The Only Real Conan Is The Robert E. Howard Conan!

Conan the Barbarian (or Conan the Cimmerian, the Warrior, the Wanderer, the Adventurer, the Destroyer…) is public domain now, so a bunch of authors/artists who are not Robert E. Howard are writing/drawing their own Conan stories/comic books, and they all suck.  I mean, the stories and comics suck (I might be using the word ‘suck’ too loosely), not necessarily the authors/artists.  A few decades ago, a writer named Karl Edward Wagner wrote a couple Conan novels, and they sucked, but Karl Edward Wagner didn’t suck.  Another famous author Robert Jordan also wrote a bunch of Conan novels, and he didn’t suck either (but his Conan novels did).

Robert E. Howard’s original Conan stories appeared in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the early 1930s. Back in the 1970s (when I first became aware of Conan), you couldn’t buy those pulps, so if you wanted to read Conan short stories, you almost had to buy books with fake Conan stories too. Authors like L. Sprague deCamp and Lin Carter, who were putting together the old Conan stories short story collections, would add their own Conan stories to the books (with permission from the Robert E. Howard estate). You didn’t have to read the L. Sprague deCamp short stories, but you had to had to buy them if you wanted to read Robert E. Howard Conan.

Now, there are books only with Robert E. Howard versions of Robert E. Howard stuff, and that’s what a lot of Conan fans want.

Some people like these fake Conan books/stories/comics, and that’s fine for them.  I don’t want to ruin anybody else’s enjoyment.  I just think of the good fake Conan stories as good stories about a random barbarian who happens to be named Conan.  It’s not THE Conan.

To me, there’s only one good Conan author, and that’s Robert E. Howard.  I’m not going to get too much into his background because you can get that anywhere, and on this blog I like to focus on my opinions and my own writing when I get around to it (I guess I’m kind of selfish). Yeah, Robert E. Howard killed himself in 1936, and that’s not really something to brag about, but he knew how to write a good sword&sorcery story.  Some people even give credit to Robert E. Howard for creating the sword &sorcery sub-genre.  I’m not sure that Robert E. Howard created it, but he definitely perfected it.  

It’s tough to get the right balance of all the elements in a good Conan story.  The problem with most fake Conan authors is that they can’t get that right mix of everything (action, horror, politics, sex, violence, magic… I’m probably leaving something out) in sword&sorcery and Conan stories.  Too many fake Conan authors focus almost exclusively on the sorcery elements while Robert E. Howard stories usually combined on human vs. human conflict with minor sorcery side elements.

Sometimes the sorcery/monster elements were added  just so the stories could get into magazines like Weird Tales.  For example, the Conan short story “The Phoenix on the Sword” was originally written as a Kull story called “By This Axe I Rule.” The Kull story got rejected by Weird Tales because it was a straight medieval type tale with no sorcery, monsters, or anything weird. Rather than send the story to other pulp magazines, Howard rewrote it as a his first Conan story, threw in some unnecessary horror/sorcery elements, and got it published. That’s how Robert E. Howard rolled.  I like the Kull story better, though.

Even with all the new stuff out there now, if I feel like reading a Conan story, I’ll just reread one of Robert E. Howard’s good Conan stories.  Sometimes I’ll read one of his non-Conan stories just for the heck of it.

BEST CONAN STORIES (not necessarily in order)

Red Nails

Beyond the Black River

People of the Black Circle

Tower of the Elephant

WORST CONAN STORIES (even Robert E. Howard can have a bad day)

The Frost Giant’s Daughter (it’s not a bad story, but it… uh… puts Conan in a really bad light)

Jewels of Gwalahar (way too much clumsy exposition)

The Vail of Lost Women (also doesn’t present Conan favorably… plus, it’s just not a good story)

There are several formulaic Conan stories, but they’re not bad if you don’t read them all at once.

BEST NON-CONAN ROBERT E. HOWARD STORIES 

The Shadow of the Vulture (with the only literary appearance of the true Red Sonya)

The Dark Man

Sons of the White Wolf

Night of Kings

Worms of the Earth

There are a lot of other good Robert E. Howard short stories, but this is a decent start, and I’m sure a lot of Robert E. Howard fans will disagree with me about best and worst stories. That’s great!  Just don’t insult me because you disagree with my opinions. That would be stoopid. Some book readers take their opinions way too seriously.

Since more people are writing Conan stories, more people are probably reading Conan stories (I hope that I’m not making up that cause-effect relationship).  At any rate, Howard’s Conan stories are much easier to find now than they were in the 1970s when I first started reading them, and I’m glad for that. With Conan going public domain, there’s going to be (and already is) a lot of new Conan of Cimmeria stuff being published, which is fine, but for me, I’ll just stick with Robert E. Howard.

In case you can’t tell, I’m a Robert E. Howard fan. Here are a few other posts that I’ve written about him.

The Famous Author Who Thought His Stories Were Junk

Robert E. Howard’s Letter to Two Nerds in the 1930s

What Dead Author Should A.I. Steal From? How about… Robert E. Howard!

My one and only novel (mentioned below) even has a Robert E. Howard reference.

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It’s the oldest story in the world, 1990s style!

Man meets woman; man falls in “luuuvvv” with woman; man gets blindsided by reality!

The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is now available on Amazon and from the trunk of my car!