Heroic Legends Series: Solomon Kane/Bêlit/Bran Mak Morn

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The Heroic Legends Series (Titan Books, 2023-24, ca 50 pages)

After Titan Books got the licence of Conan Properties International, what is now also called Robert E. Howard Properties LLC, it is publishing new fiction of Robert E. Howard's characters.

The Heroic Legend Series started last year. A Ebook only series of short stories. The first two were Conan, then they commissioned material of the other heroes. Up to date there are 7 stories, 4 Conan stories and one Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and Bêlit.

The concept has some merit. A lot of the Conan novels published by Tor Books in the 80s and 90s proved Sword & Sorcery in general and Howard in particular is not always well suited by the length of a novel. It tends to drag, and a lot of the characters can't sustain a more fleshed out approach needed for filling 300+ pages. A short story (or novella) is a different kind of beast. Insofar this is a good idea, as it tries something different.

A creative problem is that after so many new Conan stories (if you count the Marvel Comics and Dark Horse incarnations even hundreds), it is not easy to do something new and even remotely interesting with the concept. So I was more interested in the non-Conan works.

Jonathan Maberry – Solomon Kane: The Hound of God

Maberry is an old pro, he wrote a lot of horror, action-horror and fantasy. The story is simple. Set in Livonia in 1598, Kane the wanderer comes about a massacre done by brigands and some werewolf. He vows to avenge the victims. Which he does. End of story. The twist is that one of the werewolves is a kind of kindred soul.

It is a decent story, and you can't say much about without a spoiler. Kane is a difficult character to do, and Marberry does a lot of things right and some questionable. (Did he imitate Howard's use of a ton of exposition in some monologue in the middle of the story which kills a lot of momentum consciously  or not?) Still it can't shake the feeling that it not the most original of contributions.

TBC

[andydecker]

V. Castro - Bêlit: Shipwrecked (Titan Books, 2023 - 2024, ca. 50 pages or less)

V. Castro published some horror novels like The Queen of the Cicadas which got nominated for the Stoker Award, in recent times she did a few novelizations for the Aliens franchise and Rebel Moon.

Now Bêlit is one of those characters which didn't get that much attention over the decades. Introduced and killed off in Queen of the Black Coast, one of Howard's best stories, the female pirate wasn't used that much as a character in later decades. There is the Poul Anderson novel Conan the Rebel from 1980, which mainly puts her in the background, also some earlier comic book versions of course. I quite liked Roy Thomas' version for his Conan the Barbarian, even if it was a PG-13 Bêlit. Of course she is a perfect character for contemporary times.

V. Castro travels often sailed waters for her plot. Bêlit and her crew of cutthroats shipwreck on a mysterious island with a tribe of cannibalistic lizard-people ruled by a lizard king with a magical amulett. Who wants the pirate queen as a consort. And Bêlit agrees to his wishes, just to get her hands on his treasure.

Not the most original story in the Howardverse, but it is a pirate tale which naturally has narrow tropes, and Howard himself did it quite a few times. I was really curious how Castro handled the subject matter. Not surprisingly she ditches the white goddess with a black tribe stuff of the original and gives Bêlit a crew of … well, nondescript men and women, which is handled in a very perfunctory, even disinterested way. Not that it matters for the plot anyway.

At least the second part of the tale is fun. Castro makes our anti-heroine an unrelenting sociopath with loads of sex, blood and violence and follows Howard's characterisation of the pirate queen.

But this aside it is all a bit by the numbers. I don't know if the story deserves more than a okay. It is professionally written, it does what is expected, some parts work, some not, but it is nothing extraordinary. In this it is very much like Maberry's Kane.

Inexplicably Titan Books doesn't credit the cover art – or my Kindle doesn't show it, always a possibility -, but this could be from Becky Cloonan's work for the later Dark Horse Conan.

TBC.

[andydecker]

Steven L. Shrewsbury – Bran Mak Morn: Red Waves of Slaughter

(Titan Books, 2023-24, ca 50 pages)

Shrewsbury has written a lot of S&S novels for small publishers, creating some series to date. They seem well received in the circles which read them.

Now King Bran of the Picts (in this case Howard's rather fanciful version of them) is a bit of an empty slate. Appearing in five tales in which the character even seldom is the protagonist, he starred in one of Howard's best stories, Worms of the Earth. Karl Edward Wagner wrote one novel starring Bran in 1976, in 1981 David C. Smith and Richard Tierney did another.

Now Steven Shrewsbury takes a different approach for his contribution to the Heroic Legend Series, which is quite ambitious. Red Waves of Slaughter is a direct sequel to the Howard story The Dark Man. While Tor Books avoided such continuity projects with good reasons, Titan Books isn't averse to this. Their first Conan novel by S. M. Sterling Blood of the Serpent was a prequel to Howard's Red Nails of all things. It had mixed reviews, to put it nicely, and it is questionable if this is a good idea and not basically fan-fiction, regardless of the quality of writing.

The story: Dr. Blackthorn is doing psychometric readings of archaeological objects. Invited by Scottish priest Father Rogan and some strange nun he now reads a statue found in a Templar church. The object is called The Black Man, which may contain the ghost of Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn or not. Blackthorn re-lives Brans last bloody day on earth when his seer Gonar tries to transfer the King of the Picts soul into the statue through human sacrifice.

Leaving all objections to such continuity plugging aside, this is arguably the best of the three non Conan short stories of the series so far. It has an original, complex plot and lots of gruesome violence, mixing heroic fantasy with some horror elements. It is a fast and even suspenseful read and has a nice twist at the end. Here the short format is a strength. It is easy to imagine the plot stretched out which would make it less effective.