The character of John Silent, an English mercenary travelling through Germany to Italy to seek employment as a ship's captain, is compellingly and sympathetically written, as a man of the world, a man who abides convention and hierarchy even if they be evil. He meets “An Englishman? And a Puritan by the cut o’ the garb,” as he takes the forest road past the castle of a man supposed to be the very devil, a certain Baron Von Saler.
The stranger answers his hail and, strangely among heroes of fiction, refuses a ride on the back of his countryman’s horse, stating that honest men walk, a statement he makes in at least one other story.
“I am Solomon Kane,” the other answered in a deep measured voice. “I am a wanderer on the face of the earth and have no destination.”
Kane is a person destined not to where, but to what and to whom. Kane pities the horse and also seeks purity of action through unilateral transport, seeming to appear everywhere on foot. One is tempted to postulate that the Caine character played by David Carradine in the Kung Fu television series was based on Solomon Kane, as every episode begins and ends with this man footing it enigmatically into and out of the troubled life of men.
Kane has just taken down a boy from the gallows, he admits to the horrified John Silent, and welcomes meeting the baron and his men at arms as they pass beneath his castle, for Kane has right on his side and fears nothing that is wrong. Kane is a hero [an actionist with stakes] with the uncompromising ethos of a superhero [a collective actionist without stakes]. In many ways the twisted collectivist do-gooders of superhero fiction may be seen as a bastardization of the Kane character. The differences are two:
1. Kane is not superhuman in physicality, but rather extra-human in psychicality, physical equaled by various villains but as morally beyond their ken as superman is physically beyond the means of the paltry villains he squashes
2. Kane maintains his internal morality as superior to the social morality and does not hand over his bagged villains to the sheep of men and their sheepdogs, but rather removes them from life before God and returns them to their master, Satan.
Kane is above all, in the eye of modernity, a blasphemy, a walking embodiment of all that Technological Civilization curses as wrong and is, at the same time, profoundly non-Christian, despite his austere Christian affectations.
Kane is Beowulf wearing a judge’s habit.
Despite being unpublished, even unfinished, The Castle of the Devil most boldly proclaims in Kane’s own words, his trade in death:
“It has fallen upon me, now and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives. I have a feeling that it will prove thus with the Baron.”
John Silent is appropriately aghast, being a man of the world as he is.
I am more of a mind to complete this unfinished story than any other Howard fragment I have yet read.
(c) 2018 James LaFond
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