All of that being said, I am still excited about Titan Books publishing more Conan and I look forward to the next volume which is by Mr. Add in maps and other supporting material including “Red Nails,” and it’s a nice package of Hyborian Age goodness. It’s a wondrously insane tale and newcomers to Conan’s original material will find much to take away from one of REH’s seminal works. Some of this was quite interesting but the amount of exposition was excessive and bogged down the story.

as he fights against and alongside men and women from other regions was a welcome expansion to the world and lore that we know and love. I will say that there was enough fun action in Blood of the Serpent to elevate it to a passing grade for me. He managed to combine the action, adventure, monsters and magic of Conan with more realistic characters and combat (and much less purple prose, racism and sexism). The world and people are similar enough to me that the difference of writing style and even genre to an extent do not bother me whatsoever.There’ve been some stirring on the fringes of SFF communities that a Sword and Sorcery revival is on the horizon. Positioned as a prequel to the 1936 Howard novella Red Nails, Conan – Blood of the Serpent opens with the titular barbarian languishing in Sukhmet, a backwater village in Stygia, the Hyborian Age’s antediluvian precursor to ancient Egypt. The plan was to create a story that could fit inside Howard's timeline for Conan and not outside it. Conan cursed by a Stygian priest gives chase to the Stygian who he has to get to earlier than the man gets to Valeria. As much as I would love some more weird and sorcery I found myself pleasantly surprised by this book, hugely relieved to finally have a good old friend back in my life in a sense, and something I will be able to read again and again out of love.

Both authors give the reader numerous scenes of intense combat against both man and beast (Stirling’s Conan slaughters a veritable zoo’s worth of African wildlife), but I was surprised to find it was Howard that went further in graphic detail when describing bloody swordplay. It reads like a Star Trek or Star Wars IP novel that machine guns off nod after nod, Easter Egg after Easter Egg. Conan isn’t the only one pursuing Valeria; while Conan is content to bide his time and prove his merits, an arrogant Stygian commander named Khafset proves himself less willing to take no for an answer. I think that this one is pretty good, better than many I’ve read, but not quite up to the level of someone like John Maddox Roberts.After Howard’s 1936 suicide, hardback releases by Gnome Press in the 1950s and enduring support in the pages of fanzines like Amra kept the barbarian from disappearing into obscurity. Instead Conan is bedeviled by bewitched crocodiles, lions, rhinos, and even Edgar Rice Burroughs’ mangani. Contrary to what many uninitiated believe, Conan is not just a musclebound brute sporting a sword, a fur diaper, and a voluptuous half-naked damsel clutching at his mighty thews. I suspect this will be the most controversial aspect of the book for longtime Conan fans, as the most celebrated pastiche novels (i.

Serving in the company known as Zarallo's Free Companions, he fights alongside soldiers of fortune from Zingara, Koth, Shem, and other lands-a hard-handed band of killers loyal to anyone who pays them well. His fixation turns to murderous hatred, forcing Valeria and Conan to embark on a desperate journey across untamed lands, contending with threats both terrestrial and supernatural. The book is still heroic fantasy but it does take some time to do a bit more contemporary flavored world building and add some more “realistic” elements to the world through this. This guy is a totally different character who seems more at home cracking one-liners in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than in a novel bearing his name.Howard in a 1932 issue of Weird Tales magazine, the Conan stories have had a tumultuous publication history.