Ryan Harvey has graciously allowed me to make a foray into his “Pastiches R Us” with some thoughts on Leonard Carpenter’s Conan the Hero, which was published by Tor Books in 1989.  Amazon.com reviewer “raif10″ characterizes the novel as “Conan in Vietnam,” hence the title of this post.  To anyone familiar with the United States’ involvement with the Vietnam War, the allegory is abundantly — and sometimes painfully — clear.

But the Vietnam connection wasn’t what initially attracted me to this novel. Instead, it was the inclusion of Juma, a Kushite who is a fellow recruit with Conan in the Turanian army.

It should be noted that Juma is not a Robert E. Howard-created character. The Kushite was the product of the imaginations of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter.  Juma first appeared in “The City of Skulls,” a de Camp-Carter story in Lancer Books’ Conan.  Conan and Juma bond because they are both outsiders: physically powerful barbarians at odds with, yet attracted to, the opulent civilization they serve with their swords.  Although Conan is a white man from the northern land of Cimmeria and Juma a black man from the tropics of Kush, that difference in background is of no consequence to their friendship. Read More »

It’s hard to add much about RE Howard to what’s been said here, but I’ll try.

Howard is easy to compliment on his prose style, his ringing battles so evocative that the blood almost sticks to your hands as you turn the pages. His characters were primal archetypes, quick to take to and want more from. His worldbuilding allowed you to smell the exotic spices in the market street air and hear the shadowy footpads in the alleys — his masterwork Hyborea teemed with life and detail. His sense of rhythm in the telling of Conan’s latest exploit or explosive westerns leavened with physical humor prove him a master yarn-spinner.

But there’s more to him than just technique.

I get writing from amateurs every now and then that about lives up to Howard, even if it’s just aping his style. The stories just seem strangely lifeless for all the careful detail, cacophonous action, and pulpish word-choice. I usually tell these writers to “tell me one of your truths.”

Howard put what he knew to be true in his stories. He was an opinionated man, read Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir One Who Walked Alone for plenty of examples. He knew the power of entropy, he’d seen it growing up in Texas as the oil men came and went. Cross Plains experienced it in the bust of the Great Depression. Howard’s stories are filled with the frailty of civilization, yet even when all that is dross falls away and the hollow gongs go silent there’s still the rough code of someone like Conan to protect a defenseless woman or Solomon Kane’s relentless resolve to avenge a murder even unto the lawless coasts of the New World. The whole world may have fallen or been left behind, but these characters will still see justice prevail.

Howard was a great reader of history and spoke endlessly of corruption. The rotten old order gives way to the new, not always easily, then the new eventually goes sclerotic and itself is preyed on by another generation of barbarians. The same truth applied to Rome applied to Howard’s Aquilonia and fallen Stygia.

Yes, by all means give R.E. Howard his hard-earned props as a technical master. But he also wrote from his brain, his heart, and his guts about what was important about life, as he saw it. Conan’s broadsword spoke many of Howard’s truths.

Here’s to Robert E. Howard, creator of my favorite genre, sword-and-sorcery, on the anniversary of his birth. Raise high your goblets and drink deep.

What is best about Robert E. Howard’s writing? The driving headlong pace, the seemingly inexhaustible imagination, the splendid cinematic prose poetry, the never-say-die protagonists? It is hard to pick one thing, so it may be simpler to state that Robert E. Howard possessed profound and often astonishing storytelling gifts. Without drowning his readers in adjectives (he had the knack of using just enough adjectives or adverbs, and knew to let the verbs do the heavy lifting) or slowing pace, he brought his scenes to life. Vividly. Writer Eric Knight may have most succinctly described this particular aspect of Howard’s power in an article on Solomon Kane:

“’Wings of the Night’ features a marathon running fight through ruin, countryside, and even air that only a team of computer animators with a sixty-million dollar budget and the latest rendering technology (or a single Texan from Cross Plains hammering the story out with worn typewriter ribbon) could bring properly to life.”

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Conan the Unconquered
Robert Jordan (Tor, 1983)

Moving on with my Conan/Robert Jordan double-feature. . . .

With Conan the Unconquered, Robert Jordan’s third book in the series, the author seems settled with his style of writing the Hyborian Age. Some the flaws in Conan the Defender are subdued, although the story is the average “meat ‘n’ potatoes” Conan pastiche material. The book has a feeling of comfort food: neither challenging nor surprising, but providing decent sword-and-sorcery entertainment.

The plot of Conan the Unconquered follows the Middle Eastern fantasy playbook, set around the Vilayet Sea in the Kingdom of Turan, with an excursion across the waters to Hyrkanian lands. Conan is not yet in his twenties, and has arrived in the Turanian city of Aghrapur. A compatriot from his thieving days, Emilio from Corinth, approaches Conan with the offer to join in stealing a necklace from a compound outside the city. The compound belongs to the Cult of Doom, whose members may be responsible for many assassinations occurring in the city. (The Cult of Doom sounds as if Jordan is swiping from the recent movie Conan the Barbarian.) Emilio’s lover, Davinia, is the one who wants the necklace stolen. Conan no longer wants to dabble in thievery, but after the astrologer Sharak casts a chart for the barbarian, he changes his mind and seeks out Emilio from the stewpots of Aghrapur.

As usual with pastiches, Conan has slender reason to stay in the story; the device of Sharak’s chart is a flimsy one (and Sharak as a plot device hangs around far longer than he’s needed) to keep Conan interested in the Cult of Doom and its necromancer leader Jhandar. Jordan manages to coax Conan into the story faster than in Conan the Defender with some slight-of-hand that makes both Conan and Jhandar believe that the other must die for them to live. Conan allies with a vengeance-minded Turanian sergeant, a group of Hyrkanians chasning after Jhandar for the desolation he brought to their land, and the beautiful Yasbet who keeps her parentage a secret.

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Conan the Defender
Robert Jordan (Tor, 1982)

I’ve had some requests on the site and in emails to my own blog from people who have enjoyed previous installments of “Pastiches ‘R’ Us” to look at Robert Jordan’s novels. I’m here to serve. This week and next I’ll feature two of the famous fantasy author’s Conan novels.

Robert Jordan, the pen name of James Oliver Rigney Jr., is the best-known of the stable of writer on Tor’s long-running and now defunct Conan pastiche series. After writing six consecutive books (and the novelization of Conan the Destroyer), Jordan turned into one of the most popular authors of epic fantasy with his “Wheel of Time” series. Unfortunately, Jordan’s career ended early with his death in 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis, only a month before his fifty-ninth birthday.

How does Jordan’s work on Conan stack up? He’s not consistently the strongest of the Tor group—I think John Maddox Roberts deserves that title—but when Jordan first started writing Conan, he created some fresh and energetic material. His first Conan novel, Conan the Invincible (also the first of the Tor series), is pulpily exciting and one of the few pastiches from the Tor books that I recommend to people who normally avoid non-Howard Conan.

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Conan the Hunter
Sean A. Moore (Tor, 1993)

You know I’m getting busy in other parts of my life when I pull out another Conan pastiche review for you here at Black Gate. (I store them up in a locked chest to be used in emergencies.) I’ve so far looked at a book each from John Maddox Roberts, Leonard Carpenter, and Steve Perry. So now it’s time for one from Sean A. Moore.

First, a prologue. (Almost all Conan pastiches have prologues, so why not start a review with one?) There is a moment in Conan the Hunter where a palace gardener beats our hero unconscious. Incredibly, the book is not as completely horrible as that absolutely ridiculous statement would make it sound. But it just has to be one of the most unbelievable moments I’ve read in any Conan story. Go ahead, read that statement again. By Crom, I dare you not to laugh.

Now that I’ve set the tone, it is time to dive into the meat of Conan the Hunter, or at least the gristle.

This is the first Conan novel from Sean A. Moore. Like John C. Hocking, Moore came late to Tor’s pastiche series, and went on to pen a two more before the line went on hiatus. Judging from this outing, Moore’s strengths lie in crafting a clever, dense plot with immense, epic scope, and populating it with an imaginative flood of action and monsters. This novel bursts at the seams with supernatural menaces and crimson battles: A leech beast in the sewers. Hordes of gargoyles. Repugnant, horror-laden traps everywhere. An invincible demon-sorceress trying to revive her race. A cramped duel to the death in the corridors of a palace. A henchman with a magnetic lodestone for a shield. Nifty stuff all around, candy for a heroic fantasy reader.

Yet for all this material, Conan the Hunter can make for miserably slow going. Moore demonstrates two tremendous flaws that impede the novel and make it only sporadically entertaining and otherwise a chore to read.

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So, could a sword-and-sorcery icon like Robert E. Howard’s Conan ever tread the pages of modern mainstream fiction beneath his sandalled feet?

The answer is: for sure.

The Conan of today’s best-seller/mystery/thriller genre is a hulking former U.S. military police officer named Jack Reacher, the protagonist of a series of novels by Lee Child.

Over the past 12 years, Child — a native of England who now lives near New York City — has published a lucky 13 Reacher novels, with the fourteenth coming out early next year.  The first, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony and Barry awards for best first mystery novel.  Since then, Child hasn’t looked back.  Neither has  Reacher.

Lee Child

The Reacher novels are, indeed, excellent mystery yarns replete with enough twists, turns and feats of ratiocination to do Sherlock Holmes proud.  But there’s an added dimension to the Reacher ouevre.  Not only is the protagonist smart as a whip — he’s also harder than nails.  Think Robert B. Parker’s Spenser on steroids.

Or … Conan with a SIG Sauer pistol in his hand.

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Conan the Free Lance
Steve Perry (Tor, 1990)

Let’s see… I’ve reviewed a Conan pastiche novel each from Leonard Carpenter and John Maddox Roberts. So next up, Steve Perry.

If there’s one word I would used to describe Steve Perry’s Conan novels, it’s goofy. Perry has a reputation among Conan fandom for overkill and general silliness. He apparently loves high fantasy. Perhaps he loves it too much. His Conan books burst at the seams with fantastic monsters, strange races, and weird magic… and not in an ideal way. Although Perry has an enormous imagination, it gets away from him and creates a world that has almost no resemblance to Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age. It’s not so much that these elements are silly, but that they seem so when placed in Howard’s setting. They would work fine in the Star Wars universe—and Perry has written some good Star Wars novels to prove it; I’ll admit I enjoyed his Shadows of the Empire, even if LucasFilm tried shoving it down my throat first. But in the grittier, more-historically centered Hyborian Age, where magic is rare and sinister, Perry’s style feels like someone trying to write a Forbidden Realms novel who accidentally wandered into Robert E. Howard-land.

Conan the Free Lance (yes, two words, not one, according to the actual title page—Conan isn’t picking up occasional assignments for The New Yorker) won’t change anyone’s mind about Perry’s style. The story occurs in an overt wonderland akin to high fantasy. Its villain and the instigator of our plot, Dimma the Mist Mage, lives in fortress on a bed of sargasso weeds in a Karpash Moutains lake. He needs a talisman to restore his body to its solid form, and so he sends his shapeshifting servants the selkies to fetch it from the Tree Folk. Conan, while on his way to Shadizar, rescues Cheen, a medicine woman of the Tree Folk, from the draconian hunting beasts of the reptilian-descended Pili. (Okay, we already have far too many demi-human races running around.) Conan helps the Tree Folk repulse the selkie attack, but the selkie leader Kleg escapes with the talisman—the ‘Seed’ which the Tree Folk need to make their tree homes grow. He also kidnaps Cheen’s young brother, Hok. Conan joins the Tree Folk in the quest to save Hok and recapture the Seed.

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Because I’ve sat on a few Nebula juries in the past or perhaps due to the fact that a few thousand people are bored enough to stop by my blog every day, publishers send me books from time to time. The vast majority of them aren’t just bad, but amazingly bad, and I usually attempt to do the kindest thing I can do for them, which is to say nothing at all about them. I don’t know what has gone wrong at some of the genre’s leading publishing houses, but someone needs to send them a very strong message to stop publishing novels where the central theme involves the importance of being true to oneself, features a strong, independent, sarcastic hero who don’t take no crap from nobody, concerns love triangles with the angst-laden but irresistible reader stand-in at the center, or incorporates sex scenes involving more than four different individuals and at least two different species. Weve been there, a lot. We’ve done that, a lot.

The nadir has got to be what I like to consider “were-seal porn” due to one unforgettable book about a lonely, but beautiful lighthouse keeper and her mysterious lover. You probably think I’m kidding, but I swear, not only did someone actually write that book, someone decided to publish it! So, my expectations were extremely low when I picked up a book out of the PR pile, mostly because I badly needed a break from the history of economic analysis. I was surprised, then delighted, and ended up blowing off the rest of the evening in order to finish what was really a very good fantasy novel.

The Warded Man isn’t exactly low fantasy, but it’s probably closer to low fantasy than high fantasy. More to the point, it’s original, it’s well-written, and it’s extremely absorbing. It’s a strange world, one of the weirdest post-apocalyptic worlds that I’ve encountered, as the greater part of both magic and science have been forgotten in the face of a plague of demonic forces that rise from the ground at night and can only be fended off by scripted or carved wards. The author does an excellent job of conveying the essential horror and helplessness of the common people, while portraying a realistic picture of the way in which no situation is so dire that petty human weaknesses can’t stir up unrelated conflicts of their own.

The book is one of the best debut novels I’ve ever encountered in the genre, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it ended up claiming an award or two along the way. The author rewards the reader by seldom going for the obvious, and the character development tends to be a little deeper and more original than is the norm. If you feel that the fantasy field has been a bit barren of late, you should give The Warded Man a shot. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

I’m a day late on this one, my apologies. Given their interest in adventure fantasy and the fiction of the 1930s, I assume Black Gate readers are more inclined to frequent used bookstores than the average book buyer. One of the best resources online I have discovered is ViaLibri, a search engine devoted to used bookstore sites including Amazon and AbeBooks. At its site, one can discover everything from a 1932 copy of Oriental Stories Pulp Magazine, Spring 1932, Volume II, # 2, containing “Lord of Samarcand” by Robert E Howard, to the 2008 limited edition re-release of Howard’s Kull: Exile of Atlantis by Subterranean. Many of the books are a bit pricy, but bargains can occasionally be discovered; I found a complete set of the 8-volume, 1936 edition of the The Cambridge Medieval History in England for about a quarter the price I would have paid at my local used bookstore for a set missing a volume. It was an excellent deal even with the added shipping expense required. Whether you’re a serious collector or simply happen to be searching for a specific book you recall from your youth, ViaLibri is a nice resource that may be of some utility in your hunt.