“Kull: Exile of Atlantis”, by Robert E. Howard, illustrated by Justin Sweet

 

352 pages, Del Rey, ISBN-13: 978-0345490179

In the early oughts, Del Rey began producing the complete works of Robert E. Howard; Kull: Exile of Atlantis, illustrated by Justin Sweet, was the sixth volume to be published. This edition likewise has all of the tales ever published dealing with the wandering exile from the Sunken Lands, along with a collection of sundry materials, again printed in the order they were written and published: the stories The Altar and the Scorpion, By This Axe I Rule!, The Cat and the Skull, The Curse of the Golden Skull, Exile of Atlantis (untitled story), Kings of the Night, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, The Screaming Skull of Silence, The Shadow Kingdom, The Striking of the Gong and Swords of the Purple Kingdom; the poems Am-ra the Ta-an, The King and the Oak and Summer Morn; and the miscellanea The Black City (fragment), Untitled draft (“‘Thus,’ said Tu…”), Untitled fragment (“A land of wild, fantastic beauty…”), Untitled fragment (“So I set out up the hill-trail…”) and Untitled fragment (“Three men sat…”).

Kull is a very different character from Howard’s other, better known characters (*cough* CONAN! *cough*), and shows a moody, almost dreamlike quality in most of their plots and the main character’s action. As mentioned several times before, Howard wrote in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the heyday of the pulp magazine era, and not all modern fantasy fans will enjoy his writing – but he is a superb storyteller, and I think most modern fans cheat themselves if they don’t sample his oeuvre of fantasy and adventure, especially in the case of this volume. An adventurer from Atlantis who had risen to the kingship of the ancient kingdom of Valusia, Kull was in fact the precursor to Howard’s more famous later-day character, but he was so much more than a prototype. For starters, Kull is a much more introspective (to say nothing of moody) character, given to philosophical inquiries into the nature of reality and his own existence. As barbarians go, he’s deep, man.

Only three of Howard’s Kull stories were published during his lifetime (he died by his own hand in 1936), but he wrote or started at least nine other Kull stories and a poem about the brooding warrior king before aborting the series for other characters. Beginning with the August 1929 edition of Weird Tales and the story The Shadow Kingdom, Kull was unleashed upon the world. Any fan of Sword & Sorcery fantasy (and of Howard in particular) will want to explore the Kull stories in-depth and how his interpretations of well-known myths and places differed from established lore; in short, his Atlantis was a home to hostile and xenophobic barbarian tribes, rather than to an advanced civilization as implied by Plato and later the Theosophists. Thus, we see young Kull exiled from his homeland after thwarting his particular tribe’s attempt to burn a young woman at the stake for marrying outside of the tribe, an example of the extreme antipathy Howard’s Atlanteans hold towards outsiders.

The Shadow Kingdom introduces Kull as the newly crowned king of the ancient and proud land of Valusia, considered the foremost power in this antediluvian world setting. Kull is an uneasy king, however, as he has taken the throne by force via revolution, and he mistrusts many of his court and subjects. When approached by the ambassador of the Picts, an island nation hostile to his former home Atlantis, he is at first wary, but later comes to trust the Pictish ambassador Kanu, an elderly sage still spry and wise in the ways of the world, along with a Pictish war chief/warrior attached to the Pictish embassy known as Brule the Spear Slayer. The story revolves around an evil ancient race of Serpent Men who can take the form and semblance of anyone, and as such, it’s a masterpiece of paranoia that predates such later classics of the trope. Another story in the collection of interest to fantasy readers is By This Axe I Rule! which is a pretty straightforward adventure story in which a cabal of plotters spring a plot to assassinate Kull, for various reasons of their own. Some, such as the poet Ridondo, see Kull as a reactionary tyrant and wish to return to the “good old days,” forgetting that the previous king was in truth more of a despot than Kull ever thought of being, while others seek power for themselves. The major interest in this story is that Howard later re-wrote parts of it, adding in supernatural elements and removing a romantic subplot between two minor characters, and called the new version “The Phoenix on the Sword” and introduced the more popular character Conan in the newer version in the December, 1932 issue of Weird Tales.

The artwork by Justin Sweet captures the pulp magazine style and feel of the original published stories, and the essays by Steve Tompkins and Patrice Louinet are excellent at explaining the context and background of the stories.