2018 was a pretty difficult year. Then again, 2017, 2016, and 2015 weren't peaches either. As Counting Crows tells us long December, but there's reason to believe maybe next year will be better than the last. Looking at my Spotify-generated 2018 playlist, there was a lot of Counting Crows, Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell, Boston, Kamelot, and Red Hot Chili Peppers -make of that what you will. My definitive reading experience was probably a re-engagement after 12 years with Neil Gaiman's Sandman and teaching Collins' The Hunger Games to 7-9th graders. Oh, I guess there was a trip through Virgil that helped me appreciate the Man From Mantua a bit more. My definitive film experiences were Black Panther and NetFlix's The Haunting of Hill House. I guess both are par for the course though none of my friends have seen Hill House yet. So, a long December it's been here at Platypus of Truth, but there is reason to believe that this year may be better than the last or as Samwise's Gaffer puts it: "where there's life, there's hope and need of vittles."
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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