Conan: City of the Dead: A Review
Those who have been around here for a while or joined the column as a result of my Pulptober posts know that I am a rabid Conan the Barbarian fan and also a bit of an REH purist. As a rule I intensely dislike the prose pastiches of the work. They almost always get something wrong, some piece of the elemental vitality of the Cimmerian or the bloody whirlwind he carves through his foes almost always gets lost when it isn't Howard writing. Almost always. City of the Dead, brought to us by John C Hocking, is actually two barbaric sagas in one volume. The Emerald Lotus follows Conan as he reluctantly becomes embroiled in a feud between sorcerers involving a powder that allows a practitioner to summon nearly inhuman levels of magical prowess at terrible cost. The barbarian is compelled to accompany an expedition to shadowed Stygia to deal with the source of this foul substance.
Emerald Lotus is the weaker of the two stories, but it's still a very good time. There's plenty of blood-drenched fight scenes, our Cimmerian is recognisably himself without strange impulses or out-of-character moments, and the plot moves along at a fair, if predictable, pace. I'm not fond of Conan tales that attempt to cast weavers of the black arts in sympathetic roles. There are two that spring to mind from the REH years: Pelias, who is less a 'good wizard' and more a formidable (possibly no longer human) sorcerer who happens to be opposed to Tsotha-Lani, and Zelata, who is certainly more benign but also quite ambiguous as to how much of what she's doing is actually magic*. Emerald Lotus... I wouldn't say puts an unambiguously good sorceress front and center, but certainly puts forth the most honest and least actively malicious practitioner I can recall in Conan prose, and that isn't a plus for me. Sorcery in Howard's realm has a price so steep that good folk wouldn't contemplate it, and I tend to prefer it that way. The Living Plague is a direct sequel to Emerald Lotus despite being published almost thirty years after the first story. In this grim tale, Conan signs on with an upstart prince of Shem, lured by the promise of riches languishing in a city stricken by a plague seemingly belched out of the Hells themselves. Things, as you might expect, do not go to plan, and Conan faces far worse than mere disease within the walls of Dulcine. I finished Living Plague in a single day. I did not intend to do this, but I was hooked by the setting, the evocatively written fight scenes and a plot that kept throwing larger and more formidable obstacles in Conan's path. Once the mercenaries arrive at the strange plagued city things get very heavy metal and strange, and they keep getting stranger up to a climax I was not expecting in the slightest. I cannot elaborate without robbing the tale of much of its effect, so I will not. I don't think this duology will be enough to shake my general opinion of Conan pastiche work but I am happy to carve out an exception and have it sit in that niche. The Living Plague is not REH, but it's something comparably compelling and it steps out a little from Two Gun Bob's shadow without spitting on his headstone. Overall 8.5/10
*I'm sure someone will bring up one that I've forgotten
