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

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Too often the result is a brutish, monosyllabic, meat-headed jock rather than the cunning, pantherish figure created by Howard. A mercenary, a soldier, a thief, and a pirate, he faces conquering armies, malicious sorcerers, and monstrous creatures--against which he wields only the sword held in his powerful grasp. No spoilers, but after reading this book I can say that there aren't many noticeable changes if at all to the elements of Howard's characters or world (ancient earth after the fall of Atlantis). Especially since some of the characterizations in Red Nails would probably have fallen flat for a modern audience (especially that of Valeria).

And Conan is not a civilized person, he is a smart barbarian with great fighting skills and a great military mind.

However, the style of writing and even genre most of the time is not quite the same as Howard's legendary stories. With all that possibility at his fingertips, Stirling delivers a boring, uninspired plot and two dimensional characters. My hope was that an author would become a steward to the legend and carry the torch a ways farther, similar to how Brandon Sanderson continued and concluded the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Valeria is quickly introduced: “Keep your paws off my arse, Stygian pig,” the voice said, “or I’ll feed you your fingers and ram your severed sword hand thumb up your bunghole with the toe of my boot.

Howard in a 1932 issue of Weird Tales magazine, the Conan stories have had a tumultuous publication history.And after Valeria takes “drastic measures to repulse a Stygian officer, Conan follows her south into the lands of the blacks. Valeria's reputation is that of a deadly swordswoman, a notoriety she quickly proves to be accurate. They detail a series of action-packed tavern brawls and introduce the fan-favourite character Valeria from Red Nails. Stirling is probably best known for his Draka series of alternate history novels and the more recent time travel/alternate history Nantucket series and Emberverse series. Formerly of the Red Brotherhood, the blonde and blue-eyed pirate’s beauty is matched only by her lethality.

Positioned as a prequel to the 1936 Howard novella Red Nails, Conan – Blood of the Serpent opens with the titular barbarian languishing in Sukhmet, a backwater village in Stygia, the Hyborian Age’s antediluvian precursor to ancient Egypt. The reason I mention this is because unlike Jordan, Stirling in Blood of the Serpent has captured Conan almost perfectly, at least to me. Maybe the dialogue is too coarse for REH’s Valeria and too similar to that god-awful Ablaze comic-book version of the character but Stirling needed a shorthand way to introduce her as a no nonsense warrior and it probably works for a modern audience. It really made me appreciate the new material more seeing the context that inspired it and having the story conclude with Red Nails.Fiercely independent and all too accustomed to advances from her compatriots, Valeria is unimpressed. To say I was thrilled to discover a new Conan novel is the understatement of my year or maybe even decade. In The Phoenix on the Sword, the very first Conan short story, Howard described the character as possessing “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth.