REH By Someone Else, Part 1

 

I am one of those fans who generally prefers a strong continuity in the fictional universes I enjoy. I like maps, chronologies and hints at unpublished adventures from a hero's past. I like fan theories that attempt to explain plot holes and inconsistencies. 

But there is one attempt to give a stronger continuity to to a fictional hero that fell short of success. Despite being a fan of L.Sprague de Camp's novels and short stories, I was never knocked dead by the Conan stories he and Lin Carter wrote, which attempted to give the Cimmerian a cohesive life-long biography. 

I do believe that de Camp was arguably most responsible for rescuing Robert E. Howard's work from obscurity. But his style of storytelling worked best with the educated and urbane heroes who appeared in his original works. Howard's two-fisted heroes didn't fit him or allow him to exhibit his dry sense of humor. I also don't think he ever fully appreciated Howard's amazing skill as a storyteller. 

Also, though Lin Carter was a superb editor (see his work on the Flashing Swords series of books), I'm afraid I never cared a lot for his own fiction. I know he has his fans and I respect that, but his prose just doesn't work for me.

Finally, de Camp and Carter's attempt to put the Conan stories in chronological order--though it's an idea that obviously appealed to me--was a bit ham-fisted.

Like many REH fans, I discovered him through the Lancer/Ace paperback series (1966-1977)--12 paperbacks that organized the Conan tales into a chronological order and added new stories (or REH non-Conan stories re-written to star Conan) to fill in gaps in Conan's biography. 

The Lancer/Ace series included four original novels by de Camp and Carter. Of these, Conan the Buccaneer is simply dull. Conan the Avenger and Conan of Aquilonia plod along without ever being that exciting as they concentrated far too much on unneccesarily tying up supposed loose ends in Conan's life. 

The 1967 novel Conan of the Isles is the only one I remembered enjoying, so I recently re-read it again. 

In this one, Conan is in his mid-sixties and has been king of Aquilonia for several decades. He's now co-ruling with his young son Conn and he's bored to tears. He has defeated foreign enemies and his kingdom is prospering. He simply doesn't have anything interesting to do. His queen has died in childbirth and most of his old friends have passed on. 

But then strange amorphous "creatures" that come to be called the Red Shadows begin appearing, attacking people seemingly at random, then vanishing along with their victims. When Conan receives a vision from a representative of the gods giving him the job of stopping the Red Shadows (which are minons of a larger threat that threatens the entire world), Conan quietly abdicates and rides away, leaving his son to take over.

Conan heads to the coast, where he re-connects with an old friend from his days as a pirate. Soon, he has a ship and a crew. They sail west, leaving the Hyborian World behind.

What follows doesn't feel at all like a Conan story, but it is a fun and well-constructed fantasy adventure with some unique action scenes. There are several ship-to-ship battles, one of which involves a flame-thrower. Soon after that, Conan finds himself walking along the sea bottom, equipped with a breathing apparatus made from volcanic glass, getting into a fight with a giant octopus and a large shark. Later, he's attacked by a horde of dog-sized rats in an underground maze. He caps all this off by rescuing his crew from being sacrificed to a demon by releasing a horde of carnivorous 50-foot lizards into a proto-Aztec city. 

I really enjoy this last bit. It calls to mind old B-movies in which photographically enlarged lizards stand in for dinosaurs or generic monsters. It's a look that fits this story, which has a fun B-movie feel to it.

 

The book was meant to be the finale of the Conan saga and there is a short and legitimately melancholy chapter in which the barbarian reflects back on his life and his now-gone friends. But, since de Camp's Conan simply doesn't feel like REH's Conan, the novel can instead be looked at as a generic sword-and-sorcery tale or an alternate-universe Conan. 

I still like chronologies, fan theories and so on.  In fact, I would occasionally re-read the Conan stories in what I felt was an appropriate chronological order. But a comment on a Facebook REH group a few years ago convinced me that the best way to expreience the original tales is in the order they were written--as individual legends in the life of Conan without worrying about chronology. (Which doesn't mean I have stopped enjoying discussions about chronologies on their own.) 

So the non-REH stories can then also be taken on their own, to be enjoyed or dismissed on their own individual merits without bleeding over into Conan's "real life." Just like, for instance, we can read a biography of Wyatt Earp, then still enjoy his fictionalized adventures in novels, TV and film without it changing our view of Earp's real life.

In the case of Conan of the Isles, I once again enjoyed it. It does not inhabit that spot in the part of my brain that secretly thinks of Conan as a real person (only the REH stories live there), but I had fun with it. 

Some time in the next few weeks, we'll look at another writer's visit to the REH Universe with Karl Edward Wagner's Legion from the Shadows.