Introduction

There are stories that simply pass the time, and there are stories that seize you by the collar, drag you across burning deserts and up into the shadowed peaks of unconquered mountains, and refuse to let go until the final page. The tale you are about to read belongs firmly to the second kind. Written by a young man in Depression-era Texas, hammered out on a battered typewriter in the small hours when the rest of his town slept, it remains one of the most electrifying adventures ever set loose upon the printed page. It is fast, it is fierce, and it is rendered with a kind of feverish conviction that few writers before or since have managed to summon. To open it is to step directly into a world that feels both impossibly ancient and startlingly alive.

This particular adventure unfolds in a corner of the world Robert E. Howard called the Hyborian Age, a vast and gloriously imagined epoch that he placed somewhere in the misty gulf between the sinking of Atlantis and the dawn of recorded history. It is a setting of his own invention, but it never feels invented. Howard built it with such offhand authority, such an instinct for the weight of empires and the rivalry of peoples, that readers have spent the better part of a century treating it as though it were a genuine lost chapter of human history. Here are kingdoms with proud and treacherous courts, mountain tribes who measure a man by his sword arm, sorcerers who command terrors beyond mortal reckoning, and at the center of it all a wandering barbarian whose name has long since outgrown the pages that first contained him.

That barbarian, of course, is Conan. By the time the events of this story take place, he has shed the rawness of his youth and stands as a figure of formidable presence—a chieftain, a leader of men, a force that kings and conjurers alike must reckon with. Yet for all his fame, Howard never reduces him to a mere muscle-bound symbol. The Conan you will meet here is shrewd, watchful, and capable of a startling tenderness that catches the reader off guard precisely because it arrives amid so much violence. He is a man of appetites and instincts, but also of a curious code, an honor that owes nothing to civilization and everything to the wild places that bred him. Watching him move through the intrigues of this story—outwitting men who believe themselves far cleverer, surviving threats that would obliterate anyone less hard—is one of the great pleasures the book has to offer.

To understand why this story strikes with such force, it helps to know a little about the extraordinary, tragically brief life of the man who wrote it. Robert Ervin Howard was born in 1906 in Peaster, Texas, and spent most of his short life in the small town of Cross Plains, a dusty outpost surrounded by oil booms and cattle country. He was, by most accounts, a quiet and intensely private young man, physically imposing yet bookish, given to long solitary drives across the Texas landscape during which he would recite his stories aloud to the empty air. He read voraciously—history, poetry, mythology, the pulp magazines of his day—and he absorbed it all into a sensibility that was entirely his own. From this unlikely soil grew one of the most influential bodies of fantasy fiction ever produced.

Howard was a working writer in the most literal and unromantic sense. He wrote for money, churning out stories across an astonishing range of genres—boxing yarns, Westerns, horror, historical adventure, oriental tales, even spicy romance—and selling them to the pulp magazines that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. These were cheap publications printed on rough paper, sold for a dime or fifteen cents, and consumed by millions of readers hungry for excitement. The pulps demanded speed, color, and above all momentum, and Howard delivered all three with a natural genius that few of his contemporaries could match. He understood, perhaps better than any writer of his era, that a story must move—that the reader must be pulled forward by an irresistible current of incident and consequence.

It was in the pages of Weird Tales, the most legendary of all the pulp magazines, that Conan first appeared in 1932. The character arrived almost fully formed, springing from Howard’s imagination as though he had always existed and merely been waiting to be written down. Over the next several years, Howard produced a series of Conan stories that ranged from short, sharp tales of treasure and treachery to longer, more ambitious works. The story you hold in your hands is one of the finest of these longer efforts—a substantial, intricately plotted adventure that gives Howard room to display the full breadth of his gifts. It originally ran as a three-part serial in Weird Tales in 1934, and even among the devoted readership of that magazine it stood out as something special.

What makes Howard’s writing endure is not merely the action, though the action is superb. It is the strange poetry that runs beneath the surface of everything he wrote. Howard was a poet before he was a fiction writer, and the rhythms of verse never left his prose. His descriptions of landscape have a brooding grandeur to them; his sense of color and atmosphere is almost cinematic. There is a melancholy threaded through his work as well, a sense that all glory is fleeting and all empires must fall, that even the mightiest deeds vanish into the dust of time. This wistful undertone gives his adventures a depth that pure pulp escapism rarely achieves. You may come to these stories for the swordplay, but you stay for the haunting beauty of the world Howard conjures and the genuine emotion that flickers beneath the bravado.

Tragically, Howard’s career was cut brutally short. In June of 1936, at the age of just thirty, he took his own life upon learning that his beloved mother lay dying. He left behind a staggering body of work for one so young, but the world was robbed of whatever masterpieces his maturity might have produced. It is one of the great might-have-beens of American literature. And yet, in another sense, Howard achieved a kind of immortality that would have astonished him. The character he created in a Texas farmhouse has gone on to conquer the world, inhabiting comics, films, games, and countless imitations, becoming a permanent fixture of the cultural imagination. The barbarian outlived his maker by generations, and shows no sign of fading.

It is worth pausing to appreciate just how influential Howard’s work proved to be. He is widely regarded as the father of the entire genre known as sword-and-sorcery—a strand of fantasy distinct from the high, elevated mode of writers like Tolkien, focused instead on individual heroes, immediate dangers, gritty action, and a more visceral, earthbound magic. Nearly every fantasy adventure that pits a lone warrior against dark forces owes something to the template Howard established. The dungeon-crawling games that millions play today, the grim and bloody fantasy novels that fill bookstore shelves, the swashbuckling films of muscle and steel—all of them trace their lineage, however distantly, back to the stories Howard sold for a penny a word in the depths of the Great Depression. To read him now is to drink from the source.

This adventure carries you into one of the most vividly realized regions of Howard’s invented world: a frontier where a sprawling, decadent eastern kingdom presses up against the wild and lawless hill country, where mountain tribesmen with their own fierce loyalties watch the comings and goings of imperial schemers. It is a borderland thick with tension, where allegiances shift like sand and where a single act of violence can topple thrones. Into this volatile setting Howard introduces a conspiracy of dread sorcerers—the people of the black circle of the title—whose power reaches across vast distances and whose purposes are as obscure as they are sinister. The collision between these arcane manipulators and the very physical, very immediate threat that Conan represents drives the story toward its breathless conclusion.

Without revealing the particulars of the plot—for half the joy of this tale lies in its surprises—it is fair to say that you can expect everything that makes Howard great, distilled to a potent concentration. There is intrigue at the highest levels of power, where poison and prophecy are tools of statecraft. There is a journey into forbidding territory, across landscapes that Howard renders with a painter’s eye for menace and beauty. There is sorcery of a genuinely frightening kind, the sort that raises the hair on the back of the neck rather than merely dazzling with spectacle. There are battles, ambushes, betrayals, and narrow escapes. And running through it all is a current of romance and rivalry, of fierce wills clashing and grudging respect forming in the heat of shared danger.

One of the special pleasures of this particular story is its female characters, who are far more than decorative. Howard, for all that he wrote in an era with very different conventions, often created women of remarkable spirit and agency, and that tendency is on full display here. The figures who match wits and tempers with Conan are not passive prizes to be won but active players in the unfolding drama, capable of courage, cunning, and command. Their presence enriches the story considerably and gives the conflicts an emotional charge that elevates them above simple combat.

The structure of the tale, owing to its origins as a serial, is beautifully paced for sustained reading. Each movement builds upon the last, the stakes rising steadily, the geographical scope expanding outward from cloistered palaces to open plains to the haunted heights of the mountains. Howard had an unerring sense of when to pause for atmosphere and when to unleash a torrent of action, and the result is a reading experience that feels effortless even as it covers tremendous ground. You will find yourself turning pages faster and faster as the threads of the plot draw together, and the climax delivers a satisfaction that fully repays the journey.

A word now about this particular edition, which has been prepared as a modern translation and adaptation for the contemporary reader. It is important to be candid about what this means and why it has been done. Howard wrote in the idiom of the pulp era, nearly a century ago, and while his prose retains a remarkable freshness, certain elements of the original can present obstacles to readers today. Some of his vocabulary has fallen out of common use; some of his sentence constructions reflect the conventions of his time; and some of his references and attitudes, particularly regarding the various peoples and cultures of his imagined world, bear the unmistakable stamp of the period in which he wrote. The aim of this adaptation is to smooth the path for the modern reader while preserving everything that makes the story thrilling and distinctive.

This is a delicate undertaking, and it has been approached with great care and respect. The goal has never been to sanitize or rewrite Howard’s vision, but to render it accessible—to clear away the incidental barriers of dated phrasing so that the timeless power of the narrative can shine through unobstructed. The breakneck pace, the vivid imagery, the unforgettable characters, the brooding atmosphere—all of this remains intact. What has changed is largely a matter of polish: a clarification here, a modernization of an obscure term there, an adjustment to keep the prose flowing as smoothly for a reader in this century as it did for a reader in Howard’s own. Purists who wish to experience Howard’s exact original words have many editions available to them, and those texts are well worth seeking out for their historical interest. This edition serves a different purpose: to welcome new readers into Howard’s world and to offer longtime admirers a fresh, fluid way to revisit a beloved story.

It is also worth setting a few expectations about the nature of the tale itself, so that you may meet it on its own terms. This is, unabashedly, a story of adventure and action. It does not pause for lengthy philosophical digressions or elaborate world-building exposition; Howard reveals his world through incident and detail rather than through lecture. The morality of the tale is the morality of the frontier and the wilderness—direct, unsentimental, concerned with survival, loyalty, courage, and the keeping of one’s word. Conan himself is not a conventional hero in the modern mold. He is a man who lives by his own fierce standards, who takes what he wants and gives no quarter to his enemies, but who also possesses a rough integrity and an unexpected capacity for honor and even kindness. Part of his enduring appeal lies precisely in this complexity—in the way he refuses to be tamed into anyone’s comfortable idea of a proper protagonist.