Robert E. Howard 13 min read

Weary on the throne of Valusia, King Kull is led by the wizard Tuzun Thune to a hall of strange mirrors, where he gazes into other worlds, other selves, and the abyss of unreality itself.

Robert E. Howard's 1929 story is a haunting philosophical fantasy, a King Kull tale. Dreamlike, brooding, superbly told. Read it for one of Howard's most unusual and poetic works, the barbarian king Kull confronting questions of identity and reality before enchanted mirrors, in a strange, meditative sword-and-sorcery classic quite unlike his blood-and-thunder norm.

In its time

Published in 1929, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

13 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Hugh Rankin