During my glaringly obvious absence from writing for y'all here, I've been spending a decent amount of time camping. And while camping, my go-to reading material has been the Del Rey collections of the original stories of Conan the Barbarian. Written by Robert E. Howard with various illustrations dispersed throughout, these collections are beautiful paperbacks full of beautiful sword-and-sorcery fantasy.
Howard was a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft, which is how I was initially exposed to him. Together with Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft and Howard dominated the pulp magazines of the 1910s and 1920s: Lovecraft with his widely-known brand of cosmic horror; Howard with his fantasy (and occasional bouts of horror); Smith with his decidedly individual blend of the two. These three, with other contemporaries of the time, are now known as the Lovecraft Circle, and it's been wonderful exploring their various works to see how they influence and entwine with each other.
My knowledge of these stories before reading them ran something like this:
1.) These were fantasy stories that connected with the Mythos, somehow.
2.) The 2011 Conan the Barbarian film was kinda neat.
And that was about it. On a whim I committed to all three volumes, and am almost finished with the first. One thing that became readily apparent was that, although the genre is quite different from Lovecraft's, Howard can create an eerie atmosphere just as well, and often better, than Lovecraft himself. The story lines might seem kind of trite when generalized (Conan saves the scantily-clad woman! Conan defeats the evil wizard! Conan saves a different scantily-clad girl!) but really, aren't we all in it for the journey rather than the destination?
This particular illustration, from "The Tower of the Elephant", is one of my favorites thus far: Conan, during the part of his life where he was a scoundrel-for-hire, successfully enters the eldritch Elephant Tower and meets... well, you can very well see what he meets. Howard's writing is descriptive on the verge of being flowery, and everything on this ancient Earth is extravagant: the tower itself is carved completely from silver. Whole rooms are surfaced with precious gems. Thrones are carved from single, giant pieces of ivory. So yes, in the end this story is "Conan hears a rumor of a great treasure, Conan goes to steal great treasure, Conan kills evil wizard in the process," but the whole scene and mood combine to create a wonderfully rich atmosphere with just enough foreboding to keep this fabled history tense and brooding.
In summation: Conan stories are fun and dark and a wonderful thing to have on your lap while sitting around a campfire for five days straight.
Aleathia says:
This year has been hard on the reading front for me. It seems after I turned 40 my attention span disappeared. I am less satisfied to sit still reading a book than I used to be. This pains me, honestly. I did finish the last book I was reading. It was a great book, but I felt like I would never finish it.
This time around I had my kid pick a letter of the alphabet and I went to our library and chose an author with the last name beginning with "B". There was a thin, sleek book on the shelf by Saul Bellow called Seize the Day.
Years ago when I started reading all the Pulitzer Prize winning novels for Fiction, Bellow's Humboldt's Gift was one of the first ones I read. His language is smooth and cutting at the same time and really sinks into my brain effortlessly. This particular book is about a man in the 30's-40's after the stock market crash who was a child of privilege who never lived up to his parents expectations. It is about his journey navigating this society pretending to have money when he doesn't. He lives his life a disappointment to his family. I always find it funny that I don't read Saul Bellow more. When I get back into him I am always pleased.
“One thing should be clear to you now. Money-making is aggression. That's the whole thing. The functionalistic explanation is the only one. People come to the market to kill. They say, 'I'm going to make a killing.' It's not accidental. Only they haven't got the genuine courage to kill, and they erect a symbol of it. The money. They make a killing by fantasy.” --Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
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