dark strokes coloring their narratives.

For those seeking the more (if not the most) traditional horror stories, I heartily recommend reading In the Forest of Villefere, The Dream Snake, Sea Curse, Rattle of Bones (which features Solomon Kane), The Shadow of the Beast, Dig Me No Grave, The Horror from the Mound, the shockingly racist Black Canaan and Pigeons from Hell, which has a very much deserved reputation as being one of the finest horror stories ever written.  There are many other fine stories in the book, but I think that those are the best tales in the traditional horror mode.

But there are also quite a few (far too many, in fact) sword and sorcery fantasy yarns that feature a hero being transported back into a past life.  They are all pretty much interchangeable and the novelty had already been wrung out of the concept by Edgar Rice Burroughs (I am going to hazard a guess that Howard was a fan) in his John Carter of  Mars adventures.  If I had to recommend one of these far too repetitive tales, then it would have to be People of the Dark.  It features Conan and offers a satisfying (if by now cliched) "romantic" ending.

Then there are the default stories, which get tossed into the book only because they feature what are commonly thought of as horror elements.  That is the only reason I can think of as to why the gentle and most decidedly un-horrific ghost story The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux would be included in this anthology.  Why Spirt was never adapted for The Twilight Zone is a mystery to me, it is perfect for it.

With contents that are as all over the creative map as the ones listed above are, I think that it is easy to figure out that, no matter what kind of horror/dark fantasy story you might be in the mood to read, The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard has one well worth reading.

Pigeons from Hell #1 - 4 (of 4)

I am more aware of the works of Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, Red Sonja, and others) than I am read in them. The only Howard stories that I can recall reading were in a collection of his horror stories, titled Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors and published by Baen books, some time in the mid to late 1980s or early to mid 1990s. Other than that, my only exposure to Howard and his work has been the touching love story The Whole Wide World and the various cinematic adaptations (some praise worthy and others completely contemptible) of his above mentioned characters.

One legendary adaptation of a Howard story was for the anthology series Thriller that resulted in what many consider to be one of the most terrifying hours of genre television from the 1960s. The story in question had the rather silly title of Pigeons from Hell. The title is the only silly thing about the story, of that I can assure you.

A group of friends visit a decaying mansion in the Louisiana swamps that has been inherited by the twin sisters that form the center of the group. While investigating the mansion, which is considerably colder on the inside than the weather is on the outside, the group comes under attack from the murderous and inhuman something that lives inside the decayed ruins.

I have no memory of having read Howard’s source story, nor have I seen the acclaimed television adaptation of it, but Joe R. Lansdale’s comic book version of it certainly has its moments of frightening intensity. The first two issues, which I consider to be the best, are packed with enough gothic horror imagery and gruesome bloodletting to fill an entire feature length horror film. What the four issues are not filled with are particularly strong characters and the concluding chapter offers a somewhat weak finish. But Robert E. Howard his own self (in a reprinted letter to H.P. Lovecraft from September 1930) laments how all the good parts of a horror tale are always in the early portions, before anything is revealed and every strange sound or menacing shadow is draped by a malevolent mystery, before the "big reveal" allows the mind to "get around" the terror of the unknown and to tame it. Or words to that effect.

Also working against the book is a sometimes garish use of colors that I found distracting and almost headache inducing. Although there were a few panels where the colors were put to very good use, there were far more times when I found myself wondering if the comic would have been better if it had been in black and white. As it is now, it is a solid enough effort from a talented team that has done stronger work elsewhere.