Conan - Blood of the Serpent: The All-New Chronicles of the Worlds Greatest Barbarian Hero

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Before I forget I also wanted to bring up the other main character, Valeria. If you've read Red Nails then you know who she is. If not, no worries, because this book introduces her for the first time officially. She is a stellar character, almost equal to Conan in fighting prowess and highly intelligent. Their interactions throughout are part of what makes this story compelling. I'll say no morem

My ongoing criticism is sword & sorcery does not lend itself to 100,000 word novels. The form works well at the novelette and novella level. I understand what complaints people might have but seeing him still take the lead everywhere he goes, reading about the difference in cultures and languages, outfits, gear, etc., as he fights against and alongside men and women from other regions was a welcome expansion to the world and lore that we know and love. I appreciated the little details. The food. The money. Hunting techniques. Cultural things for the various countries. Strategy. Landscape. The book also contains a new map (presumably by De La Torre). This new map contains more detail than the Lancer/Ace (the gold standard) maps did. I wish they had printed it in a larger size. I do have a minor complaint about fonts used in the text. The book uses both italics and bold italics. At first I thought this was a clever way of replacing quotes for the character’s thoughts. But the motif is used inconsistently.Blood of the Serpent is an earlier tale set before and leading into Robert E. Howard's Red Nails. The plan was to create a story that could fit inside Howard's timeline for Conan and not outside it. I don't know what the other rules were, but instead of the usual short stories we get a brand new Conan novel, and it's a bit different from classic sword and sorcery. Is this a bad thing? Let's see! Which, if it helps the story, okay. But one of Elmore Leonard's most famous writing rules is to leave out the parts that people skip. Stirling seems to have gathered up all those skippable parts and stuffed them into this story to make it novel length when, at best, this should have been a novella. Revision: While the novel doesn't directly contradict anything that is established in Red Nails, it shows Conan and Valeria interacting with each other while serving in Zarallo's mercenaries to a far greater degree than their dialogue at the start of the novella implied, having had an entire adventure together already.

In Howard’s grim and all too realistic view, the barbarians are always at the gate, and once a culture allows itself to grow soft, decadent or simply neglectful, it will be swept away by the primitive and ruthless.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post I hesitate to call Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian an imitation of Tarzan; the influence of Burroughs on Howard was great but Howard’s imagination was so powerful that any Tarzan in Conan tends to be submerged in the latter’s roaring, brawling, drinking, wenching personality.” Honestly, I think Stirling read a bunch of Conan stuff just so he could make fact lists. I think he completely ignored the snappy tautness of Robert E. Howard's writing...one of the main strengths of any Conan story. Oh, well, that and the sorcery that Stirling hints at, but doesn't really dive into with both feet like Howard did. Conan believes the difference between his time as a thief and the Sukhmet street thugs is that Conan never accosted folk on the street, instead robbing from rich and powerful in their own homes, including a magician and a fallen god. He did, indeed, try to steal from a place occupied by a magician and what could be considered a fallen god in " The Tower of the Elephant."Conan: Be careful about that. If they find out you tried to hurt a priest of Set, they'll flay you and salt you and then try to think up something really nasty. Foregone Conclusion: Anyone who has read Red Nails knows from the first chapter the broad strokes of what is going to happen in this novel, to wit: Valeria is going to kill an Stygian officer who assaults her, run into the wilderness pursued by the dead officer's brother, and Conan will follow them both because he has the hots for her. Super-Persistent Predator: The novel features a considerable variety of dangerous predators that pursue their victims with a vicious persistence at odds with their known behavior. Justified Trope because there is nothing natural about the animals' behavior, it is the result of the sorcery of a Priest of Set who is compelling them to try to kill Valeria. Said sorcerer/priest also puts a dying curse on Conan to make every predator in the region come after him. Does Stirling succeed? Yes, by leaning even further into Conan’s sense of honour Stirling can reign in some of Conan’s appetites. That is not to say that he is does not kill, drink and chase women, just that it is done with a little more subtlety and self-awareness from the character. Having read a lot of modern low fantasy, the gore and sex in this book is on the same level, even tamer. Perspective Flip: The final scene of the novel shows the first scene of Red Nails, but from Conan's perspective, rather than Valeria's.