Product Description

“Between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities . . . there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars. . . . Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand . . . to tread
the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

Conan is one of the greatest fictional heroes ever created–a swordsman who cuts a swath across the lands of the Hyborian Age, facing powerful sorcerers, deadly creatures, and ruthless armies of thieves and reavers.

In a meteoric career that spanned a mere twelve years before his tragic suicide, Robert E. Howard single-handedly invented the genre that came to be called sword and sorcery. Collected in this volume, profusely illustrated by artist Mark Schultz, are Howard’s first thirteen Conan stories, appearing in their original versions–in some cases for the first time in more than seventy years–and in the order Howard wrote them. Along with classics of dark fantasy like “The Tower of the Elephant” and swashbuckling adventure like “Queen of the Black Coast,” The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian contains a wealth of material never before published in the United States, including the first submitted draft of Conan’s debut, “Phoenix on the Sword,” Howard’s synopses for “The Scarlet Citadel” and “Black Colossus,” and a map of Conan’s world drawn by the author himself.

Here are timeless tales featuring Conan the raw and dangerous youth, Conan the daring thief, Conan the swashbuckling pirate, and Conan the commander of armies. Here, too, is an unparalleled glimpse into the mind of a genius whose bold storytelling style has been imitated by many, yet equaled by none.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35160 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-02
• Released on: 2003-12-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 463 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780345461513
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From The Washington Post
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936), the creator of a blue-eyed Cimmerian fighting man, who wandered the ancient Hyborian age as a thief, pirate and mercenary, before finally seizing the royal throne of Aquilonia. In the course of many adventures, this axe and sword-wielding battle-machine was to encounter Stygian demons, a lonely being from another planet, vampiric witches and saturnine sorcerers who possess the elixir of life, a seraglio's worth of scantily clad slave girls, more than one haughty but secretly hot-blooded princess, and, not least, many, many, indeed hordes, of bloodthirsty, blood-crazed Picts, Kushites, Shemites, Vendhyans and Hyrkanians. Even more remarkably, this indomitable warrior earned the love of both Belit, the notorious corsair Queen of the Black Coast, and the deadly Valeria of the Red Brotherhood. Such a hero could obviously be no one but Conan, King Conan, Conan the Barbarian.

To most of us these days, Robert E. Howard's Cimmerian is rather a joke. During the 1970s, the Depression-era hero evolved into a comic-book icon and was later literally embodied by the young Arnold Schwarzenegger in a pair of exceptionally good sword-and-sorcery films. Soon thereafter appeared both the bookish Conan the Librarian and Terry Pratchett's mangled and bitter old bandit Cohen the Barbarian. Many an older reader must still recollect the Frank Frazetta paperback covers, top-action portraits of a massive half-naked fullback with a broadsword, either in full berserker fury or standing triumphantly upon a mound of dead enemies, his mighty thigh caressed by an adoring Playmate of the Month. Or two. Of course, none but the brave deserve the fair.

Are the tales of Conan then what a female friend would call "boys books"? Testosterone-driven daydreams for 15-year-olds? Pulp schlock with titillating suggestions of sadomasochism, rape and sapphism? (Many of the stories were originally illustrated for Weird Tales by the legendary Margaret Brundage, who specialized in kinky cover art.) The answer to all these questions is, obviously, yes.

Yet without making grandiose claims for them, Howard's Conan chronicles are also a bit more than that. They are, as Patrice Louinet demonstrates in his forewords and afterwords to these three volumes, studies in the clash of Barbarism and Civilization. In Howard's grim and all too realistic view, the barbarians are always at the gate, and once a culture allows itself to grow soft, decadent or simply neglectful, it will be swept away by the primitive and ruthless. As a character insists in "Beyond the Black River," the most deeply felt and complex Conan story, "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. . . . Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."

To Howard, however, this isn't wholly a bad thing. As King Conan plaintively confesses to his friend Prospero, "These matters of statecraft weary me as all the fighting I have done never did. . . . In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless." In essence, Conan is a creature of the wild -- he is frequently likened to a wolf or tiger -- and his understanding of the world is simple, instinctual, unmediated. While others hesitate or plan and speculate or find themselves trapped by their social positions or tangled in the snares of bureaucracy, Conan acts. Fear, doubt, uncertainty -- these never trouble his nobly savage breast. He does what needs to be done, by Crom, no matter how daunting the task. And afterwards he quaffs his wine and moves on.

Conan's greatest affinity is obviously with the Western gunfighter of our imaginations, the quiet drifter like Shane or Cheyenne who one day rides into town and then, after a final gun-blazing showdown, rides off into the sunset. Before his suicide at the age of 30, Howard attempted every sort of adventure story -- horror ("Pigeons from Hell" is ludicrously titled but chilling), detective and occult fiction, sports narratives and Westerns. "Beyond the Black River" reads like a tale of settlers and rampaging Indians transposed to the borders of bronze-age Aquilonia. After all, when a plot failed to sell to one market, a serious pulp writer simply reworked it for another.

Unfortunately, this cavalier attitude was carried on by Howard's executors. When Conan was rediscovered in the '60s and '70s, writers were hired to mine his drafts for new stories. His published exploits were filled out and the chaotic Hyborian Age turned into a realm as carefully designed as Narnia or Middle Earth. Howard's energetic (if sometimes corny) writing was heavily edited and smoothed out. Eventually, though, these additions and pastiches came under attack as collectors and scholars like Glenn Lord and Karl Edward Wagner began to republish the original texts. That process has now been crowned by these authoritative editions of all the Conan stories, supplemented with their author's outlines and synopses, maps, letters and essays, as well as appendices on the location of surviving typescripts and much interpretative material by editor Louinet and series editor Rusty Burke. (There are additional compilations devoted to Howard's Puritan sword-slinger Solomon Kane and the Celtic warrior Bran Mak Morn but not yet of the Conan precursor, Kull.) These three volumes are individually illustrated, but each artist aims to be faithful, in his fashion, to Howard's descriptions of the formidable Cimmerian.

I've read most of the Conan stories, as well as the novel (included here) The Hour of the Dragon, and, approached as guilty pleasures, they can be wonderfully entertaining. For that matter, apart from Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, sword and sorcery adventures don't come any better. Still, one must make allowances. Howard's writing can be cliché-ridden ("The Cimmerian froze in his tracks. It was no image -- it was a living thing, and he was trapped in its chamber!"). And there's undisguised racism: The darker an enemy's skin, the more vicious and animalistic his nature. Perhaps most disturbingly, Conan glorifies the Gordian Knot solution: The proper response to a complex problem is to grab a sword and brutally hack away until the problem stops moving. Some naive readers might imagine that such a policy actually works in the real world.

In general, Howard's plots involve a quest of some kind -- for treasure, for revenge -- and culminate in a fight with a witch or wizard, who is usually aided by hypnotic powers, magic talismans and demonic pets. Hidden tunnels and crumbling temples abound. Evil magic is always in the air:

"Ships did not put unasked into this port, where dusky sorcerers wove awful spells in the murk of sacrificial smoke mounting eternally from blood-stained altars where naked women screamed, and where Set, the Old Serpent, archdemon of the Hyborians but god of the Stygians, was said to writhe his shining coils among his worshippers."

In the cruder stories a lissome young woman is nearly always threatened, often drugged by the sickly sweet Black Lotus and led zombie-like, but eye-catchingly unclothed, to some fate worse than death. In "Black Colossus" an undead wizard sends his shadowy familiar into the chamber of a virgin princess, where the repulsive creature unctuously hisses its master's obscene prophecies: "But thou shalt be my queen, oh princess! I will teach thee the ancient forgotten ways of pleasure."

No matter how hopeless the outlook, Conan himself never gives up, never tires, somehow always survives. In "A Witch Shall Be Born" the warrior is actually crucified and as he hangs on a cross the vultures circle round him, one in particular:

"Conan drew his head back as far as he could, waiting, watching with the terrible patience of the wilderness and its children. The vulture swept in with a swift roar of wings. Its beak flashed down, ripping the skin on Conan's chin as he jerked aside his head, then before the bird could flash away, Conan's head lunged forward on his mighty neck muscles and his teeth, snapping like those of a wolf, locked on the bare, wattled neck. . . . Grimly he hung on, the muscles starting out in lumps on his jaws. And the scavenger's neck bones crunched between those powerful teeth. With a spasmodic flutter the bird hung limp. Conan let go, spat blood from his mouth."

To my mind, the longer works reveal Howard at his best. In "The Hour of the Dragon" Aquilonia is conquered by magic, but in battling to regain his lost throne Conan learns better to understand and appreciate his adopted country, as well as his duties as its ruler. In "Red Nails," the last Conan story he wrote before his death, Howard presents an in-bred civilization that has degenerated into a never-ending, generations-long guerrilla war between rival factions inside a single gigantic castle. Its Grand Guignol conclusion dramatizes the Freudian phrase "the return of the repressed" and leaves but one man standing. As with so many of the Conan stories, the overall mood is one of sorrowful wonder at the insane ways of men.

Conan is still a young wanderer in "Red Nails," only dreaming that one day he might become a king. Yet since Howard never bothered to publish the Conan stories in any particular order, readers already know from his very first appearance in "The Phoenix on the Sword" that the Cimmerian will realize his ambition. Indeed, from the beginning he strides out of the pages of the so-called Nemedian Chronicles, already the stuff of modern myth:

"But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
?Howard?s writing seems so highly charged that it nearly gives off sparks.?
?STEPHEN KING

?I adore these books. Howard had a gritty, vibrant style?broadsword writing that cut its way to the heart, with heroes who are truly larger than life. I heartily recommend them to anyone who loves fantasy.?
?DAVID GEMMELL
Author of Legend and White Wolf

?The voice of Robert E. Howard still resonates after decades with readers? equal parts ringing steel, thunderous horse hooves, and spattered blood.
Far from being a stereotype, his creation of Conan is the high heroic adventurer. His raw muscle and sinews, boiling temper, and lusty
laughs are the gauge by which all modern heroes must be measured.?
?ERIC NYLUND, Author of
Halo: The Fall of Reach and Signal to Noise

?That teller of marvelous tales, Robert Howard, did indeed create a giant [Conan] in whose shadow other ?hero tales? must stand.?
?JOHN JAKES, New York Times bestselling author
of the North and South trilogy

?For stark, living fear . . . What other writer is even in the running with Robert E. Howard??
?H. P. LOVECRAFT -- Review

Review
“Howard’s writing seems so highly charged that it nearly gives off sparks.”
–STEPHEN KING

“I adore these books. Howard had a gritty, vibrant style–broadsword writing that cut its way to the heart, with heroes who are truly larger than life. I heartily recommend them to anyone who loves fantasy.”
–DAVID GEMMELL
Author of Legend and White Wolf

“The voice of Robert E. Howard still resonates after decades with readers– equal parts ringing steel, thunderous horse hooves, and spattered blood.
Far from being a stereotype, his creation of Conan is the high heroic adventurer. His raw muscle and sinews, boiling temper, and lusty
laughs are the gauge by which all modern heroes must be measured.”
–ERIC NYLUND, Author of
Halo: The Fall of Reach and Signal to Noise

“That teller of marvelous tales, Robert Howard, did indeed create a giant [Conan] in whose shadow other ‘hero tales’ must stand.”
–JOHN JAKES, New York Times bestselling author
of the North and South trilogy

“For stark, living fear . . . What other writer is even in the running with Robert E. Howard?”
–H. P. LOVECRAFT

Customer Reviews

BACK IN PRINT -- Robert E. Howard's great creation!
If you're a fan of fantasy author Robert E. Howard, who wrote for the pulps in the 1920s and 30s, rejoice! His stories of the great barbarian adventurer Conan are coming back in print, without unnecessary editing. These are the original texts.

If you enjoy fantasy, but have never read either Howard or Conan -- BUY THIS NOW. It is a must for lovers of fantasy. Banish any notions you have of Conan in other media: movies, comics, books by other authors. Howard's Conan is a stunning, unique creation. At turns bloody thrilling, filled with passionate rushes of action, at other times brooding and beautiful, sweeping you off to strange vistas. Howard was a one of a kind author, an American great, and with Conan he was at his best.

This first volume covers the first third of Howard's Conan stories, presented in the order they were written. The included stories are (in order):

1. The Phoenix on the Sword
2. The Frost-Giant's Daughter
3. The God in the Bowl
4. The Tower of the Elephant
5. The Scarlet Citadel
6. Queen of the Black Coast
7. Black Colossus
8. Iron Shadows in the Moon (aka Shadows in the Moonlight)
9. Xuthal of the Dusk (aka The Slithering Shadow)
10. The Pool of the Black One
11. The Vale of Lost Women
12. The Devil in Iron
13. The Phoenix on the Sword (first submitted draft)

Plus a number of fragments and outlines, and Howard's guide to Conan's world: "The Hyborian Age."

All the stories are enjoyable, although a few are minor entries in the Conan canon. The superior works are "The Tower of the Elephant," "The Scarlet Citadel," "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," and "Queen of the Black Coast." The last story is the gem of the collection: a grand romantic tragedy that you will never forget. This is one of Howard's ultimate great works.

The volume comes with a treasure trove of supporting material: illustrations by Mark Schultz that have a unique take on the character; an informative introduction and very detailed appendicies that go into the history of how Howard wrote the stories and some of his sources, and textual notes for the truly obsessed.

This is simply a superb collection: long-time fans and first time readers will all find something to treasure in this salute to one of the major authors and founders of modern fantasy.

A magnificent tribute to Robert Howard
If a teacher assigned a project requiring you to draw up a list of the most influential authors in the fantasy/science fiction genre, Robert E. Howard would sit safely in the top five. Along with H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, Howard was one of the groundbreaking influences in popular fiction of the 1930s. His influence is still felt today as evidenced by the large number of books containing stories based on his most popular creation, Conan the Cimmerian. Sadly, most of these newer tales, spun from unfinished fragments found in Howard's possession after his untimely demise in 1936, barely manage to attain a shadow of the glory found in the original tales. I think of Lin Carter's "Conan the Liberator," a truly awful piece of junk based on one of these fragments, and I shudder at the damage done to Robert Howard's reputation. That's why we should all give a warm round of applause to Del Rey for releasing this comprehensive collection of the earliest Conan stories. It's great to see a collection of the original tales available for sale at a reasonable price. Moreover, the book contains a foreword from the illustrator chosen to draw for this collection, a fascinating piece of criticism examining Howard's influences, and a few other goodies shedding even more light on how Conan came about. The order of the stories, too, mirrors exactly the sequence in which the author wrote them.

"The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian" is, I am embarrassed to say, my first foray into the original Conan tales. I looked around for these things for years, but always found the prices in the secondary market-usually for moth eaten copies of decades old versions-to much weight to place on my wallet. I did get a chance to read a few of Howard's Bran Mak Morn stories, several of his Cthulhu tales, and a couple of other great stories completely unrelated to Conan. Still, it's not the same. To know Howard is to read the Conan sagas. Included here are thirteen original stories, beginning with "The Phoenix on the Sword" and including such epics as "The Tower of the Elephant," "The Scarlet Citadel," "Queen of the Black Coast," and "Black Colossus." Lesser, but by no means uninteresting stories, include "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," "The God in the Bowl," "Iron Shadows in the Moon," "Rogues in the House," and "Xuthal of the Dusk." Included also is Howard's history of his Hyborian Age, a lengthy discussion of the various nations and peoples that form the backdrop of the Conan adventures. The author's love for setting stories in the historical past led him to create an alternate version of world history, one that resembled in many ways our own ancient times but allowed him to make up things as he went along. The history of the Hyborian Age alone is worth the price of the book.

It's impossible to adequately summarize every story, or even most of the stories, contained in the collection. A few worth noting include "The Phoenix on the Sword," where King Conan of Aquilonia thwarts a coup attempt with the help of a long dead sorcerer. Another winner is "The Tower of the Elephant," which finds Conan as a thief attempting to steal the wealth locked up in a malefic temple. "The Scarlet Citadel" and "Black Colossus" work so well because the two stories give Howard the opportunity to write extremely involved descriptions of huge battles against a background of magnificently executed scenes of phantasmagoric weirdness. Even the lesser tales contain enough flashes of brilliance and imagination to keep the reader riveted to the page. Conan battles giant apes, evil alien beings that turn humans into shrunken dolls in a magical pond, a vicious god preying on decadent citizens of an ancient city, and slays frost giants in pursuit of a goddess, all without batting an eye. Swords flash, armies clash, women fawn, sorcerers cast spells, and Conan wins the day in his inimitable taciturn style. All of the stories move at a lightening quick pace.

Sure, a few of the stories here follow a rather formulaic structure, but that doesn't make them any less entertaining. I think there's a tendency by some people to sneer at fantasy books and stories; they argue that the simplistic writing style and predictable plots do not inspire readers to peruse REAL literature, and to some extent that claim may contain grains of truth. But as Patrice Louinet makes clear in her introduction and analysis of Howard's Conan stories, this author was an extremely intelligent, well read individual who infused his stories with elements borrowed from Bulfinch's works on ancient and medieval history. As for simplistic writing style, you won't find much of that here. Howard routinely uses elevated prose in the construction of his stories, and while he's no Clark Ashton Smith or H.P. Lovecraft in terms of OED inspired vocabulary, his language still rises much higher than you would think.

The only problem I had with the book concerned Louinet's assessment of Howard's Conan canon. I haven't read much about the underpinnings of writers like Lovecraft, Howard, and the other fantasy writers in the 1930s, but I always suspected the success of these authors rested heavily on the Great Depression. Howard wrote about a warrior of great physical, mental, and moral strength, perhaps, because a man with such traits was necessary in a time of great social turmoil. American audiences yearned for stories that created worlds where bread lines, bank closings, and starvation didn't exist. Moreover, they longed for characters that could triumph over seemingly insurmountable obstacles with nothing more than their native abilities to fall back upon. Anyway, read these stories. All fans of fantasy/horror/science fiction should pick up a copy of this book immediately. I can't wait for the next volume.

Elemental Myth Burns on the Page
In a society in which self-conscious irony has become standard in virtually every form of entertainment, these stories shine with the blinding light of 100% sincerity. This is pulp fiction elevated to the level of myth. Howard's hero moves through, and dominates, the Hyborian Age in much the same way that Beowulf and Odysseus do in their own, older, more respected, myths.
Conan is a character hewn from the fabric of saga and legend; dark, dangerous, unpredictable, as much an embodiment of the forces of nature as a human being. His world comes alive as a wildly imaginative patchwork of ancient and medieval history, filled with haunting references to our own past yet existing as a independent world as lushly alive as any in fantasy.
These stories have been more influential and imitated than practically any others in genre literature. But they have never been duplicated. Howard's prose is shocking in both its power and diversity, frustrating attempts at either imitation or parody. Sharp, hardboiled sentences drive home the fierce brutality of combat. Vivid, often lyrical, passages describe the sprawling majesty of the Hyborian world. Darkly ominous writing depicts the creeping horror of otherworldly sorcery.
If you know Conan only from film, comics or pastiche novels, you don't know Conan at all. Read Robert E. Howard's fiery words and discover some of the most potent, most primal, fantasy ever written.