I’ve read a couple; the flying creatures that eat people (see serpents, above).
Not only the unusual plot of a Puritan as a vengefull, mean son of a bitch, but the European displaced to Africa.
Is there a back story, or a tale that offers exposition?
And what of the King Kull movie, with Hercules/Dylan Hunt? I thought it was fair, beats the hell out of no Howard at all.
Pick up the Wandering Star collection. The first few stories are barely even stories, but once he gets to Africa, they’re easily as good as the best Conan stories and often quite better.
There’s a great subtext to the stories that’s missing from Conan. There’s the White Man’s Burden angle yet at the same time, Kane belongs to a much older tradition that goes back to Conan and especially Mak Morn - here, the savage is an agent of Civilization (or Race), yet he only does it out of a sense of duty; civilization may be weak because people like Kane and Conan did/do all the heavy lifting, but unless Kane protects them, the forces of darkness (which often takes the form of dark-skinned folks: Moors, Africans and Spainards) are going to take over and that’s worse, so he ends up protecting an imperfect system.
I don’t recall a story that specifically addresses his “origin” though.
It’s a collection of all the Conan, Kane and Mak Morn stories in their original form (from what I understand few, if any of Howard’s stories were published verbatim). This obsessive crew wen through different editions and the drafts to reconstruct what Howard’s original stories were. I have no idea how they stack up against the rewrites, but I like them well enough.
The stories are also placed in the order in which Howard wrote them, which is also not necessarily the order in which they were published.
There are also supplementary material, some of it is drafts or fragments (and some interesting background material that Howard used to create Hyborea) and pictures! The Schultz pictures in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian make him look like an Italian sword and sandal star with an IQ of 70, but the Gianni art in the following books (especially Kane) is fantastic.
There are also some essays of varying quality and interest and “version histories” (I don’t know what they’re properly called) of his drafts and the different publications.
I haven’t read Howard before (in his “altered” work), but I think these are superb collections.