My Favorite Solomon Kane Tale: “Wings in the Night” by Robert E. Howard by Fletcher Vredenburgh “Wings in the Night” (1932), is one of Solomon Kane’s, Robert E. Howard’s swashbuckling Puritan, African adventures. In the face of darkness, he sees himself as Satan’s implacable foe.  Kane’s a dour man, dedicated wholly to defeating evil and meting out justice. In two separate stories, he spends years hunting for the killers of innocents. A skilled swordsman, he has freebooted in the New World, suffered at the hand of the Inquisition, and fought vampires and cannibals in Africa. In this story, he battles great bat-winged, razor-taloned monsters.  This story is one of REH’s most visceral, and blood is spilled on every other page. Also, it’s one of my favorites. As it opens, Kane is fleeing from a band of cannibals when he discovers a devastated village and within it, a mutilated, yet still living man, tied to a stake. The village appears to have been attacked from above. One body hangs high up in a tree, impaled upon a branch. Continuing to evade his pursuers, he finds himself set upon by a winged creature with a manlike face.  He barely survives that encounter, thanks only to the ministrations of people from the village of Upper Bogonda. That town has long been subject to the bloody depredations of a tribe of winged monsters. Seeing that Kane killed one of the creatures, they look to him for protection. Denying any of the divine power they perceive in him, as well as any real hope he can defend them, he pledges to stay with them nonetheless: “Yet will I stay here in Bogonda all the rest of my life if ye think I be protection to the people.” It’s an effort that ends in failure and madness.  “Wings” is bloody and savage, more so than any other of Howard’s stories that come to mind. It shares with the Conan story, “Beyond the Black River,” a sense of inevitable doom, but it’s far darker. That story revolves around colonists facing off against the indigenous tribes; here, villagers forlornly await their fates at the claws of sadistic creatures who view them as little more than cattle. Hundreds of innocents are torn apart, decapitated, or eaten alive. In the end, they all end up in the monsters’ bellies...