‘His Own Red Fear’

Flight by Robert E. Howard, a review by James LaFond
Reading from pages 66-67 of A Word from the Outer Dark

These three savage, 16 line verses are about Cain, Adam’s son, who is fleeing the fallout from his brother-slaying crime.  Howard has an unsettling knack for infusing Biblical narrative with his passion for the poetry of vengeance, a passion that transfigures the reader and transcends mere human notions of revenge.

A jackal mocks Cain on his flight, vines trip him up on the trail, shadows haunt him close, stalked by his own footfalls, harried by the sound of his own breath, judged by mountains, indicted by valleys and worried by the bones of dead men—the killer casts the reflection of his sin wherever in the natural world he wanders. Cain, forsaken by men, meets not another soul on his lonely road. Eventually, fleeing the silence of the dead and the wrath of God, Cain comes to a lonely sea, in search of the only refuge left to him and comes face-to-face with a “monstrous thing of gloom” taken shape from the very deep, and it speaks:

The foremost killer of the earth comes not into my land!
Down all the drifting years to come your fate mankind shall tell
That ye roam the world for the rest of time, disowned by earth and Hell!

On reading this poem I am reminded of one of Howard’s earliest letters to a friend in which he wrote enthusiastically about promoting a local teacher’s discussion on Biblical matters. It has been a few years and I am forbidden from quoting these letters, but I believe—though might be mistaken, that he had also recently read Ben-Hur and an essay on that novel. Having read all of Howard’s Solomon Kane stories at least three times, as the Puritan avenger monstrously roamed the earth righting wrongs with terrible prejudice, I cannot but think that there was some link between this poem and that character in the narrative precincts of Robert E. Howard’s mind.

(c) 2018 James LaFond