Interesting Shorts: The Hills of the Dead

Though split into chapters, the Hills of the Dead by Robert E Howard is a short and is definitely interesting in the way it treats vampirism. This is one of Howard’s Solomon Kane stories and was published in Weird Tales in 1930.

Kane is in Africa and consults with a Shaman called N'Longa who gives him a stave, sharpened at the end, and suggests that if he sleeps holding it, the stave will draw N’Longa to him astrally. The stave isn’t named in the story but is the Staff of Solomon.

As he travels, he saves a village girl from a lion and offers to escort her home. However, they have to shelter for the night – against her better judgement – and he choses a cave. He lights a fire and sends her for more firewood. Whilst she is gone two men approach from within the cave – but stay a distance from the fire. They are described as having “skins {which} were a dusty black, tinged with a grey, ashy hue, as of death.” As the fire dies they attack him and he fights back though they seem invulnerable. When he stabs one with the stave, “before his eyes, the great body crumbled, dissolving to dust”.

The returned girl confirms that the hills of the area are teeming with vampires, all from a long dead city. In a war, generations before, the sorcerers of the city brought fallen warriors back to fight again and eventually all the population became vampires. Aspects of this story did feel like foreshadowing of other, much later, vampire texts and this nation of vampires from an ancient Africa reminded me, obliquely at least, of Ganja and Hess and the undead memory represented by the Myrthian people – though whether this was an influence for the scriptwriter is utterly unknown. The vampires are said to be suckers of souls, but they do this through bite and sucking of blood.

Kane summons N’Longa, who has Kane send the girl to her village and return with her lover. When she returns N’Longa borrows his body, puts her in a mystical sleep like state, and the two men go to sort the vampire problem out. The vampires are only able to be killed three ways – one being through the stave (because of its magical properties), secondly through fire and the final way by being devoured by vultures (as they are dead flesh). This is the other foreshadowing I mentioned. N’Longa draws the vampires out of their caves (they only return to the city if threatened) and uses magic to summon a flock of giant vultures – the idea of using magic against vampires to summon a creature that will kill them (though the creatures summoned would be bats) would be seen in Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire.

The story itself has a rip-roaring quality to it but the portrayal of the shaman, especially his voice, was perhaps a bit too pidgin and the view of Africa certainly one through a colonial lens but the story was of a time and the actual active hero of the tale was N’Longa (it is the shaman who kills the vampires, though Kane is not passive and is physically fighting them off whilst the shaman weaves his magic).

In a collection on Kindle @ Amazon US

In a collection on Kindle @ Amazon UK