Hither Came Conan; A Review

Also a winner of The Valusian Award from
the Robert E. Howard Foundation.

Robert E. Howard Days was wonderful for many reasons, but among them was the opportunity to talk Robert E. Howard, anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Standing in line waiting for barbecue at the pavilion, on a schoolbus tour led by Rusty Burke, or wandering around downtown Cross Plains, everyone was there to talk REH and ready to engage in banter about their favorite tale or their own Howard origin story.

It was like being in a warm blanket of Howard-heads.

Then it was over, and I was thrust back into the hard cold world of the ordinary.

The good news is if you own Hither Came Conan you don’t have to wait a year for a similar experience. Imagine a bunch of folks gathered around a proverbial campfire with an assignment: "Why is this Conan story Howard’s best? You’ve got 10 minutes. Go.” That is the premise of this volume, published in 2023 by the nonprofit publishing house Rogue Blades Foundation.

Hither Came Conan serves as a fine companion to the Conan stories. I can imagine this book serving as an ongoing reference, pulling it off the shelf and seeing what Deuce Richardson or Gabe Dybing has to say when you’ve finished re-reading “Black Colossus” or “The People of the Black Circle” for the eighth time.

This exercise admittedly gets a bit absurd when you are assigned something like “Vale of Lost Women” or the unfinished “Wolves Beyond the Border.” Everything Howard wrote has some minor touch of genius, some cool scene or vivid snatch of poetic prose, but no one can seriously defend the likes of “Vale” as REH’s finest hour. But I give the respective essayists credit for the attempt.

The list is authors assembled for this project is impressive. Wide ranging, from top scholars to fiction authors and ardent fans. People like Patrice Louinet, who stands in the black circle of top Howard scholars (his Hyborian Genesis essays in the Del Reys are a must), Jeff Shanks, David C. Smith, Bobby Derie, Mark Finn, Morgan Holmes, Richardson, many others.  But the true spine of the book is “Re-Reading” Conan by Bill Ward and Howard Andrew Jones, a written dialogue which appears with every story including the “Wolves on the Border” fragment and “The Hyborian Age.”

Truth be told I was preoccupied and not paying attention in 2015 when the great Black Gate Conan re-read was going on, and so I missed this series when it first appeared. It is reprinted here in Hither Came Conan and so was new to me. This remains the best part of the book. Ward and Jones engage in a back-and-forth discussion that almost feels like spoken word. Both are of course incredibly complementary to REH and offer shrewd insights into what makes each tale great, or at least solid pulp fare, while largely managing to avoid engaging in hagiography. Neither are afraid to critique REH and talk about which stories or parts of his stories fell flat or conform to predictable pulp formula. I’m still puzzled by Howard (Andrew Jones’) ongoing rejection of “Beyond the Black River” but hey, that’s why you read a book like this. If it was all unadorned praise it would invite no engagement and discussion and get real boring, real fast.

Some of the essays are very good, others are uneven or somewhat uninspired. My own is in here (“Honor Among Thieves: Hyborian Age Morality,” an “Extra, Extra!” essay analyzing “Rogues in the House,”) which in hindsight is OK. I’m my own worst critic. If you’ve read it let me know what you think.

I gleaned a few new insights reading the essays, for example the considerable effort REH placed into “Man-Eaters of Zamboula” after reading John Bullard’s appraisal of Howard’s careful revisions over three drafts. But what is best about this book is the sense of shared admiration for this character, and the varied voices of the wonderful community of fans that have sprung up around him. In that vein I also appreciated the work of editors Jason Waltz and Bob Byrne for also including the voices of the readers of Weird Tales. It gives us a sense of communion with the past, and the knowledge that fans leaving comments on the Black Gate website aren’t so different than fans writing to The Eyrie letters column circa 1932-37. 

Indeed any evaluation of Robert E. Howard and Conan involves a communion with a time and place nearly 100 years ago. But one that thankfully shows no signs of slipping into the past, thanks to new volumes like this.