Conan the Barbarian

The story behind the story

First, a clarification that matters: there is no single book called Conan the Barbarian that Howard wrote in 1932. Conan debuted that year in the December issue of Weird Tales with a story called “The Phoenix on the Sword,” and Howard wrote around twenty more before his death in 1936. Most modern editions bundle these under the Conan the Barbarian banner, so that’s what we’re reviewing here: the original Howard stories, not the pastiches that later writers stapled onto the character for decades.

Howard essentially founded a genre. Sword and sorcery (lean, violent, morally murky adventure fiction with a wandering protagonist) starts more or less with these stories. He was writing for a penny-a-word pulp market from small-town Cross Plains, Texas, corresponding with H.P. Lovecraft, and inventing a prehistoric “Hyborian Age” complete with its own fake anthropology. That worldbuilding, done piecemeal across magazine issues, quietly became the template for how fantasy authors would map imaginary continents for the next ninety years.

What still works, and what has aged

The prose is the surprise. People expect meathead grunting; what they get is muscular, propulsive writing with a genuine ear for rhythm. Howard could open a story with a line of pure atmosphere and then cut to a throat being opened in the same paragraph, and the transition never feels clumsy. His action scenes remain a masterclass: kinetic, spatially clear, and mercifully brief. Plenty of celebrated modern fantasists still can’t stage a swordfight this cleanly.

Conan himself is also smarter than the parody allows. He’s a thief, a pirate, a mercenary, and eventually a king, and Howard writes him as shrewd, observant, and weirdly principled: contemptuous of “civilized” men whose cruelty hides behind manners. There’s a running theme here, a barbarism-versus-decadence argument, that gives the stories a spine most imitators lack.

Underneath the sword-swinging runs one persistent idea: that civilization is a thin, self-congratulating veneer, and that the so-called savage is often the only honest man in the room.

Now the honest part. These stories are products of 1930s pulp, and it shows. The racial attitudes range from casually dated to genuinely ugly, particularly in the depiction of the “darker” peoples of the Hyborian world. This isn’t a minor asterisk, and readers should know it going in. The women are frequently scenery: rescued, imperiled, or draped decoratively, though a few (Bêlit, Valeria) get real agency and are among Howard’s best characters. And because these were written as separate paychecks, there’s repetition of structure: Conan arrives, trouble festers, ancient evil stirs, steel solves it. Read as a novel, it sags. Read as intended, one or two at a sitting, it sings.

The actual reading experience

This is fast, physical, atmospheric fiction. A typical Conan story runs the length of a long short story, and Howard front-loads mood (crumbling towers, serpent-cults, cities swallowed by jungle) before the violence arrives. The Lovecraft influence gives the supernatural threats a genuine cosmic dread that most sword-and-sorcery never bothers with. It reads quickly and lingers longer than you’d expect. Check the latest price on Amazon, and look for the Del Rey collected editions, which restore Howard’s original texts without the later hands muddying them.

Who should read it, and what to read next

Read this if you love fantasy and want to understand where half of it came from. If you’ve enjoyed Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, or the grittier corners of modern grimdark, you’re reading Conan’s descendants. Skip it, or approach it carefully, if the dated racial content is a dealbreaker for you; that’s a fair line to draw. If Howard hooks you, go next to Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales for wit, or Moorcock’s Elric for the deliberate inversion of everything Conan stands for.