Formerly published as ‘Voice of a Dying Race’, revised

The Moon of Skulls is one of Howard’s longer works, a fast-paced full-length novella, which begins with the psychotic Puritan avenger, Solomon Kane, climbing a central African cliff in the face of savages tossing boulders at him. The back story is, he killed a man in a duel in England, and the fellow literally spilled his guilty guts at the end, telling Kane about his great sin as he lay dying. He had sold the daughter of a mutual acquaintance to Barbary Corsairs.

One Taboo aspect of the Life of Europe, that has been erased from the historical record, is that, for hundreds of years, even after “Britannia ruled the waves” with the best fleet in human history, the ruling class and states of Europe turned a blind eye to the fact that Islamic Berbers from Morocco, Tunis, Algeria and Libya—and as far off as Turkey—raided the coasts of Europe for slaves, to be sold as sexual play things in Arabia, Egypt, and other distant lands. Only the fledgling United States, under the leadership of the neurotic hypocrite Thomas Jefferson, cared enough about their common people to go smack those Muslims back down into the sand holes they had arisen from to kidnap and hold for ransom its merchant mariners.

Howard’s Kane character was largely his vehicle for posthumously redressing the wrongs of the slave society exported from Spain and Britain around the world in the European upper class’s quest to milk every soul of humankind for its material worth like some great clutch of vampires. Some might claim that the object of his villainous obsessions is ongoing in the liberal elite’s quest for globalism, from one world rule to outsourcing and the displacement of indigenous citizens by criminally trafficked immigrants.

In the shadowy African night Kane is met by a great lion-headed black man and his warriors, who says to Kane, “This is not the white man’s land.”

Kane responds that he is Solomon Kane, and that he seeks the Vampire Queen of Negari, who is one of the most realistic female villains in fiction. Her henchmen, the warriors of Negari, “yell in savage exultation,” and engage in all manner of real, brutal, and politically incorrect warrior behavior that reads as entirely beyond the pale in our own age of the passive, feminist, martyr of unarmed, innocent, black malehood. Modern readers will be horrified by Howard’s harsh view of a black vampire kingdom ruled by the spear. However, if I were a black boy reading pulps 70 years ago, given the choice of some stepping and fetching clown to identify with, and one of these “magnificent specimens of manhood” I think I’d be happier reading about Queen Nakari’s “lion-headed captain” defending his queen against the “corpse-like” white seeker, than I would the other fictional images then available.

The narrative view of black Africans in this story is not endearing, and is typified by such statements as, “The [masonry] work seemed very old and very much superior to what might be expected of a tribe of ignorant negroes… They no more suited their surroundings than a band of monkeys would have seemed at home in the council chambers of the English King.”

Queen Nakari is described in sensual, lurid detail, marking her as the most attractive female character Howard has etched in words that are generally more suited for describing horrific impressions. She would be played by Serena Williams in a movie adaptation. Nakari might be evil, but she is smart, beautiful, fearless, and ambitious, superior to the pampered and domesticated feral African American woman that is the current objectified ideal of the liberal consumer matrix.

Kane skulks through the ancient city of the blacks like a “gray ghost,” eventually, as he runs, hunted “like a rat” through forgotten dungeons, he makes the acquaintance of the last man of a dying race, who is an inbred descendent of the brown-skinned rulers of Atlantis who had built this place ages ago.

It is revealed through his encounters, that Kane has hunted the world for the daughter of an English friend who had finally become the slave of Nakari—with some pretty brutal lesbian overtones that reminds the reader of the tortures suffered by Howard’s “Aunt” Mary at the hands of slave Mistress Bohannon. Kane has stood mercilessly over many dying men in his search, and in this story is exposed as a callous fanatic of the most determined sort, a perfect plot driver. Kane can only rectify his yearning for the savage queen he has come to kill by comparing her to Lilith, “Beautiful and terrible as Purgatory. She is Lilith—that foul, lovely woman of ancient legend.”

The story goes on to resolve itself in a hard-driving dynamic fashion, built on Howard’s race obsession, that seems to have been tied into his ideal of Atlantis, as a kingdom of brown men who once ruled a glittering world, the fringes of which were stalked by “black savages” in jungles deep, and “white savages” in icebound caves. Such were his fantastical, ancestral notions as to why mankind—most particularly whites and blacks—seemed so driven to enslave other humans. It may not be a view that appeals to the reader as a case of probable evolution, but it certainly makes for a savage tale, and that was the point of The Moon of Skulls, a story that extols humanity as foolish for regarding itself as being anything more than “food” for “black gods.”