I find myself drawn ever back to the murky, monster filled jungles and deserts of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age. A few years ago I got my hands on a collection of all the Conan Tales and read them from back to front. At the time I was an undergraduate and my interest for the vile sorceries of Conan’s world grew so passionate I largely based my undergraduate dissertation on it (along with several other pulp stories). I find I constantly want it to be considered literature, and often wonder why it isn’t by most people. I imagine it’s partly to do with the low brow nature of it; it’s escapist, easy fun about a strong warrior who saves countless damsels from the clutches of gibbering demons and mad wizards. I find another part of Howard’s rejection from scholarly discussion, when compared to similar writers of the time like H.P Lovecraft, is partly to do with the reinvention of the character by MARVEL comics and the Arnold Schwarzenegger films of the 80’s. I think to many he’s more or less a campy super-heroesque character like He-Man.

I am not trying to say of course that the Conan short stories are the pinnacle of fantasy literature and they aren’t flawed. Many of them are. The Slithering Shadow comes to mind. It’s been a while since I’ve read it so you’ll have to bear with me on the details, but it’s

about Conan and a young woman, Natala, finding themselves in the desert city of Xuthal. At first I found the atmosphere is creepy and foreboding. It hearkens back to many of Lovecraft’s desert based stories as the two take the city to be abandoned at first and the only person they see for a good while is a zombie-like creature. For anyone who has read A Song of Ice and Fire, Xuthal seems very similar in tone and narrative design to Vaes Tolorro, the haunted city Daenerys Targaryen comes across in the Red Waste in A Clash of Kings. However the climax of such a brilliantly setup atmosphere is ruined by Howard’s choice of ending. A monster named Thog stalks the city, occasionally feasting on the remaining inhabitants. This is not however the primary villain of the piece nor, despite being cliché, the issue I take with it. Instead it is a woman called Thalis, who decides that she wants Conan for herself and therefore she must remove Natala from the picture. The pinnacle of the narrative is a weirdly homo-erotic, BDSM-like whipping scene in which Thalis decides to torture Natala because she believes Conan prefers her. The whole chapter seems devoid of creative spark and seems to have been fashioned as an excuse for the editor of Weird Tales to get their cover artist draw a scantily clad woman in order to sell more co

pies (something he admitted himself helped sales). Eventually the monster creeps up on her and devours her and the hero and heroine escape.

This is fairly a fairly isolated example though in the vast plethora of Conan tales and I’d say for the most part the Conan stories are brilliant. They capture that early modern fantasy feel so well, and I’d say they have affected the literary landscape of fantasy almost as much as Tolkien. Howard’s world is mashup of historical locations with fantastical elements and it thrives on the barbaric, swashbuckling, explorer vibe that his Cimmerian so energetically provides. I think I should probably admit that my favourite story is The Queen of the Black Coast, a relatively early story about Conan’s time as a pirate. It introduces his first (chronologically speaking) love interest and is the closest thing that the character ever comes to being a true epic, rather than a sword and sorcery, hack and slay fare. But I will say no more lest you wish to read it yourself. I heartily recommend the short stories to anyone who wishes to delve into a gritty, yet believable fantasy world that requires very little commitment to get into.

Party on friends