Most of these sentences echo the general tone and plot of The Shadow Kingdom, where the snake metaphor has given way to actual snake-like characters. They also echo some of Kull’s musings: “As he sat upon his throne in the Hall of Society and gazed upon the courtiers, the ladies, the lords, the statesmen, he seemed to see their faces as things of illusion, things unreal, existent only as shadows and mockeries of substance. Always he had seen their faces as masks, but before he had looked on them with contemptuous tolerance, thinking to see beneath the masks shallow, puny souls, avaricious, lustful, deceitful, a vague horror that lurked beneath the smooth masks. While he exchanged courtesies with some nobleman or councilor he seemed to see the smiling face fade like smoke and the frightful jaws of a serpent gaping there” (p. 41). The “one man” to whom Saul can always turn evokes of course Brule, the spear-slayer. The only notable difference between the two “stories” resides in the absence of an equivalent to the “snaky Samuel”; in Howard’s story, the snake-characters are indistinguishable from one another.
Upon learning of the acceptance of The Shadow Kingdom in September 1927, Howard reacted in a typical fashion and almost immediately proceeded to write another story starring the same character. (Howard had completed Wolfshead in July 1925, the same month the first story starring de Montour, In the Forest of Villefère, was published. A few months later, he would repeat this, completing the second Solomon Kane story, Skulls in the Stars, upon news of the sale of the first, Red Shadows.) This time the writing took much less time than for the first story: Howard wrote an eight-page draft, polished it by rewriting the last two pages of the story and sent the result to Weird Tales. That second Kull story, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, was quickly accepted by Farnsworth Wright for $20. Of that story, generally held in high esteem by contemporary as well as modern readers, Howard offered the following comment to his friend Clyde Smith: “more of the Shadow Kingdom, occult and mystical, vague and badly written; this is the deepest story I ever tried to write and I got out of my depth.”
It was some weeks before Howard would return to writing Kull stories. In the first months of 1928, he began what could have been a serial-length Kull story, but abandoned it at the eighteenth page (see p. 65). Howard probably realized that his story was rambling and unconvincing, relegated it to his archives, and immediately began work on another Kull story, which was to be titled Delcardes’ Cat. The history of the composition of this tale is worth detailing: Howard wrote it in two sessions. He titled his first draft Delcardes’ Cat, and only had the idea for the character that was to become Thulsa Doom as he was writing page 22 of a draft that runs 25 pages. The introduction of the new character (whose name was initially Thulses Doom) required a few modifications in the earlier parts of the tale, which of course lacked any references to Thulsa–or Thulses–Doom. Howard, in a particularly unprofessional move, didn’t even rewrite his story, making all his changes on his first draft, and retitled the tale The Cat and the Skull, whose “Skull” is an explicit reference to Thulsa Doom. The story survives as an original (with the modifications) and a carbon (which shows the first stage of the story).
The story is rather poor and suffers from a lack of cohesiveness, which is not surprising given the late addition of Thulsa Doom. The character of Kuthulos is introduced as a “slave,” but later on Tu, the chancellor, suddenly “remembers” that Kuthulos is “a slave, aye, but the greatest scholar and the wisest man in all the Seven Empires.” In fact, it is quite probable that Howard first intended Kuthulos to be the villain of the story, only discarding the idea when he came up with Thulsa Doom. Last, it took Howard several pages before he gave a name to the slave; and it appears, upon close scrutiny of the typescript, that his original name was not Kuthulos, but Kathulos. Not surprisingly, the story was rejected by Weird Tales, apparently to Howard’s surprise, if this is indeed the unnamed story he is alluding to in Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (p. 133). Undaunted, Howard wrote yet another tale featuring Kull, the second and last featuring Kuthulos: The Screaming Skull of Silence. The story was quickly submitted to Weird Tales and likewise rejected.
After a false start and two unsold tales, it would be several months before Howard would return to writing Kull stories. In the meantime, he met with commercial success in the acceptance of his longest story to date. Skullface (Howard’s original form of the title) was written during the second half of 1928, and was accepted for $300 later in the year. It would be hard not to notice that in this story, Stephen Costigan and John Gordon are opposed to the deadly “Kathulos of Atlantis,” whose physical description matched that of Thulsa Doom. Kathulos/Kuthulos had disappeared from the Kull stories only to re-enter Howard’s fiction via another story.
As 1928 was drawing to a close, Howard once again returned to Kull. The Striking of the Gong was the first Kull story not submitted to Weird Tales, but was sent instead to Argosy; The Altar and the Scorpion, a short story in which Kull is only mentioned, was submitted to Weird Tales. Both stories failed to sell. The Curse of the Golden Skull, also barely mentioning Kull, and probably composed in late 1928 or early 1929, likewise met rejection.
The metaphysical tone of the early Kull stories echoed Howard’s philosophical delvings of the time. In January 1928, Howard was writing Clyde Smith: “The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days.” The questions of reality and identity are central to those stories which, due to their short length, writing style, and atmosphere, tend more toward the philosophical fable than the kind of fantasy stories Farnsworth Wright would have bought.
This passage from a letter to Clyde Smith, for example, resonates with passages in The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune and The Striking of the Gong: