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Cover of The Hills of the Dead

The Hills of the Dead

core short fiction 1930 Solomon Kane

Record

First published1930
Original language EN
Work typeshort fiction
Canon statuscore
Reader rating3.94 (239 ratings, collected 2026-08-13)
First-edition ISBN9780739450338

Synopsis

The Hills of the Dead is the fifth of Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories, first published in Weird Tales in 1930. Back in West Africa after earlier adventures there, Kane is reunited with his old ally, the shaman N'Longa, who presents him with a carved wooden staff said to hold protective magic against supernatural danger. Thus armed, Kane pushes deeper into unmapped jungle than he has gone before, tracking rumors of a lost city. What he finds is a settlement of the walking dead, vampiric beings that prey on the region's living inhabitants and have turned the surrounding hills into a place of terror. The story leans more heavily into overt horror and the supernatural than the earlier Kane tales, testing both Kane's Puritan resolve and the limits of N'Longa's magic against an enemy that is already dead.

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.

Sources

← Solomon Kane dossier · All universes

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