Jesse > Recent Status Updates

This book rearranges elements of Macbeth to tell a story about the ubiquity of sexual violence in the time period in which it is set as a parable for our own time. Within 50 pages, we have the general tone: Lady Macbeth is 17 and does not wish (and who can blame her?) to consummate her marriage to her hulking brute of a husband. Also, it’s painfully obvious that she is going to fall for Banquo’s son.

Mersualt is so blasé about everything, except when he’s feeling lusty or severely annoyed. His situation is kind of absurd with the contrivances that led to him murdering in what felt like self-defense, but it’s impossible to empathize with him because he hardly feels for anything. I did laugh when the magistrate jovially sends him away as “Monsieur Antichrist”.

Mersault’s lack of narrated introspection is daunting insofar as I am constantly challenging myself as to whether he is really just composed of surface level thoughts or if he is, like Murakami’s protagonists, talking around landmines, but I believe that he is really just an ordinary guy who doesn’t challenge his status quo much.

“The King and the Oak (Draft)”

This poem draft has a unique opening stanza which instantly makes it more worthwhile an inclusion than either of the previous two drafts. Thanks, Del Ray!

“Delcardes’ Cat”

Blah. Largely identical draft of “The Cat and the Skull”. Something to pad out the page count, I guess. Some of the names were still being changed around, as Howard was want to do.

“The Shadow Kingdom (Draft)”

Some of the drafts that I’ve seen in these collections offered some in-uteri difference that illuminated the creative process as far as the development of some of the ideas. This one, not so much. It’s been polished a bit, I think, but the vast majority of the prose is pretty much the same.

“The “Am-Ra of the Ta-An” Fragments”

These are included to give a better context to the first story of this collection. Kull was a side-character who quickly outclassed the MC of the story, Am-Ra. Am-Ra was originally conceived as something like a cave-man living in the stone ages. There is still an element of the fantastic in the fragment that describes the setting, but no hint of Atlantis or Lemuria.

“Kings of the Night”

Historical fantasy where the peoples of non-Roman England are resisting a Roman incursion. They have a group of Norsemen, too, but their new leader won’t fight without a King who doesn’t belong to the Gaels, the Celts, or the Picts. Well, Wulfhere gets the king that he asked for, with King Kull jumping 100,000 years into the future in order to bail out his best bud’s direct descendant.

“The King and the Oak”

A short poem about Kull having a nightmare that is something along the lines of Ozymandias, except more about how nature (and specifically plant life) will conquer the Earth again. It feels like an epitaph for the Kull character, much as Howard wrote one for Solomon Kane depicting his return to his ancestral home, though there’s one more story left.

“Swords of the Purple Kingdom”

Another political assassination plot. Howard crams together some of his previously unpublished Kull elements together to create an emotional story to pair with Kull’s personal peril. It is absolutely no surprise to anyone who reads this who the traitor is, if only due to the economy of characters. Delcartes gets a chance to shine, here, helping to save Kull.

“By This Axe I Rule!”

Notable as the story that was retooled for the first Conan tale. Kull is tired of bureaucratic red tape of civilization, as these laws—particularly dogmatic marriage laws—continue to dog his rule. Meanwhile, there is a plot to assassinate him, by dissatisfied nobles and one idealistic poet. These two stories actually tie together pretty well for the finish.

“Untitled Fragment”

This almost cold starts out like Kull and Brule are playing Dungeons and Dragons before Brule starts to talk about That One Time I Killed a Wizard, outlining some aspects of Pict life that better define them as somewhat akin to Native Americans. Plus, some insufferable “the aristocracy of the Man” born ruler stuff. There’s no indication of where this was going.

“The Black City (Unfinished Fragment)”

Barely a start. Kull has relocated court to some mountainous pleasure-palace, but there’s something rotten in the land below them. Notable for the insinuation that the dead Pict who kicks this off was gay (“Grogar never looked at any woman—even of his own race”). Then again, it could just be that this era of Howardarians is almost notoriously celibate.

“The Curse of the Golden Skull”

Another sketch where Kull is only named. Some Lemurian necromancer is dying from a sword wound that Kull gave him. He spends like an entire page and a half laying out curses, invoking—among other things—Shuma-Gorath, trying to find some way that he can get vengeance on humanity. Some 40,000 years later, in the modern age, he gets his dying wish.

“The Altar and the Scorpion”

Kull is Sir Not Appearing In This Story. This is a single scene of a young noble couple who are in danger of being sacrificed by a priest who worships a Lovecraftian outer god. The prince attempts to supplicate his familial god, the Great Scorpion, and while it doesn’t seem like it’s going to, the Great Scorpion pulls through.

“The Striking of the Gong”

Another very metaphysical Kull story. For a brief moment in his time, he is divorced from mortal existence, encountering a figure who I can only assume is the Raama of the previous tale. The entity spends its time trying to explain microcosms, macrocosms, and the relativity of existence to Kull, who has pondered all this to the point at times of distraction.

“The Screaming Skull of Silence”

Kull is bullshitting with Kuthalos and his buddies when a legend regarding the embodiment of silence comes up. Kull decides to check it out, because everyone knows the physical location where Silence is imprisoned. And, well, in his haste to show how awesome a warrior he is, he almost dooms humanity to a fate that had been staved off long ago.

“The Cat and the Skull”

Kull is intrigued by a talking cat. Pay no attention to her servant, who never talks and keeps his lower face covered. This actually starts out as an innocent enough swindle before Kull is lured to the Forbidden Lake to rescue his Enkidu, Brule, and has a crazy underwater adventure before finding out that this lethal turn of events was brought to you by SKELETOR—I mean, THULSA DOOM!!!

“Untitled Draft”

The horrible thing about reading Howard drafts is that they tend to end just when stuff starts getting awesome. This is starts out as a petty story where some foreign nobleman elopes with a local lady, which would be no big deal for Kull but for the fact that the upstart has sent a “neener neener” message to Kull and the barbarian king just can’t countenance that.

“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”

Somewhere between a fable and a “prose poem”, this story has Kull contemplating the nature of reality. The wizard’s philosophical musings are part of a plot, as Howard lets us know very early on, but they still leave a heavy mark on Kull’s psyche, even as he is saved from a bizarre, otherworldly fate by his trusty friend, Brule.

“The Shadow Kingdom”

Kull’s rule as king is contested by a secret ruling class of serpent-priests who, of course, want to replace him. Kings getting replaced by snake-men is kind of an epidemic in Valusia. There’s a lot of subtext, here, as Kull thinks on the metaphorical as well as literal masks being used in court. And then the barbarians SMASH subtext!!!!

“Untitled Story (previously published as “Exile of Atlantis”)”

A short tale that introduces Kull, an adoptee of the barbarians who raise them, but who hasn’t entirely adopted their credos, and wants to see the Big City. It feels more like a scene-setting fragment. When his group arrives back at home, the village is about to burn a woman at the stake for marrying outside of her people.

It’s a pretty tense thriller as we go through the remaining film shots and the phenomenon has the capacity to control the camera’s holder to do what it needs him or her to do. I said that this was sort of Twilight Zone or 50s weird fiction-ish, but the camera feels a lot like a novel based around an SCP entry, minus the dark humor or bureaucratic satire.

Where King excels in these stories is taking a short story concept and then steeping it in characters and a setting and letting it really breathe. Much of the first half of this book is “Pop” conning the Delavans. I feel that the big twist is going to be that, once he has the camera, he is going to become desperate to somehow get it back to Kevin. I don’t care if we never hear the HOW or WHY of the camera.

Beginning “The Sun Dog”. This one is more firmly planted in the sort of Twilight Zone on steroids that the other stories had, or at least where “The Library” started out before it went into a low-powered It with a VERY dark past for the MC. There’s some amusing stuff where Kevin’s 11 year old sister is just devouring horror movies from the 80s, specifically name-dropping Child’s Play.

“The Library Policeman”

This story has a brutal final 20% AS WELL AS a false finish. Sam’s recollection of his own Library Policeman is graphically brutal, but it makes for a satisfying catharsis once he confronts Ardelia with no fear, reminding me of Something Wicked This Way Comes. In some ways this treads a bit too close to the plot of It, but it isn’t terrible to read a different, focused take on It.

The Dave story is a huge historic aside that is its own, though entirely related, story. It doesn’t exactly grind the story to a halt but the more we hear about Ardelia the less mystery we get. The one real mystery left—and it’s about to be resolved—is what Sam’s trauma is. I thought one thing, at first, but it’s pretty clear at this point that he was a victim of SA.

At this point we have moved beyond a shadowy secret Library Police to some sort of offshoot of It that has nested in the Proverbia library. She’s a bit more “concrete” than It because Ardelia was apparently having a LOT of sex with poor ol’ Dave and wasn’t just purely hiding on the edge of society. Maybe, like, one of It’s progeny? It’s made clear that Ardelia feeds on (prefers?) the fear of children.