Conan: The Definitive Collection

by Robert E. Howard

This giant tome contains all 18 of Robert E. Howard's stories about Conan the Barbarian, published in Weird Tales magazine between 1933-1936 and features an interactive table of contents.

Included are the stories:
The Tower of the Elephant
Rogues in the House
Gods of the North
Queen of the Black Coast
Black Colossus
Shadows in the Moonlight
A Witch Shall Be Born
Shadows in Zamboula
The Devil in Iron
The People of the Black Circle
The Slithering Shadow
The Pool of the Black One
Red Nails
Jewels of Gwahlur
Beyond the Black River
The Phoenix on the Sword
The Scarlet Citadel
The Hour of the Dragon

Also you get:
Cimmeria - a poem
The Hyborian Age - Howard's essay on the world of Conan

Genres: Fantasy, Classics, Adventure

858 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 8, 2014

About the author

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."

He is well known for having created—in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales—the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can only be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

—Wikipedia

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[C.T. Phipps · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.” - Conan, Queen of the Black Coast

The thing to understand about Robert E. Howard is that he was a good writer. This feels like it's a redundancy. After all, his stories are still inspiring people a hundred years later. Except, it really isn't. I've read the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and HP Lovecraft extensively while being utterly fascinated by their worlds. However, I have to adjust my brain a little bit to absorb their style of prose. Robert E. Howard is as good today as he was a century ago and it is every bit as enjoyable to modern eyes (with the occasional bit of values dissonance--but not even that much).

No, in fact, I'm going to come out and say it: Robert E. Howard is a fricking FANTASTIC writer. His every word is evocative and transports you to a magical land every bit as wondrous and amazing as Middle Earth. I will go so far as to say I think Robert E. Howard, Tolkien, and Frank Herbert are pretty much the three greatest fantasy/science fiction writers of all time. Extra points for the fact Robert E. Howard was communicating his beautiful reality through short stories and one novel.

It wasn't accurate to Conan in any real way but I'm reminded of the John Milinus Conan the Barbarian movie in a very real way: the stories have no right to be as deep or as engrossing as they are. Robert E. Howard pooh pahed civilization and wrote of a mighty warrior from a purer barbarian people but his stories were deeply influenced by history, archaeology, philosophy, religion, and mythology.

I consider myself an intelligent man but when I read them as a teenager versus reading them as a Master of History, I find myself awed in an entirely different way by the concepts involved. John Milinus didn't adapt Conan accurately but he wrote in the same way that Howard did: stories that worked perfectly on a pure action level as well as deep meditations on bigger concepts. Its timeless and amazing in the same way Blade Runner is (except in the distant past not future).

Who is Howard's Conan? He is a barbarian, mercenary, pirate, cat burglar, philosopher, and eventually king. He was a man too big and too curious for his native Cimmeria and lived life to its fullest until the time he took responsibility for a dying civilization. He's our travel guide for the fantastic worlds Howard takes us to and introduces us to the strange land we're in by living it.

Fiercely intelligent, fiercely loyal, and frequently fed up with this nonsense -- he is a hero and antihero at various points in his life but doesn't so much change as evolve. We start with the end of his career and go through the past but it never feels inauthentic. He is as alive as any fictional character can be and I think I know him better than most real people I know.

Just read Howard's stories on Conan, you won't regret it. Everyone should.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Hyborian Age—where all the women were supple and all the men had mighty thews.
The world of Conan is a riot of wildly diverse races, cultures, and civilizations. Roman-inspired troops fight pseudo-Egyptians, there are echoes of Babylon and Persia, grim Celto-Germans, fearsome steppe nomads, and Picts that more closely resemble a caricature of native Americans than ancient British tribes. Speaking of native Americans, there are Aztecs too, or perhaps Mayans, though considering one of their number is named “Olmec,” it’s hard to tell. An Iranistan resembling old Orientalist legends of the Ottoman Empire butts up against a desert filled with Cossacks and a distant pseudo-India. The Far East is out there somewhere, and the jungles, plains, and deserts of “the Black Kingdoms.”
This incoherent mix of cultures from every era and part of the world is engaged in a constant struggle for survival, where only the mightiest races can survive. And race is very key in the story. If you cut Howard, he bleeds with that old style of Darwinian racism that is no longer in vogue among scientifically minded progressives. The darker the skin, the more savage—usually—the person. Peoples’ characters are defined by their bloodlines, genetics having a strange amount of weight in an otherwise Nietzschean, will-centered story universe.
The overall effect is an intriguing one. Are Aquilonians Roman or high medieval France? How did a Mesoamerican people sprout out of what appears to be Egyptian stock? Are the Egypt-inspired Stygian sorcerers actually any different from the Shemite villains Conan meets elsewhere? Are the Cimmerians Celts, or Germans, or Scythians, or something else altogether? What is the difference between the black men whose race makes them little more than animals in Conan’s sight, and the black men Conan is willing to call his friends?
This wild riot is intriguing. There’s always something new—if not terribly so—and each piece of the puzzle is just suggestive enough to make you want to fit them all together, to form a coherent view of Conan’s world. At every turn, however, you are confronted with contradictory bits of information, or some strange new problem that destroys the picture you thought was coming into view. Still, the fruitlessness of the exercise does not diminish its effect. With each new story, you are drawn into the world and wondering at every new and exotic person, city, custom, or creature that comes around the corner.
While Howard’s Darwinian racism is more central to his stories, and expressed in far more violent outbursts than in those of his friend, H. P. Lovecraft, it is qualified in an interesting way. Though Conan looks down in contempt at so many peoples for being uncivilized and barbaric, barbarism is clearly something both Conan and his creator admire. There is something more primal and more excellent about a wild man, a barbarian, a wolf in human form, than in the soft folk of more civilized stock. It is always the city folk who are the first to die, and one particular story makes it startlingly clear that all civilization goes this way. In Conan’s world, the natural state of man is wild barbarism, barely elevated above the animals. That is the place where human excellence thrives, and all civilization must ultimately bow before this fact as it is swept away in the sands of time and only the strong, the wild, the primitive remains. In such a world, how seriously can we take the supposed inferiority of Pictish hordes or Afghuli tribesmen?
Conan himself is an interesting puzzle. Like Superman, he’s impossible to beat, but he is far more cynical than that golden-age American hero. The only law he recognizes is survival, the only good he knows is the pleasure of his own belly—supple women, power, and gold. Indeed, the coldly predatory way he sometimes treats women is shocking, despite Howard’s unwillingness to cross certain lines or his studied avoidance of any entirely explicit sexual content. Conan is a creature powered largely by his lizard brain, made unstoppable by the might of his arm and his rough upbringing in the hills of Cimmeria.
Then again, Conan sometimes does make a moral choice. He saves a woman rather than treasure, goes back to save a newly-met traveling companion rather than fleeing to safety. Sometimes this is waved away with a cynical comment about how it was in his own self-interest in a roundabout way, or the careless acknowledgment that risking his neck like that was a poor choice, one he probably will not repeat. But sometimes it seems like Conan is developing human qualities that have little to do with the primitive pleasure-centers of his brain. There might be some character hiding under all the raw barbarian muscle.
The Lovecraft connection really cannot be ignored. Nods are given to that mythos, certainly, but they share a larger underlying logic. Lovecraft sets out in his work to tear down man’s presumptuously anthropocentric view of the universe. He does so by introducing his characters to inhuman beings of great antiquity, of vast power, and who little notice or care what happens to feeble humankind. Entire civilizations struggled up from the slime before us, many dwell beside us, and many more will outlive us. We are less than a footnote in the annals of cosmic history.
Howard takes a crack at our anthropocentric presuppositions, but from another point of view. Rather than drawing attention to what gods or monsters might exist beyond the limits of our knowledge—though they certainly do exist in this world—Howard draws attention to our own continuity with the forms of life below us. All too often, Conan stumbles across a race of men that look and act a little too apelike. At other times, he runs across apes that act far too human. Conan himself is often said to have more in common with a jungle dragon or a wild wolf than he does with civilized men. He even knows the name and sign of a god the animals worship but man has long forgotten. Always we are reminded that men are merely beasts, and beasts may be more cunning, or stronger, than men. After all, many races of man have little more intelligence than the apes from which they are descended. The illusion that we are special is constantly dashed.
This is why racism is so prominent in Conan’s world. It’s the entire point. Man is just another beast in the struggle for survival. At any point he is arising from another species of ape, or diverging along two evolutionary paths. Just as the Atlanteans once overcame the other stocks of men in their world, and the Hyborians overcame the new races of men after the Cataclysm, so the “sons of Aryas” will soon wipe out what is left of Conan’s world and a new stock of human will come to dominate the surface of the planet—an event of far less consequence than such a creature might think. History is nothing but a succession of species eliminating its competitors and spreading its seed.
That, by the way, also makes the religion of the Hyborian world a far more brutal thing than in many other settings. There is no reverence among the followers of the gods, except on the part of the weak minded and easily killed. One might expect religion to be a superstition in this world, but it is not. No, the gods exist, but they are just another form of life, one more powerful than man, one that might be persuaded to help him if given the right incentive. The gods of Conan’s age are things to be cynically bartered with in acts barely distinguishable from either the summoning of a demon or the hiring of a mercenary. They are far from holy.
This is what makes the Conan movie so very different from these stories. The racism is toned far down, and the gods, though hardly treated with reverence, do not figure as hugely or as savagely in the darkness behind their sorcerous servants as they do in Howard’s originals. Where the written Conan is essentially an escapist fantasy where we get to follow the ubermensch around as his slays, lays, and plunders his way across an exoticized version of our own past, the film is a more sensitive treatment of the riddle of steel, of man’s heart and will and strength. It also asks Conan what is best in life—and wants you to seriously consider the answer as the film proceeds. While Howard’s stories certainly have some deep themes, it is rare that he explores them so philosophically. He sees, perhaps, far less meaning in life than the filmmakers, and far less wisdom to be gained from contemplating it.
Overall, the original Conan the Barbarian stories are quite a diverting smattering of adventures. Though the language gets a bit repetitive and the world never quite coheres, the zest with which Conan engages his world, the thrill of combat, of survival in dire circumstances, the wonder of strange lands—all can keep the reader spellbound for hours at a time. While I wouldn’t want to spend entire novels in this world, the occasional vacation there is enjoyable. It’s not hard to see how it inspired so many imitators and retellings. It’s quite the ride. Particularly “Beyond the Black River.”

“Conan's hand fell heavily on her naked shoulder.
‘Stand aside, girl,’ he mumbled. ‘Now is the feasting of swords.’"

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a long time fan of Howard's work, and have read Conan stories since my high school years. This incredibly dense and huge collection represents all the Conan stories published in Weird Tales magazine between 1933-36. While there were stories I liked very much, and others not so much, overall it was a great reading experience, which, frankly, took me nearly a year to complete. Granted, I never tried to plow through more than a few stories at a time, and the realities of life dictated that I had to share my reading time with manuscripts for upcoming illustration projects. Despite the time investment, I never considered letting it go and moving on, though the fictional historical essay The Hyborian Age tested my resolve. I much preferred the fiction. The final word? This book receives my highest recommendation.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a similar collection of H.P. Lovecraft's work a few years back so was curious about R.E.H- a contemporary. These stories are from the "swords and sorcery" genre and by today's standards are quite culturally insensitive, to put it mildly. But it's also interesting to see how R.E.H helped plant the seeds for the Fantasy juggernaut to come. For what it's worth I believe his Conan stories helped pave the way for Dungeons & Dragons and Game of Thrones.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult to rate as a single unit because it is a compilation of short stories. Some were twos. Some were fours. A worthwhile look at some of the foundational stories of fantasy literature.

[Nick Senger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read the stories of Conan the Barbarian over thirty years ago, in the Lancer/Ace paperback versions that included stories by his creator Robert E. Howard as well as new tales by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp. The Lancer/Ace editions presented the Conan stories in the order of the fictional barbarian's life, and traced his progress from thief to king. For my Classics Challenge, I wanted to read only the original stories by Howard, and in the order they were first published, so I chose a Kindle edition that included all 18 stories as published in Weird Tales magazine from 1933 to 1938.

The 18 tales move back and forth through the timeline of Conan's life, but that wasn't as jarring as I thought it would be. In fact, it felt just as Robert E. Howard described in a letter to P.S. Miller in March of 1936:

"In writing these yarns I've always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That's why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him."

Those "widely separated" narrated episodes are classics in the heroic fantasy genre, influencing countless writers, for good or ill. This definitive collection contains stories from every stage of Conan's career: thief, pirate, mercenary, king. In over 800 pages, the muscular barbarian from the north with "volcanic blue eyes" and a black "square cut mane" faces giant apes, alien gods, and sorcerers brought back from the dead, to say nothing of the many scantily-clad women he encounters.

Taken as a whole, these are dark tales with dark settings. But behind these stories lies a philosophy that hearkens back to the Romanticism of the early 19th century: "Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical." Much of that is evident in this collection. The thematic thread running through the Conan stories is a disdain for civilization and a preference for freedom, nature and simplicity. Conan succeeds because he is powerful, direct, and fiercely independent.

I think it is fair to say that he is the kind of character that could only have arisen in America. He may be a rogue, but he is a virtuous rogue, that quintessentially American character. He is cut from the same cloth as the fallen private eye of film noir, or the lone gunfighter with the heart of gold.

After reading the Conan stories in their "pure" form--unedited and in order of publication--I have to say that I have mixed feelings about them. I love the exotic settings, the way Howard is able to create an eerie atmosphere so efficiently, and the action-oriented plots. But the stories do get repetitive after awhile, especially when read continuously. And while I appreciated Howard's criticism of the hypocrisy and phoniness of modern life, I grew tired of the repetitive violence, the stereotyped women, and the episodic plots. A better way to read them is probably to take one story a week or maybe one a month. Even then, however, they portray an ideal and a philosophy that I think does damage to the heart of America if left unchecked. Perhaps the way to view the Conan stories is as an entertaining corrective to the passionless routine that modern life can sometimes become.

[Greg South · Rating 2 out of 5]

Note that 2/5 rating normally means "it was terrible" but I'm sticking to goodread's definition, "it was ok."

Howard was an pulp fiction writer who has had a profound effect on the modern fantasy genre. It succeeded in stirring up the thirst for adventure that I turn to the genre for, but it simply does not hold up to most fantasy works of the time.

I've been reading through the most influential works of modern fantasy. After reading the great poets Homer and Virgil, and the professors of literature Tolkien and Lewis, Howard, an young man without a secondary education, seemed juvenile. This is a byproduct of reading a collection where his writing skills wax over time, his last two works, "The Hour of the Dragon," and "Red Nails" are much better than the hours of writing that precede it in the collection. That aside, Howard was a pulp fiction writer, and I believe the title "great pulp fiction writer," is more fitting than "great fantasy writer" considering the other giants of the genre.

Howard's take on fantasy is particularly interesting. It seemed more like a world as seen by the superstitious people of today; a world mostly inhabited by man, but infested by monsters in the dark and wizard and witches who must do terrible things to gain their power. For all that, Howard, being an areligious man from rural Texas in the 1930s, creates a depressing worldview compared to the educated Christian fantasy writers from the same time period. Particularly, while I have some patience for his views of race and gender considering the time and place he came from, there's no denying they simply subtract from the quality of his work.

[Clint the Cool Guy · Rating 2 out of 5]

SUPER boring. These stories are incredibly long, and after you’ve read a few of them, you start to realize that they are all about the same.

I read all but the last story, which is the longest. By that time, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Every villain in this book is exactly like. Conan gets an intro to every story in which he is described the same way every time. There are hardly any supporting characters and none of them do anything except provide dialog for Conan.

The females here are really odd, too. They are all portrayed exactly the same way, as strong, tough women who still somehow ending up needing Conan to save them. Also, almost all of them end up topless or nude in the story, which none of them seem to have a problem with. But the weirdest thing is how the sexuality of Conan is portrayed. He is constantly around these women, and always grabbing them and kissing them. But anything beyond that is rarely even implied. It makes Conan seem super macho, yet oddly sexless. A product of its time, I guess, as cheap adolescent male pulp fiction.

The dialog and exposition really drags in these stories. Pages and pages of exposition will be devoted to background events, telling you rather than showing you. Once you see a big wall of text starting up about the history of someplace-or-other, you start wishing you were reading something else.

The stories do have some interesting moments, and Conan is undoubtedly a cool hero. These stories are iconic in some ways. But they haven’t aged all that well, and by Crom, I doubt I’ll ever read anything else by this author.

[Mcf1nder_sk · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a youngster, I had enjoyed the tales of Conan the Barbarian by Robert E Howard, Lin Carter and L Sprague deCamp. When I discovered this collection of 18 early tales of adventure starring Conan on Amazon, it was an opportunity tio relive my youth amidst the daily grind of adulthood.
These are not the only stories written by Howard, but it is a nice blend of Conan's early adventures, as a thief, a pirate, a mercenary, and eventually a king.
Being an over the top adventure series, the men are larger than life, the women are all beautiful seductresses or innocent maidens, the action is fast paced and the violence is brutal and graphic.
This is not a classic novel, but it was a wonderful escape, and sometimes that's all a 📖 needs to be.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like any collection there's great stories, and meh stories in here.
Yes, it legitimately took me almost 10 years to get through all of this. I would read a story, then put it down and read a bunch of other books, then read another and so on. It feels really good to finally finish it. I'm doing the same thing with an HP Lovecraft collection, so look for that review 5 years from now.

[Nilda McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The original 'sword and sandal' stories. I can see what has made these stories, and this author, the standard. However they are definitely a product of time they were written. If you can get past that, these stories are worth checking out.

[Og Maciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read the Conan magazines as a teenager and thoroughly enjoyed the stories, I was taken back to those early years while reading the 18 stories included in this book!

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

As far as I can tell this collection represents pretty much everything R E Howard completed on the topic of Conan in his lifetime.

First thing to note. Conan is very much of his time when it comes to casual racism and misogyny. This may be difficult to get past for some readers.

As other reviewers have noted that a collection is bound to be a mixed bag. Perhaps the strongest entry is the final arc where King Conan is deposed and goes on a rollicking series of adventures in order to recapture his crown.

Considered as a whole it is clear that while Conan may have been one of the originals of the genre he is not the best. The stories often appear rushed and a little formulaic, no doubt they were cranked out under tight constraints. For example, read the first paragraph after Conan is introduced in each story. Nine times out of ten the format is the same. Conan is described from head to tail; long hair, broad shoulders, sword and "naked except for a loincloth". Side note, it turns out there are many ways to describe loincloths; wet, ragged, muddy, tattered.

If you're looking for something like this but perhaps a little deeper (only a little mind) consider the "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser" tales.

[Exanimis · Rating 5 out of 5]

" Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars - Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

Many books on writing state the importance of grabbing your target audiance with the first chapter, Robert E. Howard did it with a single paragraph. Reading that paragraph, you know that you are beginning a journey unlike any other and your would is about to be forever changed by the writings of an unmistakable master of the art, although many have tried, none compair to Robert E. Howard.

[Jared Trueheart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly awesome fantasy

These stories are presented in the order they were published. In this way you really appreciate the genius of Robert E. Howard. The highlight is definitely The Hour of the Dragon, his only novel and the last published Conan story (written by him). When you read it you will remember the very first conan story and be impressed by the sheer scope of the character and the world. Can't recommend this book enough. Only $0.99!!! It is well worth ten dollars.

[Bcoghill Coghill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Takes me back to my late teens when I devoured the Conan stories. A pleasure to return to them. The Howard stories, to me, were the best.

[Tome Addiction · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Conan, not much more to say about it.

[Brian L Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Old goodie

Refresh with one of Tyrolese originals and relax. A fun trip in barbarian land.

Do not require me to write a minimum of 20 words fora review and not expect as snark.