The Best of Sword & Sorcery: Conan by Robert E. Howard and Kane by Karl Edward Wagner

SHORT VERSION-

When it comes to sword & sorcery, almost everybody has heard of Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard, but hardly anybody has heard of the Kane books by Karl Edward Wagner or even knows what sword & sorcery is.

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LONG VERSION-

Sword & sorcery might be the most difficult genre (or sub-genre) to explain.  It’s my favorite sub-genre when it’s done correctly (yeah, I know ‘correctly’ is subjective), and in my opinion very few authors get it right.  Sword & sorcery is a violent adventure fantasy in a pre-Ancient setting (usually medieval type of civilization that was wiped out long before the Bronze Age) with a combination of anti-hero, action, war, horror, sorcery (of course), lusty scantily clad women, and bloody violence that most readers would be appalled by in real life.  Great sword & sorcery stories don’t have to have all these traits (some don’t even have the lusty scantily clad women), but they have to have the right blend of the characteristics that the author chooses to use.

There are no sword & sorcery sections in bookstores because there wouldn’t be enough books to fill them, so they’re usually in the science fiction/fantasy section, and you have to know what books you’re looking for ahead of time, and even then it will be tough because new bookstores focus more on current trends like romantasy (if that’s what sells, then the bookstores have to sell it).  Even used bookstores are no guarantee because hoarders and book flippers grab the old sword & sorcery right away and jack up the prices online. 

To me, only two authors have consistently gotten the sword & sorcery combinations right in their stories: Robert E. Howard, best known for Conan the Barbarian, and Karl Edward Wagner, creator of the Kane series, which a lot of people today have never heard of.  A lot of fantasy fans love the Elric of Melnibone novels by Michael Moorcock (Moorc… Hahah!… cough, cough…ahem… sorry… old habit), and some are more partial to the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser short stories by Larry Lieber. Some lesser known characters were Thongor by Lin Carter and Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes.  Yeah, the names Brak and Thongor aren’t as cool as Conan or Kane or even Elric or Fafhrd, and their stories reflected that.  If you’re going to write good sword & sorcery, you darn well better have cool names for your characters.

I think sword & sorcery usually works better in a short story format than that of a novel because it’s difficult to balance so many elements for very long.  For example, Robert E. Howard wrote only one Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon (sometimes published as Conan the Conqueror), and I don’t particularly care for it.  Karl Edward Wagner wrote three Kane novels, Bloodstone, Darkness Weaves, and Dark Crusade, and out of those three, I only like Bloodstone.  But I really like Bloodstone.  It might be the only sword & sorcery novel that I really like.  And it’s one of the few novels that I kept when I got rid of most of my books.  And I’m not selling it either.  You’ll have to pry it from my cold, de… Never mind.

A Game of Thrones (or A Song of Fire and Ice) by George R. R. Martin is almost a good example of a good sword & sorcery novel.  It’s almost sword & sorcery, and it’s almost good.  It’s almost sword & sorcery because it has all of the elements, except it has almost heroic figures like Jon Snow and Ned Stark rather than the one lone wolf anti-hero (maybe if either Bronn or The Hound would have been the central character), and the series is almost good, except the books get bogged down and lose their momentum, and even though some readers love the bogged down sections, those sections kept George R, R. Martin from finishing the series, so those sections automatically suck.

The best Conan short story  (in my opinion) is “Red Nails” because there’s nothing else quite like it, sword & sorcery partially set in a pre-ancient dystopian society that turns what should be a utopia into a spiraling slaughterhouse. What it says about human nature is disturbing, and at the same time it’s a fast-paced action horror story.  Other great Conan stories that break the normal man vs. monster story formula often found in generic sword & sorcery stories are “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Beyond the Black River,” “Rogues in the House,” and “People of the Black Circle.”

Even though Robert E. Howard wrote the only good/great Conan stories, he also wrote a bunch of Conan clunkers and a couple that kind of… sucked.  A common formula for the clunkers was that Conan would rescue a scantily clad lusty female as they trekked through some unknown city or unknown island or something like that.  You can read that kind of thing almost anywhere now.

Kane short stories, on the other hand, are anything but formulaic.  Yeah, Kane (probably one of the most evil protagonists I’ve ever enjoyed reading about) has usually cooked up some kind of scheme, and almost all of the characters are pricks in some way, but there’s no set formula.  I have two favorites, one of which, “Cold Light” from Death Angel’s Shadow, seems like a simple chase story at the beginning where a group of bounty hunters set out to find and kill Kane, but the chase turns out to become so much more, and the end has a couple moral dilemmas that you often don’t find in pulpy fantasy type stuff.

A more untraditional Kane story that breaks any sword & sorcery formula is “The Dark Muse” from Night Winds, which has a heavy emphasis on poetry and the power of finding the perfect word or the perfect phrase in the perfect place and the price that a wordsmith is willing to pay to reach that perfection.  You don’t find many literary discussions in sword & sorcery, and “The Dark Muse” still has the action, sorcery, and horror elements that (I believe) the sub-genre requires, so I think this story stands out as well.  

I’m pretty sure Thongor has never done any literary analysis of the pre-Ancient verses.  Pfft!  Thongor.

I haven’t read any Kane short stories that outright sucked, but out of the novels, the only one I’ve reread was Bloodstone.  I wouldn’t say Darkness Weaves or Dark Crusade suck. They just felt more like rough drafts than finished, polished masterpieces (maybe too strong a word) that Bloodstone and the Kane short stories were.

If you want to read the original Conan stories the way they were originally written, you can find them for free as they were presented in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1930s at places like Internet Archive.  If you want to read the Kane books without paying too much, you can find digital copies pretty cheap (or maybe even … cough, cough,… free in some places that aren’t Internet Archive). At any rate, with today’s technology, you can find access to these stories even if you have a tough time finding the actual books.

I admit that I can be overly picky about the sword & sorcery stuff that I read. If you like the Conan books that aren’t written by Robert E. Howard, that’s cool. I don’t want to ruin anything that other people enjoy. If you think Thongor is a cool name, that’s cool too. It just gives you more stuff that you’ll enjoy reading, and that’s always good. If you like fantasy but think it can get a little tame sometimes, maybe try some sword & sorcery. And if you just want to read the good stuff, well… it’s tough to go wrong with Conan by Robert E. Howard and Kane by Karl Edward Wagner.

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But enough about me and my opinions! What do you think? Who is your favorite sword & sorcery character or author? What other overlooked sub-genres do you enjoy? What other old out-of-prints series or book or genre is worth finding and reading again? Is romantasy as weird as I think it is? Show the world that you made it to the end of this blog post and leave a comment below.

For more about sword & sorcery, see…

What was the deal with…? Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner

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

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

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My ONE and only novel is NOT sword & sorcery. It’s a romantic comedy from an average man’s perspective, but it does make a reference to Robert E. Howard, so… close enough!

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A grammar-obsessed English teacher falls in ‘luuuvvv’ but discovers how chaotic and dangerous ‘luuuvvv’ can really be. It’s a romantic comedy from an ‘average’ guy’s point of view!

The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is now available on Amazon!