A curved tulwar swung at the hip of every one except for him who marched close behind Amanar. The fingers of the elongated hands that held their spears ended not in nails, but in claws.

His henchmen looked like ordinary men, at first glance and from a distance, but their faces were vaguely pointed, their eyes glinted red beneath ridged helmets, and their skins bore reptilian scales. He was slender, this thaumaturge, and darkly handsome, his black beard cropped close but a vaguely serpentlike streak of white meandered through his short hair, and the red flecks that danced in his eyes drew the gaze, and the will, of anyone foolish enough to look deeply. Fierce hillmen who feared nothing rode miles out of their way to go around that dark bastion, and made the sign of the horns to ward off evil at its mention.Īmanar the Necromancer made his way down a dim corridor that violated the very heartstone of the mountain, followed by those no longer human. As in soap opera, the charm of sword-and-sorcery fantasy is that the adventures go on forever.The icy wind whipping through the brown, sheer-walled chasms of the Kezankian Mountains seemed colder still around the bleak stone fortress that grew from the granite flank of a nameless mountain in the heart of the range. Conan always ends up footloose, underfunded and ready for fresh exploits. Throughout there are lashings of swordplay, blood, loot, sex, human sacrifice, supernatural nasties and battles against impossible odds.

Conan clashes with typical Howard foes, such as Amanar the Necromancer, servant of that snaky god-demon the Eater of Souls Albanus the intending royal usurper, who has assembled an armoury of magic weapons to take a throne which Conan finds himself defending and Jhandar the chaos mage of the Cult of Doom, who unwisely decides to eliminate Conan as an obstacle to his planned empire. Though perhaps lacking that touch of inspired madness that shone through Howard's clumsy writing and made Conan immortal, these are competent, full-blooded fantasy thrillers.

The Conan Chronicles is an omnibus of the first three: Conan the Invincible, Conan the Defender and Conan the Unconquered. This influential saga of swords and sorcery has been rearranged and extended by other authors and Robert Jordan-now famous in fantasy for his Wheel of Time sequence-wrote seven new Conan novels in the early 1980s. Howard in 17 stories written between 1932 and his suicide at age 30 in 1936. The bloodthirsty barbarian hero Conan the Cimmerian was created by Robert E.

Conan the Unconquered by Robert Jordan