Conan the Barbarian is one of the most famed figures in fantasy fiction. With the success of the new film starring Jason Momoa and Ron Perlman, the time is right to revisit Robert E. Howard's classic stories. Presented in chronological order over three books, all of Conan's life is here, from his wild adventures as a youth to the final tale of Conan the King. Howard's tales of the wanderer, the reaver, the thief, the Barbarian have never been surpassed. In this volume Conan learns the secrets of THE TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT and the ROGUES IN THE HOUSE, meets THE FROST-GIANT'S DAUGHTER and the QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST and visits THE VALE OF LOST WOMEN and THE BLACK COLOSSUS. A selection of other tales and fragments round out this new collection of a classic character.
An action-packed collection of Conan the Barbarian’s wild adventures. In this unparalleled collection from a literary mastermind, swordsman Conan the Barbarian faces powerful sorcerers, deadly creatures, and ruthless armies of thieves. With his character Conan the Barbarian, author Robert E. Howard single-handedly invented the genre that came to be known as sword and sorcery. In this volume are eighteen Conan stories, including a classic of dark fantasy, “The Phoenix and the Sword,” and the classic adventure “The Devil in Iron.” These timeless stories feature Conan the raw and dangerous youth, Conan the daring thief, Conan the swashbuckling pirate, and Conan the commander of armies, and bring to mind the pulp tales that dominated the mid-twentieth century. The Conan the Barbarian Stories includes “The Phoenix on the Sword,” “The Scarlet Citadel,” “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Black Colossus,” “The Slithering Shadow,” “The Pool of the Black One,” “Rogues in the House,” “Gods of the North,” “Shadows in the Moonlight,” “Queen of the Black Coast,” “The Devil in Iron,” “The People of the Black Circle,” “A Witch Shall be Born,” “Jewels of Gwahlur,” “Beyond the Black River,” “Shadows in Zamboula,” “Red Nails,” and “The Hyborian Age.” This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
The intense psychological portrait of a hitman—the anti-Jason Bourne—as he stalks his prey from Boston to LA. He wants you to know him, maybe even admire him, but only for his excellence in his craft. Perhaps he was even born for it. "A natural killer," his mentor—a middleman named Vespucci—said he was. He proved it with his first professional hit: a Fifth Circuit Court judge in Boston, executed with a sheet of Saran Wrap in the stairwell of her own courthouse. He's proved his merit often, usually with a Glock semiautomatic, but he's improvised too, with his bare hands, the heel of a shoe, knives, even a sewing machine. He is the consummate assassin, at the top of his form, immune to the psychological strains of his chosen profession. He is what the Russians call a Silver Bear. He calls himself Columbus. It's the name Vespucci gave him, ten years ago, when he discovered a dark, new world of fences, clients, marks, jobs, jack. Not that his real name meant much to him anyway. He never knew his father or his mother, a prostitute who became dangerously involved back in the seventies with an earnest young congressman named Abe Mann, then a rising star in the Democratic Party. The magnetic Abe Mann has since become the Speaker of the House. He is currently running for the Democratic nomination in an exhausting presidential campaign, weaving his way across the country. Columbus is not far behind. But as he pieces together his past and prepares the seamless assassination of his mark, the criminal underworld he has always ruled begins unraveling violently around him.
Conan the Cimmerian: the boy-thief who became a mercenary, who fought and loved his way across fabled lands to become King of Aquilonia. Neither supernatural fiends nore demonic sorcery could oppose the barbarian warrior as he wielded his mighty sword and dispatched his enemies to a bloody doom on the battlefields of the legendary Hyborian age. Collected together in one volume for the very first time, in chronological order, are Robert E. Howard's tales of the legendary hero, as fresh and atmospheric today as when they were first published in the pulp magazines of more than seventy years ago. Compiled by and with a foreward and afterword by award-winning writer and editor Stephen Jones.
These early works by Robert E. Howard were originally published in the early 20th century and we are now republishing them with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Tales of Conan the Barbarian' is a compilation of Howard's stories in the Conan series and include 'Beyond the Black River', 'Black Colossus', 'Queen of the Black Coast', and many more. Robert Ervin Howard was born in Peaster, Texas in 1906. During his youth, his family moved between a variety of Texan boomtowns, and Howard - a bookish and somewhat introverted child - was steeped in the violent myths and legends of the Old South. At fifteen Howard began to read the pulp magazines of the day, and to write more seriously. The December 1922 issue of his high school newspaper featured two of his stories, 'Golden Hope Christmas' and 'West is West'. In 1924 he sold his first piece - a short caveman tale titled 'Spear and Fang' - for $16 to the not-yet-famous Weird Tales magazine. Howard's most famous character, Conan the Cimmerian, was a barbarian-turned-King during the Hyborian Age, a mythical period of some 12,000 years ago. Conan featured in seventeen Weird Tales stories between 1933 and 1936 which is why Howard is now regarded as having spawned the 'sword and sorcery' genre. The Conan stories have since been adapted many times, most famously in the series of films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Reprinted as they originally appeared in the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales from 1934 to 1936, this ferocious anthology gathers many of the barbarian's most famous adventures: "Red Nails," "The Hour of the Dragon," and three others.
A sumptuous collection of epic fantasy heroes from the pen of Robert E. Howard, one of the true Masters of Fantasy Robert E. Howard was a pulpwriter who turned his hand to everything from historical adventure and detective stories to Western and boxing fiction - and invented the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery: it is for these tales of heroic fantasy and horror that he is best remembered. His mighty heroes - including an English Puritan adventurer sent on redressing grievous wrongs, the king of a mythical, antediluvian empire contemporary with Atlantis, a Pictish warrior-king - all these brothers of the sword and more bestrode the pages of WEIRD TALES and the other pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties. This companion volume follows on from the success of the first Gollancz Big Black Book featuring Howard's world-famous barbarian king, and contains all the stories featuring his brothers-in-arms, collected together in chronological order, as fresh and atmospheric today as when they were first published in the pulp magazines of more than eighty years ago. Compiled by and with an Afterword by award-winning writer and editor Stephen Jones, and with cover image, frontispiece and internal pictures by the award-winning artist Les Edwards.
Conan is besieged by enemies! Xaltotun, an ancient sorcerer attacks the Kingdom of Aquilonia! The only way to defeat him is to retrieve the Heart of Ahriman!
Two of the most famous contributors to the Conan legend write the official novel of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, the seminal fantasy film by John Milius. The official adaptation of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, the seminal film written by John Milius and Oliver Stone, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Earl Jones. In the novel by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, the Cimmerian youth Conan witnesses the death of his parents at the hands of Thulsa Doom, a priest of Set. Enslaved, he is trained as a gladiator. Gaining his freedom he allies with Subotai, a Hyrkanian archer, and a skilled swordswoman thief named Valeria. Together they raid the Tower of the Serpent, then Conan breaks away to seek the cult of Doom—and revenge on the sorcerer who leads it.
This 860-page collection contains all of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian stories published during his lifetime, contextualized with biographical details of their author. The hardcover, a Multimedia Bundle Edition, includes the e-book and audiobook editions as downloadable bonus content. Excerpt from Introduction: "When the first Conan of Cimmeria story appeared in the pages of Weird Tales magazine in December 1932, nothing quite like it had ever before appeared in print.Author Robert E. Howard had been writing stories broadly similar to it for half a decade; but it was with Conan, and the Hyborian Age storyworld in which he was placed, that Howard finally fully doped out the sub-genre that would become known as "sword and sorcery," of which Howard is today considered the founding father. "Conan's origins date back to an experiment in 1926 titled "The Shadow Kingdom," featuring the character Kull, exile of Atlantis. The idea -- Howard's great innovation -- was, at its core, historical fiction set in a pre-historical period. That pre-historical period -- being, of course, lost in the mists of time -- could contain anything Howard might like to include: evil races of sentient snake-things, sorcerers, undead creatures, demons walking upon the earth, anything. "In other words, Howard was creating a secular mythology. "And as with any mythology, secular or no, there would be a hero, a Ulysses or a Theseus, an exceptional man of legend striding through that myth-world, sword in hand, righting wrongs and slaying supernatural monsters and, along the way, providing metaphorical insight onto his world and ours. "At the same time, he was finding success with another historical-fiction-fusion innovation: The grim, savage English Puritan Solomon Kane. Kane's world was the skull-strewn chaos of Europe and north Africa during the Thirty Years War, in the early 1600s. Little enough is known about specific events during that dark time that it was possible to take historical liberties with it as a storyworld, so that it could accommodate dark magic, walking skeletons, vampires, magic staffs, and, of course, N'Longa the witch-doctor. "Howard quickly realized he was onto something with Solomon Kane. The first Solomon Kane story, "Red Shadows," appeared in August 1928 in Weird Tales, and readers loved it. Here was a dark, brooding world of menace and witchcraft connected pseudo-genealogically to their own. It was easy for readers to "take the ride" -- to suspend their disbelief and envision Kane's adventures as a part of the real world. "But, perhaps the connection with the real world was too close. The countries of 1630s Europe are well known; the causes of the conflict fully understood. There was only so much Howard could do in Solomon Kane's world. Moreover, Solomon Kane is just a hard character to root for. Unlike Kull, he is, not to put too fine a point on it, really not a sane man. "So it makes perfect sense that after the shadowy, prehistoric world of Kull and the dark, necromantic world of Solomon Kane, Howard would combine these two precursors to develop a world that was far enough into the distant past to be free of actual historical constraints -- like Kull's -- yet close enough to the present to still exist as echoes and legends in the world's mythologies. "And so Howard created The Hyborian Age, circa 10,000 B.C. And to play the role of our avatar as we explore this shadowy, almost-historical world, he gave us Conan the Cimmerian - to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."
