The Joy of Erudition > Recent Status Updates

"Kings of the Night" is the last of the three published Kull stories, and the most boring. It's hardly even a Kull story, since the main characters are Bran mac Morn and Cormac, with Kull showing up via magical time travel to lead the army of Vikings and Picts against the faceless Roman legionnaires in a blandly realistic battle scene. Some of the unpublished stories are much better than this one.

"The King and the Oak" is just a poem about Kull. Nothing of note happens in it.

"Swords of the Purple Kingdom" was Howard's second attempt to feature the character Delcardes. Neither of them were accepted. This is an alternate version of her, meeting Kull for the first time. This time she doesn't have a talking cat, but she still wants to marry someone her father won't allow. In this one, the marriage issue is resolved without anyone getting angry, but there are no monsters or lost races.

"By This Axe I Rule!" is an unpublished Kull story that Howard later rewrote to become "The Phoenix on the Sword", starring Conan. I like it better as a Kull story, because it seemed very much out of character for what Conan would become, and the character relationships are truer here with Kull's cast. However, the Conan version had more interesting fantastical elements added, that are absent here.

The next two stories are unfinished fragments, but at least Kull is actually in them. "The Black City" involves one of Brule's friends disappearing behind a secret door in a palace. This one looks like it needed some editing for consistency of character motivations, moods, and even the facts of events.

The next untitled fragment is just Kull, Brule, and a new character Ronaro playing a board game, then it ends.

"The Curse of the Golden Skull" is the second one in a row where Kull doesn't actually appear in the story! This one is about a dying sorcerer invoking a curse before his death. Kull fatally wounded him before the story began and left him to die alone, which doesn't match his established character (he normally would have made sure he was dead before leaving). And that's the full extent of Kull's involvement.

"The Altar and the Scorpion" was so short, Kull didn't even have the chance to show up! Instead it focused on a young man and his girlfriend pleading for their ancestral god to save them from being sacrificed to a new evil god. The boy mentions that Kull is on his way riding to save them, but when the story ends we just barely hear Kull's horse's hoofbeats arriving.

"The Striking of the Gong" is almost *pure* abstract musings on the nature of reality and the universe, positing not only other planets, but other universes *and* other dimensions. Only at the very end do we get a bit of story anchoring it to the usual world of Kull and his ensemble cast.

"The Screaming Skull of Silence" is another one where Kull decides to poke a hornet's nest with a stick out of curiosity. He hears about an embodiment of silence trapped in an abandoned castle, and decides to unseal the door and take a look inside, despite warnings. It ends abruptly, and seems to flow right into the next story, which has a gong like this one does, making me think it was a direct followup, but no.

"The Cat and the Skull" begins with Kull being taken in by a parlour trick, but it quickly escalates into a journey so fantastical it doesn't seem reasonable to doubt a talking cat. We're also introduced to "Kuthulos".

I liked these characters, and I liked the journey. It's simultaneously more abstract and more action-oriented than most Conan stories.

"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" is another good one. I can see why some readers might already be tired of Kull's obsession with thoughts on the nature of self/identity and reality, especially since some of it was already covered in the first story, but I don't mind.

Strangely, the filmmakers for Conan the Destroyer appear to have taken a location and character from this story, rather than sticking with Conan material.

"The Shadow Kingdom" is a great story with an introspective warrior-king discovering that imposters are all around him, and that they mean to secretly kill him and replace him with one of their own. This story could easily have been the inspiration for They Live.

I like how there's an emphasis on how ancient things are, even in this long-before-Conan era, and mentions harpies, werewolves, etc. as having died out.

I hate so-called "introductions" like this, which specifically state that they're intended for new readers, and yet they include lengthy quotes and summaries of plot points of the stories we haven't bloody read yet.

The first story, "Exile of Atlantis", is really just a fragment of a story, which establishes Kull's past, then gives him one scene in which to demonstrate his character through action, before it ends.

Very good for a 19th century novel.

Pretty episodic.

So far the story has been mostly political, with a clash between a new blasphemous empress and a viceroy loyal to the old priesthood. But there was also some action in the form of sea battles with giant sea serpents, pirates, and giant man-eating birds (rocs, I assume) with a little Atlantean technology on display.

There was also a completely unnecessary prologue of the sort typical to the time.

This is one of those books where everyone talks in long, uninterrupted speeches before yielding the floor and allowing the next person to speak.

So here's the part where the hero decides to sneak away from his men and go on a solo expedition into dangerous territory while they're anchored at an island for rest and provisions.

He let out a breath he hadn't even known he'd been holding and slid his elbows off the lip and felt his feet sink into the rocks, felt one shift and his right ankle bend to the left with it, and he slapped at the cliff face and leaned the weight of his upper body back against it, and the rocks beneath his feet held.