Reading “The Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Sword & Sorcery” makes me angry . . .

Smash! Smash! Smash! So I’m reading Robert Weinberg’s Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Sword and Sorcery* (Starmont House, 1976) when I come across a comment about “Rattle of Bones,” one of my five favorite Solomon Kane stories, that burns me up:

“‘Rattle of Bones’ is an entertaining tale but is a weak Kane story. It contains most of the faults of the series and little of its strengths. The basic problem is that Kane is an onlooker. He does nothing other than witness the events, even though he is constantly threatened. The plot is contrived nearly to the point of absurdity. Gaston the Butcher, the mad innkeeper, and the dead sorcerer all squeezed into a short story of only a few pages are too much.”

Obviously, Weinberg is very wrong. I would place “Rattle of Bones” probably #3 or #4 in my list of favorite Kane stories. Does anyone complain about such Hellboy stories as “The Chained Coffin” or “A Christmas Underground” (both found in the excellent The Chained Coffin and Others* collection)? No they don’t, despite the fact that Hellboy has little interaction with the main focus of each story (almost zero in “The Chained Coffin”) because the story is entertaining enough without Hellboy charging in and taking command of the situation (though he does smash some zombies and another monster in “A Christmas Undergound”).

Kane doesn’t have to take a major, active role in order for a story to be entertaining. The dead sorcerer, chained to the floor, in “Rattle of Bones” gets his ultimate revenge without Kane’s assistance.

A hero need not always do more than witness an event.

(See me review of Solomon Kane: Death’s Black Riders for another take on Rattle of Bones.)

Weinberg goes on to prove just how wrong he is when he writes about “The Right Hand of Doom” — the Howard story and not the Hellboy story of the same name — the following nonsense:

“‘The Right Hand of Doom’ was a very minor story. It had little to do with Kane, as the Puritan was no more than a spectator in it. It was standard treatment of an old plot and was either rejected by Weird Tales or never even submitted. It is of note only for the Kane completist.”

I don’t know what to say to that. “The Right Hand of Doom” is, again, one of my five favorite Kane stories.

Related articles

• 31 Days of Horror 2013: Solomon Kane (biffbampop.com)
• The Tortured Soul: Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane (tor.com)