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Cover of Red Shadows

Red Shadows

core short fiction 1928 Solomon Kane

Record

First published1928
Original language EN
Work typeshort fiction
Canon statuscore
Reader rating3.55 (390 ratings, collected 2026-09-13)
First-edition ISBN9781473322950

Synopsis

First published in Weird Tales in August 1928, Red Shadows introduces Solomon Kane, a grim Puritan wanderer of the sixteenth century who roams the world righting wrongs wherever he finds them. Traveling through rural France, Kane comes upon a girl dying from an attack by a bandit gang led by a Frenchman called le Loup, "the Wolf." Before she dies she names her killers, and Kane swears a solemn oath of vengeance over her body. His pursuit of le Loup carries him out of Europe and across the sea into Africa, where the chase brings him into contact with the shaman N'Longa, beginning Kane's long association with African sorcery. The story establishes Kane's character: a humorless, implacable avenger who treats the destruction of evil as a personal, almost religious calling regardless of the cost or distance involved.

Where it sits

Notes

  • From the series record (The Solomon Kane Stories): Core = the 7 Solomon Kane stories Howard himself sold to and saw published in Weird Tales during his lifetime (Aug 1928 - Jul 1932) -- a bibliography independently and unanimously corroborated across 4 sources (reh.world's per-story pages, Black Gate's 'Vintage Treasures' column, Dark Worlds Quarterly's Weird Tales-adaptations article, and Wikipedia), with no disagreement on titles or issue dates. Expanded Canon is deliberately NOT registered: the posthumous Kane material is genuinely tangled in a way the lifetime stories are not -- 'The Right Hand of Doom' and 'Blades of the Brotherhood' (Red Shadows collection, 1968) are usually described as complete Howard manuscripts left unsold rather than fragments, but 'Blades of the Brotherhood' has its own bibliographic wrinkle (it derives from a 1929 Kane draft, 'The Blue Flame of Vengeance,' that Howard himself later reworked in 1932 with a different, non-Kane protagonist -- which of the two texts the posthumous editors actually published under which title is not yet cleanly confirmed here); 'The Castle of the Devil', 'Hawk of Basti', and 'The Children of Asshur' are Howard fragments completed by Ramsey Campbell (with a published note on where Howard's text ends and Campbell's begins, per the same completer-credit convention as Conan's Expanded Canon) but were not individually re-verified; 'Death's Black Riders' is an unfinished Howard fragment with two DIFFERENT, mutually independent completions by two different writers (Fred Blosser, 1984; C.J. Henderson, 2002) with no single canonical text; and 3 Solomon Kane poems ('The One Black Stain', 'The Return of Sir Richard Grenville', 'Solomon Kane's Homecoming') have no matching work-type category in this project's schema (no 'poem' value exists). None of this affects the Core admission above, which rests on a clean, independently corroborated bibliography -- but Expanded is left for a dedicated future pass rather than guessed at. No contemporary genre awards exist for any of the 7 Core stories (Howard died in 1936, 17 years before the Hugo Award began, exactly as already documented for Conan the Barbarian) -- their absence is expected and unremarkable for a pulp-era body of work from this period, not a quality signal one way or the other.

Neighbouring works

Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.

  • Publication order, within the series The Solomon Kane Stories: position 1 of 7: next Skulls in the Stars (1929)

Sources

← Solomon Kane dossier · All universes

Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.