Sartre said that humanity's problem is that we are not heavy enough for reality. Pain, guilt, persecution, these things break through the illusions of comfort and hope to expose the power of the naked will. But I wonder... What would you give if an angel came down from heaven this morning and told you the secret of life: that we are too heavy for true being; we must grow light again! Joy, Hope, Comfort, Love must break forth in a riotious torrent until we are more good than good and more real than real! We have become so heavy with our pain, our endless see-sawing between self exaltation and self flagelation that we have sunken straight through reality, as surely as Dante's hell stands at the center of the earth while his heavens encompass the cosmos. What if he told you that the ultimate reality was not the stillness of an abandoned cathedral but the laughter after the punchline of a truly good joke shared between old friends long parted? What if he declared with joy and certainty: I have come from being Himself and this is His offer "come and have life, and life over-flowing". Would you not fall down before such a liberator, would you not pay any ammount to hear those words and know them to be true?
I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard. This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane. The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up. I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all. Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser. Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong. I h...
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