A typical summer here at the Platypus of Truth features literary reviews or live blogs of series such as Terry Brooks' Shannara or my projected plan to work through Garth Nix's Abhorsen series. This year, while some books are being read (Moby Dick and The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings) most of my time is being sucked away by a change of apartment complex and a slew of medical tests trouble shooting my perennial stomach problems. In the meantime, pencils and pastels have become a favorite distraction and hence their proliferation on this site. We'll see if enough reading gets done to still post the "Seven Heavens of Summer Reading" awards at the end of August, but that may not happen. In any case, literary criticism will resume as soon as possible and the trip through Nix has not been forgotten. Until then, whatever's going on with me, the Platypus speaks Truth.
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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