Nothing makes for a morning of enjoyment like finding out that an elderly historian is liquidating part of his library and that you get first pick. The only thing that could make it better is if he wasn't an Americanist... Oh well. I still got to bring home some treasures including: "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," "The Closing of the American Mind," and Winston Churchill's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples." All for free, of course. And just in time too; my summer reading is going faster than I planned.
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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