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Cover of The Moon of Skulls

The Moon of Skulls

core short fiction 1930 Solomon Kane

Record

First published1930
Original language EN
Work typeshort fiction
Canon statuscore
Reader rating3.91 (361 ratings, collected 2026-09-13)
First-edition ISBN9780345461506

Synopsis

The Moon of Skulls is the fourth of Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories, a novella first published across two issues of Weird Tales in 1930. Kane takes up the case of Marylin Taferal, an Englishwoman abducted from her home and sold into captivity among Barbary corsairs by her own treacherous cousin. Following her trail deep into Africa, his search eventually leads him to Negari, a hidden city ruled by a figure the local inhabitants call its Vampire Queen. Kane must navigate the politics and dangers of this lost civilization to find Marylin and free her, aided once more by his knowledge of African terrain gained during earlier travels. Longer and more elaborate than the preceding Kane stories, it expands the series from short vengeance tales into a sustained lost-world adventure centered on a rescue rather than a personal vendetta.

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.