Celebrated Robert E. Howard scholar and contributor to this blog, Fred Blosser, has just done all of the Solomon Kane fans around the world a Big Favor with this instant classic: The Solomon Kane Companion. Last week I refreshed my memory of the Solomon Kane saga by reading The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane (you can read my review here).

Fred’s “informal guide to Robert E. Howard’s Dark Avenger” provides a detailed tour of Howard’s precursor to his legendary Conan the Cimmerian. Solomon Kane is a Puritan wanderer who is obsessed with fighting Evil and righting wrongs. Kane’s adventures involve battling some occult forces. While Kane is an expert swordsman and a deadly shot with his I particularly enjoy when Kane uses his juju staff. Kane’s friend N’Longa, an African shaman, gave Kane a juju staff for protection against evil and to be wielded as a weapon against Dark Magic. Kane uses it to kill vampires and supernatural spirits. In “The Footfalls Within”, it is identified as the mythical Staff of Solomon.

I enjoyed Fred’s analysis of the development of Solomon Kane from story to story. Kane’s adventures begin in 1553 and stop in 1610. But after Robert E. Howard’s death, Solomon Kane stories appeared as pastiches. I remember reading MARVEL’s Solomon Kane series years ago.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Solomon Kane can be found between these pages. Fred Blosser has written a great book about a great character. Don’t miss it! GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction — vii

CHAPTERS

1. Puritan Marvels and Mysteries — 13
2. King of Swords — 17
3. The Crimson Trails of Solomon Kane: First Phase — 23
4. The Crimson Trails of Solomon Kane: Second Phase — 29
5. The Crimson Trails of Solomon Kane: Third Phase — 35
6. The Crimson Trails of Solomon Kane: Final Phase — 41
7. Damsels Demure, One Damsel Destructive — 45
8. Demons and Devils — 57
9. Despots and Desperados — 69
10. Magi and Men-at-Arms — 81
11. Haunted Places and Lost Cities — 93
12. Variant & Associated Stories in Solomon’s Kane Saga — 105
13. Shrouded in Mystery — 111
14. Solomon Kane and the Lost Continent — 115
15. Dark Avenger versus Eldritch Horrors — 119
16. Did Solomon Kane Ever Meet…? — 123
17. Solomon Kane’s Ruthless Other — 131

APPENDICES

A. SOLOMON KANE in the Comic Books — 137

B. The SOLOMON KANE Concordance –165

C. SOLOMON KANE Chronology — 175

D. Why I Wrote This Book — 181

E. The Essential SOLOMON KANE — 183

F. A Guide to Further Reading — 187

G. Red Shadows — 189

About the Author — 223

The Buffalo Bills and Pittsburgh Steelers play a Must-Win game today. The Bills are 3-point favorites, but after the 23-19 loss to the Houston Texas a week ago and with mounting injuries–two of the starters on the Bills Offensive Line will be out for this game–I’m cautiously pessimistic about the outcome of this game.

Aaron Rodgers, who turns 42 next week, sat out the Steelers’ 31-28 loss to the Bears in Week 12 with a fractured left hand, but it is reported he will play against Buffalo this afternoon. The Bills defense is riddled with injuries, too. A loss for either team will send them plummeting out of the Playoff category and into the dubious In the Hunt status.

How will your favorite NFL perform today?

Diane and I went to the BABEL event and listened to Hernan Diaz speak about his writing process and how he came to write Trust, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize.

I was struck by Hernan Diaz’s range. His first novel, In the Distance, is a Western that surprisingly was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Trust is an historical novel about capitalism. In the Q&A session, Diaz told the audience of about 500 people that his next novel will be set 400 years from now and centers around Artificial Intelligence. Talk about three very different novels by the same writer!

Diaz earned a PhD from NYU and wrote Borges: Between History and Eternity. Diane and I came away impressed by this writer. Are you familiar with Hernan Diaz?

I became a fan of MARVEL Comics in the early 1960s (you can read about it here), but it took me until the mid-1960s before I discovered Doctor Strange. The story of a gifted surgeon who loses his ability to operate gripped me. Stephen Strange’s search for an answer to relieve his afflictions take him to Asia and becoming a student of a Sorcerer Supreme, The Ancient One. Strange learns magic exists and that Earth is just one location in a multiverse of dimensions.

At the time I started reading Doctor Strange comics, the artist and prime mover was Steve Ditko who specialized in surreal artwork to capture the weirdness of the various dimensions where Doctor Strange travels to while defending Earth from invasion by powerful entities.

Doctor Strange uses a variety of  mystical objects, including the powerful Eye of Agamotto and Cloak of Levitation to help defend our planet. Strange resides in a mansion referred to as the Sanctum Sanctorum, located at 177A Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City. 

While other MARVEL super-heroes use super powers, Doctor Strange has to manipulate the occult forces of magic and sorcery to defeat multidimensional threats. Doctor Strange: A Decade of Dark Magic provides a guided tour into the development of one of MARVEL’s most enigmatic characters. GRADE: A

Table of Contents:

The Ancient Tomes — xi

Prologue: Set Time to Swirling — 1
1. 1963-1964: The Gossamer Thread — 8
2. 1964-1966: A Nameless Land, a Timeless Time — 27
3. 1966-1969: Other Realms, Other Voices — 47
4. 1970-1972: The Flickering Flame — 71
5. 1972-1973: Man Nor Magic — 87
Epilogue One: Over Credits — 111
Epilogue Two: After Credits — 113

Acknowledgements — 121

Illustrations — 123

Bibliography — 126

About the Author — 130

Hope you all don’t eat too much turkey!

Robert E. Howard is best known for his stories of Conan the Barbarian. But Howard was a prolific writer who created several characters. One of Howard’s oddest, but compelling, characters is Solomon Kane, a Puritan adventurer. The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, a Del Rey collection from 1998, brings the stories from 1930s back into print for a new generation of readers.

Most of Solomon Kane’s tales involve occult powers and creepy settings. Whether it’s a battle in the Black Forest or a scary trek through the jungles of Africa, Solomon Kane faces many forms of Evil.

My favorite Solomon Kane story is “The Moon of Skulls” where Kane takes on the beautiful vampire queen of Negari. Another jungle adventure, “Red Shadows,” features battles between Kane and the cunning Frenchman, Le Loup.

Robert E. Howard is one of the greatest writers of fantasy fiction. The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane contains hours of high entertainment. Are you a REH fan? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Much of Western NY was tuned in to The Hallmark Channel over the weekend to watch Holiday Touchdown: A Bills Love Story, a Hallmark movie mostly shot in local settings like Highmark Stadium, Canalside, and Chestnut Ridge Park. Buffalo Bills fans loved to see Bills Head Coach Sean McDermott and Bills players Damar Hamlin, Dion Dawkins, Dawson Knox, Reid Ferguson, DeWayne Carter, Ray Davis, Joshua Palmer showing up on their TV screens.

For those of you who missed Holiday Touchdown: A Bills Love Story you can catch it on Wednesday, November 26 at 8:00 PM. There’s a search for a Secret Santa. Two lifelong Buffalo Bills fans, Morgan Quinn (Holland Roden), a doctor, and Gabe DeLuca (Matthew Daddario), the man in charge of construction for the new Highmark Stadium in Buffalo provide the Love Interest. The two friends have lived next door to each other since childhood and their families are close. Their search takes them all around Western NY…and brings them together romantically.

If you’d like to see what my community looks like and how Bills fans support their team, you might want to give Holiday Touchdown: A Bills Love Story a try! GRADE: A

Stephanie Burt is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. She offered a course on Taylor Swift expecting about a dozen students to sign up. Instead, 200 students did!

Burt was a “Swiftie” before it became a Thing. In 2009, Burt became entranced by Taylor Swift and her music. And, of course, the seeds for this book were planted then. Burt describes how Swift talked her parents into moving from Pennsylvania to Nashville so she could pursue her dream. And they did!

It was a steep climb for a teenage girl to get airplay on Country Western radio stations (who mostly played male singers). It was a challenge to cross over from Country Western music to pop music. Taylor Swift made some mistakes due to her contract ignorance (she lost control of her songs–and had to buy them back years later) and dealing with the recording industry in general.

If you’re looking for a detailed analysis of each of Taylor Swift’s albums, Burt takes a Deep Dive into each one. She notes who Taylor Swift is singing about in her many Break-Up songs. Burt dissects Swift’s feud with Kanye West. But, more than all this tracing of Taylor Swift’s development as an artist, Burt shows how Swift became a billionaire. Are you a Taylor Swift fan? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Ready for it — 1

Debut — 17

Fearless — 39

Speak now — 59

Red — 83

1989 — 109

Reputation — 133

Lover — 161

Folklore — 187

Evermore — 203

Midnights — 221

The tortured poets department (the anthology) — 245

Eras — 271

Acknowledgements — 299

Notes — 303

Index — 327

The Buffalo Bills, still smarting from the 23-19 loss to the Houston Texans on Thursday Night Football, have a week to recover from that critical loss before they travel to Pittsburgh to take on the Steelers. Every game now is a “must-win” if the Bills want to make the Playoffs. The rash of injuries to key players play a role in the recent losses–but all NFL teams have injuries at this point of the season. The Good Teams overcome them.

How will your favorite NFL team perform today?

Wicked For Good (aka, Wicked, Part 2) winds up the story of the two witches, Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande), who involve themselves with the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum). Most of the best known songs–“Popular” and “Defying Gravity”–are in Part 1 (you can read my review here) so the music in Part 2 is fairly bland. As Justin Chong of The New Yorker puts it: “Defying brevity, they cleaved the movie into two parts—“Wicked: Part I” and the newly arrived “Wicked: For Good”—effectively doubling the running time to five hours…”

So far, Wicked for Good is getting mixed reviews. Justin Chong writes in “Wicked for Good is Very, Very Bad”: “Why is everything in this movie, for all its lavishly gilded, emerald-studded set design, either too dim or too bright—so blindingly backlit that Oz seems to be under perpetual thermonuclear attack, or so murky that you could scarcely tell a monkey from a Munchkin?”

While all of that is true, the audience Diane and I saw Wicked For Good good with, made up of little girls–many dressed up as Glinda or Elphaba–with their mothers, enjoyed the movie. GRADE: B+