Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Further Chronicles of Conan by Robert Jordan.

This omnibus edition includes Conan the Magnificent (my earlier review here), Conan the Triumphant, and Conan the Victorious (my earlier review here). There is no editorial framing to relate the three novels to each other or to any larger Conan continuity. Strangely, the sequence in which they appear in the book is neither their order of first publication (in which Conan the Triumphant led), nor that of their likely narrative chronology (in which Triumphant would be the last of the three). Perhaps this volume reflects the order in which Jordan actually wrote them? They were all originally issued in paperback by Tor Books in a period of little more than a single year.

By sheer chance, I ended up reading the three stories in their chronological sequence. Of the three, Triumphant is the most conservative, in terms of its closeness to the REH character and setting. The other two novels take place in the east of Conan’s world (the far east in the case of Victorious), and demand a little more creativity on Jordan’s part. There is certainly some inventiveness in Triumphant, centering mostly on the nature of the supernatural threat involved: a dormant demon-god held over from the Acheronian-age past who thrives on BDSM. It is somewhat puzzling that this entity has an apparently Arabic name. 

Another notable feature of Triumphant is the reappearance of Karela, a bandit leader nursing a love-hate relationship for Conan that she had developed in previous stories by Jordan; she is only one of the several female characters used ceaselessly –and somewhat preposterously–throughout this novel to emphasize the barbarian’s irresistability for the sexual appetites of all women. 

I retract the hypothesis advanced in my earlier review that Jordan had “never really developed a rhythm for a short stand-alone novel.” In fact, he had written multiple Conan novels before the ones collected here (thus “Further Chronicles”), and these three show scrupulous adherence to a somewhat mechanical formula. The feature that had put me off–a hasty climax and plot resolution–is evidently just the way he writes. Each book dependably features a prologue which provides a first exposition from a “villain’s-eye view.” Then the focus shifts to Conan, and follows his progress into deeper and deeper trouble, with him unaware of the sorcerous elements involved until nearly midway through the book. The entire climax of the book, including the abrupt defeat of the supernatural menace, is packed into a final chapter. And an epilogue details the fates of the principal characters.

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Conan Chronicles by Robert Jordan.

When I bought this hardcover omnibus volume of the first three Robert Jordan novels published in the Tor Books Conan series, I thought that I had already read all of them in individual mass-market paperbacks. But when I finally got around to cracking the book, inspired by a perverse nostalgia for the first one Conan the Invincible (certainly one of the earliest Conan books I had read, back in my teens), I discovered that I had never read the other two. So I went ahead and ripped through them; they’re far from heavy reading.

In all three novels, Jordan makes competent though uninspired use of the Hyborian settings: Shadizar, Belverus, and Aghrapur. Karela the Red Hawk and her sometime lieutenant Hordo are original Jordan characters who provide continuity between the first two stories. Karela is a red-haired bandit who seems to have been suggested in part by the Red Sonja comic book character (herself derived from Robert E. Howard’s Red Sonya), and Jordan builds a sexualized frenemy relationship between her and Conan.

The author’s particular erotic fantasies are on evident display consistently through this collection. In each of the first two books, a sorcerer-villain establishes mind control over a beautiful woman and has her strip naked as a demonstration of the effect. (In the third, the lascivious wizard simply asserts supernatural dominance over a woman already nude.) Although it’s not Conan’s most frequent approach, he obtains sex through presumed consent in all three stories, i.e. he forces himself on a woman who is overtly upset with him, and offers to stop if she tells him to–which she doesn’t. In these episodes, the sex is also construed as something the woman in question “owes” to Conan for her misbehavior.

The third novel Conan the Unconquered involves the “Cult of Doom,” which makes it appear rather derivative from the John Milius and Oliver Stone cinematic Conan story that had reached screens the year before Unconquered was published. The villain in this case, though, is not Thulsa Doom (pilfered by the movie from Howard’s Kull stories), but a necromancer named Jhandar. The megalomaniac warlocks that Jordan throws against Conan are in fact disappointingly uniform.

Even among the Tor Conan books, these are merely passable entries, outclassed by many of the later ones. [via]

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Conan the Victorious by Robert Jordan.

Jordan’s novel is an adequate entertainment grounded in the Conan property. A youngish Conan goes to Vendhya (the Hyborian Age version of East India) in search of revenge and a cure for a poison he’s been afflicted with. Savagery, seductresses, and sorcery ensue.

More curious is the appendix “Conan the Indestructible” by L. Sprague de Camp, which is a thirty-page attempt to construct an integral Conan biography or comprehensive narrative continuity that embraces all of the original Howard stories, the early Carter and de Camp pastiches, the Bantam Conan novels (Offutt, Wagner, de Camp, and Anderson), the Tor Conan books (Jordan, to that point) and even the movie novelizations. It has a few hilarious little passages of mock-scholarship, as it adheres throughout to the conceit that these are genuine legends of pre-antiquity, attested through ancient texts. [via]