The Legendary Tales of Conan the Cimmerian

Got this for Kindle, very cheap. I've read most of these already, but I hope rereading them will stanch my inevitable disappointment over the new Conan movie Klatrymadon rated it it was amazing Jan 15, Eric T rated it it was amazing Sep 05, Ian Mcshane rated it really liked it Jul 23, Uber rated it it was amazing Aug 01, Nicholas rated it really liked it Nov 19, BJ Haun rated it liked it May 31, Scott rated it it was amazing Sep 12, Ryan rated it it was amazing Dec 29, Michael D Keller rated it it was amazing Aug 30, Michael rated it liked it Feb 16, Bill Johnson rated it really liked it Mar 17, Fabian Nicollier rated it liked it Apr 10, Marcos de Camargo rated it liked it Sep 28, Marcus Morrisey rated it really liked it Mar 03, Anh Truong rated it liked it Apr 12, Tim Butram rated it liked it Jun 01, Georgina Brandt rated it really liked it Jul 12, Null rated it liked it Feb 05, Algis rated it it was amazing Jun 24, Patrick rated it liked it Apr 02, Marcos rated it really liked it Oct 14, Pat Starnes rated it liked it Feb 22, Pieter rated it liked it Jul 06, The last Conan story was written less than a year before Howard's suicide, but there's absolutely no sense of that here and on a lot of levels this is the most satisfying volume of the three, containing at least two masterpieces and one other that can be argued as ranking just below it.

As seems typical with Conan stories, the ones that hew closest to what everyone imagines a Conan story to be like wind up being the weakest ones in the collection. There's so much going on in the plot you can generally ignore the "Haven't we done this already? But especially here you start to get a sense that Conan is nearly invincible and way smarter than everyone else, which means that any outcome is rarely in doubt at any point.

Howard's prose tends toward breathless hyperbole at times, describing Conan's every bulging sinew with a heated glee and while it's fun to watch him always come out ahead, I want him to sweat for it a little bit here someone pretends to be someone else but after they're gone Conan reveals to us that he knew it all along. On some level we've been here before as well, with pirates and two helpless women this time but with this story Howard goes full pirate and turns Conan into Blackbeard.

What works here is that Conan straddles the space between bystander and agitator. The feud that exists between the pirates has been going on long before Conan enters the scene and he is absent for a good chunk of the story but Howard gives them plenty of room to develop their characters before Conan arrives and starts messing everything up by tilting the balance and not playing for any side but his own. His gambit to lure someone to their death borders on the diabolical and with the menace of the Picts always lurking about, it gives the story a sense of urgency and a deadline.

What makes this work is the chamber opera feel of the setting, with everyone trapped in a limited space, and the fact that Howard has created several well defined characters who spend most of the story plotting to kill each other in various ways. If you wrap your mind around Conan going all "Yo ho ho", you won't even notice the almost complete lack of magical elements.

Having a feeling that this was the last Conan story he'd write for a while, he went all out in ensuring it made a statement and spared himself nothing in the depiction. Indeed, it feels like all the sword and sorcery tales taken to their logical extremes, as Conan and the warrior-pirate Valeria coming across a lost city that turns out to be steeped in violence and decadence, the result of a civilization crumbling and everyone else slowly devolving in the ruins.

Two tribes still exist in the city at opposite ends and spend most of their time figuring out ways to kill each other, while a woman keeps her skin fresh with the best moisturizer of all. Rather disturbing set pieces abound my favorite being the room of severed heads and it all operates along its own twisted internal logic, where hammering red nails into a pillar once you've killed an enemy makes horrifyingly perfect sense.

This is probably the Conan story that everyone remembers the black and white Marvel adaptation is a thing of beauty because of that blend of the fantastic and realistic and insane, all pushed into the red and steeped in an atmosphere that feels smothering. For me, I acknowledge its genius and if not for the existence of one other Conan story would probably feel this is the ultimate Conan story, despite my misgivings about the whole dragon thing and that climax magic wands solve everything that swords can't!

It's the only one I read and felt a chill upon finishing it, where I had become immersed in a smothering and completely alien world that only relented when it was finally over. It takes everything that was ever in a Conan story and strips it away, putting our sword slinging hero in a frontier setting at the edge of civilization where a group of settlers are trying to maintain their existence.

Except in the forest just beyond the river lurk the Picts and they aren't too keen on any of the civilization bunk coming by. For the first time Howard takes his theme of civilization versus barbarian and turns into a physical thing, bending the very landscape to the theme as the river becomes a border between the lands that are honest and the lands where people pretend to have logic, something only Conan can easily walk between. This is only time for me that a Conan story actually felt dangerous and full of menace, with the obscuring forest lurking on all sides hiding hordes of people who will fight to avoid the encroachment of civilization, where the old stories are still true.

It becomes a race against time as the Pictish threat increases, infusing the story with a rare urgency as the settlers try to hold the line and failing that, have to get the heck out of Dodge before everything gets destroyed. It depicts a clash between two lifestyles that are utterly incompatible, one where no rules exist and one where the rules are only a veneer.

It frighteningly displays Howard's belief that civilization is just a nice story we tell each other at night, framed as a losing struggle where losing is the best outcome, for no one can seriously hope to win here. For once, the magical elements feel as weird and alien as they should, steeped in a myth that is truer than stories and an entrance into a world that otherwise has been covered up. Placing Conan in such a realistic setting it only heightens the stakes at play here.

It never puts a foot wrong and is so confident in itself that it tosses off the best line in the story to some nameless incidental character. At the end, no less. The twin strokes of "Red Nails" and "Beyond the Black River" could have cemented any pulp writer's legacy, but when you add in the other nineteen tales it only makes Howard's achievement that much more extraordinary.

It's hard to say where he would have gone from "Red Nails", if he even would have revisited the barbarian and not moved into other types of stories that paid better or were more attuned to his newer interests.

Maybe if he had lived longer Conan would have faded out with a string of interchangeable sword and sorcery cliches, dulling the impact of what we did get. It still would have been nice to have Howard around for longer to find out anyway. Apr 08, Brian rated it it was amazing Shelves: It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.

Howard , "Beyond the Black River" I started this last volume with trepidation, since my experiences with Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Leiber had taught me to expect a decline over the course of the writer's oeuvre culminating in either mediocrity or active disgust on my part, but my expe "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind," the borderer said, staring somberly at the Cimmerian. Howard , "Beyond the Black River" I started this last volume with trepidation, since my experiences with Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Leiber had taught me to expect a decline over the course of the writer's oeuvre culminating in either mediocrity or active disgust on my part, but my expectations were not met at all.

They were completely inverted, actually-- The Conquering Sword of Conan is absolutely the best of the three Conan collections I've read so far. There's only a few stories here, and two of them are on the same subject, but each of those stories is great. My favorite is probably Beyond the Black River , which I know I've read before somewhere, probably in one of the many edited Conan collections floating around out there, but only vaguely remembered it. I've been looking forward to "that story with the Picts" since I first started reading this collection, and it definitely held up to the image I had in my memories.

There's a section in the end of the book where one of the essays talks about Howard's turn towards drawing from his Texan surroundings to make materials for stories, and that's definitely evident in "Beyond the Black River. The area past the Black River is the American West transplanted to the Hyborian Age, with forests instead of plains and distant uncaring feudal lords instead of a distant uncaring central government.

The main difference is that while in America the drama was a foregone conclusion and the Native American way of life was ultimately doomed, in the Hyborian Age the fact that barbarism is superior to civilization see opening quote is what dooms the Aquilonian attempt at colonization. It does seem a little ridiculous that all these barbarian tribes can coexist next to advanced nations based on what happens in our own world's history in those situations, but with the authorial conceits of the Conan stories, it wouldn't happen any other way.

I guess it's just another aspect of how European culture has never gotten over the fall of Rome. Oh, and random fun fact: This is also the book that has Red Nails , which I've heard a lot about from various places but never read until now. I can see why people like it so much. I personally loved the use of a dinosaur as a dragon--though admittedly, I liked the draft where the dragon herds had come ranging up from the south when the climate changed rather than the published version where they were extinct but raised through black necromancy to guard Xuchotl--and the way that Xuchotl is a city that's also a single contiguous building.

That's not a particularly common trope in fiction, but it's one I'm quite fond of. Maybe because I sunburn so easily. It's still written by a man born in , so the story swerves between treating Valeria as a warrior worthy of respect for her combat prowess or a beautiful woman who's going through some kind of silly phase, but it at least represents a kind of progress. It makes me wonder what else we would have seen in further Conan stories if Howard had lived.

The essays at the end also make a good point about "Red Nails"--it's the ultimate example of Howard's view of civilization.

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The inhabitants of Xuchotl live in a single structure without ever stepping outside or seeing the naked sky. Their food comes from fruits that feed on the air, and they have no connection with the world at all. In the end, the fall into horrific decadence and war amongst each other over minor slights, commit hideous tortures that take even Conan aback, and eventually kill themselves in an orgy of self-destruction.

Civilization here is literally unnatural in its total separation from nature. The other three stories, "The Servants of Bit-Yakin," "The Black Stranger" the other story involving the Picts , and "The Man-Eaters of Zamboula" didn't stand out quite so much in my mind, but that's not to say they're bad stories. Well, "The Man-Eaters of Zamboula" isn't much to write home about honestly, but it's not bad enough to drag down my appreciation of the rest of the book. That's not to say there's nothing wrong with The Conquerering Sword of Conan. Howard's racial politics, already pretty uncomfortable in the previous stories, get worse here.

Previously, while Howard lumped everyone south of Stygia in as "a black," he tended to make distinctions between the other countries in a more Victorian sense, the way people would write about "the Irish race" or "the German race" and talk about their essentially characteristics. In these stories, pretty much everyone gets divided into white, brown, or black, with scarcely a mention made of nationality.

And of course, Conan saves people just because they're white and obviously he can't leave a white person behind to be killed by black people and blech.

Conan the Cimmerian: The Complete Tales (Trilogus Classics)

Sure, you can make an argument that Howard is a product of his time, but it falls down because it's not this bad in previous Conan stories. If there's a reason not to read this book, it's that one. Also, part of the reason I liked the book so much is because of the various drafts and story ideas that are placed at the end of the book. Some of them are for stories that appear in the book, like "Red Nails," but there's also one called Wolves Beyond the Border that was never published during Howard's lifetime. There's a first draft and a second draft, and the first draft is very rough.

It definitely didn't feel like any of the other Howard stories I read, but the second draft was a lot more polished and had a lot more of the That's glib, yeah, but the main reason I found this so encouraging is that, like a lot of people on the internet, I have a mostly-finished novel sitting on my hard drive and I often find it hard to work on writing more of it instead of spending an endless amount of time editing what I already have. Reading novels and then looking at what I've written is almost enough to make me just rip the whole thing up, and it's really encouraging to get another reminder that good writing is made, not born.

It almost never springs forth fully-formed from the writer's brow, but has to be coaxed and molded over time and through draft after draft until it reaches its final form. It's not really clear that we would have ever gotten another Conan story, since Howard hadn't written one in almost a year before he died and had written about how his thoughts were turning more towards Westerns instead.

If "Red Nails" had been the last one, though, it would have been a fitting ending to the barbarian's stories, and going out like that I'm not surprised that Conan has been so popular to write about in the decades since then. As the ending of the book puts it: Conan the Cimmerian, however, is still with us. In spite of some difficult years, he has managed to survive, and shows no signs of weakness. The barbarian's longevity wouldn't have surprised Howard.

The barbarian must always ultimately triumph. And indeed, he has. The Bloody Crown of Conan. Jul 20, H. Gregory Manchess provides the illustrations for this volume, and they may be my favorite of the three. The letter, in particular, is interesting. The Conquering Sword of Conan is probably the strongest volume of the three. But Howard was growing tired of writing Conan stories, or at least disassociated with the character.

He wanted to write stories in new settings and it shows. Martin has been called the American Tolkien. Howard would be the Texan Tolkien. If Conan fills the American archetype of the backwoodsman, his love interests tend toward the pioneer woman. Warning settlers of the impending Pict invasion, the first cabin just holds one woman.

She answers the door in nothing but a shift, holding a candle in one hand and an axe in the other. She is terrified but wants to hold the cabin and fight. At the next cabin, an old woman puts a young woman on a horse before her. Feb 18, Ethan Hulbert rated it it was amazing Shelves: I've never read anything quite like Conan. Honestly, Howard's writing style is so explosive that I think the writing alone is some of the best I've ever read. Even when a story may be leading to a somewhat predictable end, Howard's descriptions and detail make these weird tales more exciting than most movies.

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I will be eagerly looking for more H Wow! I will be eagerly looking for more Howard books and collections after this. Mar 25, Jonah rated it it was ok. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This was the third volume of REH's Conan writings. It was enjoyable to read them in the order they were written, and for me, the first time. I quite enjoyed the first two volumes in the series, and, based on the gushing introduction, I had high expectations for this volume as it was said to contain some of Howard's most lauded Conan stories written.

Certainly, the frameworks of the stories were interesting, but as I read them, I kept thinking how badly they needed an editor. Or perhaps that was the problem as I saw it: I barely made it through Red Nails, and gave up after the first unpublished draft. If you are a fan of the character, as I am, and just want to know the true original core of the Conan legend and have a strong stomach for sometimes ridiculous radio-serial-era dialogue , by all means, this is worth finishing - but if you're not a big Conan fan to begin with, and you have a taste for characters with several dimensions, leave this one to the REH cheerleaders.

All that moaning aside: I really did enjoy the first two volumes, so I am not just bashing the author, or character. Do not look at the skull! Valeria shook herself like a lion shaking his mane. It holds still the life and fire of magic drawn from outer spaces! Somewhere in the room, or in the void, or in the dim reaches of her consciousness, an inhuman voice cried out in pain and rage.

Techotl's hand was plucking at her arm and he was gibbering: You have destroyed it! Not all the black arts of Xotalanc can rebuild it!

Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard | www.newyorkethnicfood.com: Books

Come away quickly, now! Nov 20, Hilmi Isa rated it really liked it Shelves: The Conquering Sword of Conan merupakan salah satu daripada tiga buku koleksi yang menghimpunkan kesemua karya asli Robert E. Howard yang meletakkan Conan the Cimmerian sebagai watak utamanya.

Buku ini juga merupakan buku yang terakhir dan pelengkap kepada koleksi ini. Di dalam buku kali ini,terdapat lima buah cerita pendek,iaitu: Selain itu,sebagai bonus,turut disertakan beberapa manuskrip yang berkaitan seperti draf-draf,sinopsis-sinopsis,dan apendiks. Saya bukanlah seorang yang boleh dianggap peminat tegar karya tulisan mendiang Howard. Namun demikian,memiliki buku ini merupakan sesuatu yang amat saya hargai. Hal ini kerana buku koleksi ini juga menampilkan beberapa ilustrasi yang dilukis oleh Gregory Manchess.

Sememangnya sebuah buku yang wajib dimiliki oleh para peminat Howard! Having read the old series of Conan paperbacks religiously when I was teenager and going back to re-read the stories from time to time I was VERY happy when these were put back into print in nice and inexpensive volumes that were unedited pure Robert E. Howard written versions of the stories. Conan is a much deeper character than the public, even those that have read Conan, seem to understand. As well as Howard does not get the credit he deserves from the mainstream.

The Devil in Iron

As I have said before t Having read the old series of Conan paperbacks religiously when I was teenager and going back to re-read the stories from time to time I was VERY happy when these were put back into print in nice and inexpensive volumes that were unedited pure Robert E. As I have said before these stories are sometimes as much horror stories in the Lovecraft veign as they are sword and sorcery tales as well as being VERY politically incorrect.

Sep 27, Mike the Paladin rated it really liked it Shelves: I don't know, I have the hard back but it wasn't listed This is the third volume of the three volume set of Howard's versions of the Conan stories. Conan was good when he was first published he's still good today. Oct 04, Beth rated it it was amazing. So, confession, I love the Schwarzenegger Conan movie. But that was really my only exposure to the Conan stories until this collection came into my hands.

Howard is brilliant in these longer stories. His use of language and imagery is brilliant, his characters are well-crafted, and the stories are perfectly paced adventures. They're very much a product of their time, but also timeless in their commentary on the nature of humanity, monsters, and the line between civilization a So, confession, I love the Schwarzenegger Conan movie. They're very much a product of their time, but also timeless in their commentary on the nature of humanity, monsters, and the line between civilization and barbarism.

Jul 10, Timothy Boyd rated it it was amazing Shelves: Read Conan as Howard intended him to be. You will find that Conan is more than just a big semi-naked barbarian with a sword. He speaks and reads many languages and thinks his way through a lot of what he encounters. But then when that doesn't work he can swing a sword with the best of them. Jul 11, Daniel rated it liked it.

This collection contains longer Conan works, including "By the Black River", in which Howard laid out many of his theories and thoughts about the decadence of the civilized world. Feb 25, East Bay J rated it it was amazing Shelves: And, with the third and final installment of the complete, unadulterated Robert E. Howard Conan stories, we have the final piece of proof, should any more be needed, that this is how anyone and everyone interested in reading Conan should do so. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter through the ringer for being both mediocre writers and heartless butchers.

I had this idea, when I first started picking up these three Conan volumes, that I would re-read ALL of the Conan novels and stoies in the chronology as laid out by William Gray: Reading sixty Conan novels.

I remember enjoying all of them and the Robert Jordan, etc. If you're tired of the trilogy-bound plain brown wrapper fantasy offered today, this might be a welcome diversion Fred Dilger rated it it was amazing Sep 01, Scott rated it really liked it Jul 22, Brian Addington rated it it was amazing Aug 12, Hektor Vokshi rated it it was amazing Mar 02, Elaine rated it liked it Oct 26, Vinnie rated it it was amazing Oct 16, Lee Watkins rated it did not like it May 28, Charl added it Apr 14, Wayne McCoy marked it as to-read May 12, Andreas marked it as to-read May 12, Althea Ann marked it as to-read May 19, Mike marked it as to-read Jun 23, Arturo marked it as to-read Oct 03, Erik marked it as to-read Oct 17, Tom marked it as to-read Jan 15, Art marked it as to-read Jun 21, Sorobai marked it as to-read Jan 10, Adam marked it as to-read Apr 15, Chelsae added it Apr 29, David marked it as to-read Jun 29, Thiago marked it as to-read Jan 16, Spencer marked it as to-read Aug 07, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

Robert Ervin Howard was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror.