Right Hand of Doom

by R E Howard

The sixteenth-century Puritan Solomon Kane has a thirst for justice which surpasses common reason. Sombre of mood, clad in black and grey, he 'never sought to analyse his motives and he never wavered once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings.

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2014

Reviews

[Daniel Shellenbarger · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is a bit of a misnomer, this edition is actually "The Right Hand of Doom & Other Tales of Solomon Kane" since "The Right Hand of Doom" is but one of the stories within (and not the longest by any means) and this contains the entire collection of Howard's Solomon Kane stories. Coming to this after Conan, there are really very few similarities. For one thing, Solomon rarely ever kills giant snakes (shocking) and he is a singularly humorless fellow, so if you expect the sort of humor you get in the Conan stories, yeah... not so much. Despite the fact he's a 16th century English Puritan, most of the stories are set in Africa, where Solomon has a side-line in wandering the jungle stumbling onto ancient horrors. On the other hand, like Conan, Solomon is an unstoppable force of destruction (and righteous vengeance) and it's a really bad idea to make him angry. Frankly, my biggest disappointment with the stories was how "sensational" the plotlines were, I had hoped for something more in the vein of a sort of gothic monster-hunting detective stalking incessantly across the world to eliminate ancient evils but this is far more sensational swashbuckling adventure than gothic horror. It's certainly interesting and imaginative but compared to Conan I just didn't find it to be that much fun, which is a shame.