Review: The Hound of God by Jonathan Maberry

by Gary Romeo

A new Solomon Kane adventure! We haven’t seen too many of these. Unlike the plethora of Conan adventures, Kane has not been overused at this point. This is the second “online” story about Kane. The other one being “The Death’s Head Tavern” by Nancy Collins. This is the first “authorized” adventure though. And it’s a good one.

I don’t know that much about Jonathan Maberry. I did read the Sword & Sorcery issue of Weird Tales that he edited, and I know he corresponded with L. Sprague de Camp decades ago. (In 1981, Maberry wrote de Camp a letter about a proposed article on the Conan movie for a magazine called Action Stars. Maberry holds an 8th degree Black Belt. In the letter he writes: “You [de Camp] provided me with invaluable advice when I was trying to get a writing career started.”) All these things make me favorably to him. And this short story does as well.

The story starts off in a Howardesque way. Short sentences painting the scene. With Solomon Kane “gray” feels right. With Conan it’s “red.” This story gets “red” pretty quickly with a scene of blood and horror.

This first chapter really works to give the reader a sense of who Kane is. A man of God who passionately wants to stop evil. And Kane has a forensic mind. His evaluation of the “crime scene” is tentative at first and he almost takes a wrong path, but his sharp reasoning skills let him apprise the truth. A werewolf is on the loose.

Chapters 2 and 3 disappointed me a bit. Maberry’s prose is a quick and easy read, straightforward and breezy, nevertheless these two chapters seemed like filler, and I was starting to think this short story was simply going to rush to a simple conclusion once enough words were written.

But happily, that was not the case. Chapter 4 was a real turnaround. At a certain point in this chapter a name “Mario Taglioretti” is mentioned. I thought maybe Maberry was naming a real historical person (similar to the way Paul Di Filippo used historical figures in his Kane pastiche) but that doesn’t appear to be the case (or at least he is not easily found on Google).

Kane displays a little too much self-satisfaction in the final chapter, but I’ll forgive that. Robert E. Howard narrated Kane’s victory in “Wings in the Night” in an even worse way. This adventure was action packed and had a decent twist. And that’s all that can be said at this point without spoilers. Jonathan Maberry has done a fine job here.