Formerly published as ‘The Black God,’ revised

This is the first of the eight Kane stories and poems [of the 16 written] that bring the Puritan fanatic to Africa. This is the first of three trips to the Dark Continent for this whitest of men, marking Howard as a man that suffered from a bit of jungle fever himself. More importantly, it is in this story, that Howard establishes Kane as a force of unparalleled vengeance, a man that will never quit, who will never neglect to implement a moral sentence he has passed upon some sinner.

The story begins with a dying French girl, for whom Kane sets out after a band of robbers led by a Frenchman named The Wolf. By the time Kane tracks the villain to Africa, where he is co-king of some savage tribe, the tables turn and Kane finds himself at the mercy of a gruesome foursome, one of whom, N’Longa, the “ju-ju” man, becomes the longest running supporting character in Howard’s canon, appearing, in body or spirit, in six of these savage tales of fanatical zeal and righteous slaughter under the eyes of a pitiless God. Kane and the black ju-ju man become blood-brothers, which I suppose could be construed as Howard being a racist in some convoluted fashion that evades my grasping mind.

Throughout the African portion of the story Howard outdoes himself in terms of atmosphere, evoking Africa itself as “a Black God” whose drums spoke in the night. The exotic setting baffles and hypnotizes the harsh Englishman, “Lies,” thought Kane, his mind still swimming, “jungle lies like jungle women that lure a man to his doom.”

Howard sketches a black villain—one of three—in fantastic terms that would make liberal men quail and their feminist owners swoon, “…He was the hugest man that Kane had ever seen, though he moved with catlike ease and suppleness…”

15 lines are devoted to the description of this awesome warrior.

Kane is continually haunted by the thought of “… the Black God, brooding, back in the shadows!”

The hero has the sense that his enemies are the expression of some primal force that will overwhelm him. Then he sees that the leading blacks abuse and butcher their own and devotes himself to the overturning of their tribal order.

Although Kane came to Africa hunting the fugitive bandit, the figure of the nasty French cutthroat pales into insignificance besides “Gulka the gorilla-slayer,” putting into play an ending that falls but barely short of the final scene of the great spaghetti western The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Kane emerges from Red Shadows as a figure of pure, monstrous, retribution, driven by a crazed need to right timeless wrongs in a black-hearted world suspended above a pit of limitless, upward-striving evil.

Howard’s obsession with the redemptive agency of apes and ape-men is more keenly expressed in Red Shadows than in any of his numerous other insertions of the concept, which he certainly shared an affinity for with Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of his explicit literary influences. But Howard takes the ape-man complex to an entirely superior level of intensity.

Below is a link to a nicely done audio version of this novelette, which is Howard’s best length, and is a model of its kind.