Conan the barbarian back in his younger, sword-for-hire days meets blonde bombshell pirate lass Valeria for the first time and naturally wants to get into her pants. But Valeria is a strong, independent mercenary and don't need no man. So the pair of them embark on a never-ending and utterly stupid Benny Hill chase through the hinterlands where Conan has to fight a bunch of rabid animals and Valeria has to evade a magic-using bounty hunter. Crom, I've never prayed to you before, I have no tongue for it, but please don't let this author try to write another Conan tale...
One generally understands you shouldn't always judge a book by its cover, but given the utter bland, banal, generic, and cancel culture safe front cover adorning Blood of the Serpent, there's enough anecdotal evidence here to say the old, hackneyed cliche may be wrong. It's not that Blood of the Serpent is poorly written per se, it's just that nothing happens. Even the action scenes seem to have pregnant pauses built into the prose. How do you manage to make sword and sandal action boring? Instead of moving from story beat to story beat as pulp fantasy ought to, the author stops to give us languid descriptions of things, not in the Howardian sparkling purple prose manner, mind, but in the tedious and insipid stylings of cookie-cutter high fantasy novels.
The fact that this story is intended to take place in Conan's timeline directly before Robert E. Howard's Red Nails really made me understand just how low quality Blood of the Serpent actually is, because either the author, publisher, or both made the startling decision to include Red Nails within this tome. As soon as Blood of the Serpent ends, we segue directly into Red Nails. It's like going from a kid's first piano recital to Beethoven. One writer is clearly a neophyte and one is a master, and it's not hard to figure out which one is which.
I'll be honest, I don't know anything about author S.M. Stirling's writing pedigree coming into Blood of the Serpent and what exactly qualified him to be the next Conan continuation novel writer, but based on this book alone, I'd say he's an incredibly poor match for this series, unless the publisher's goal was indeed to make something bland, banal, generic, and cancel culture safe in a contemporary market that tries to punish anything that doesn't immediately adhere to 'The Message'. And given how much the character of Valeria is beefed up to be an undefeatable level 50 Girl-boss who is literally kicking men in the balls for leering at her wrong, I don't think I'm far off the mark here. Then we get to the book's afterword, where the author disgustingly 'apologizes' for Robert E. Howard being a hot-blooded man in the 1920's and 30's. Stirling doesn't explicitly say the hostage video line of "it was wrong then and it's wrong now", but he may as well have.
I spit on this sentiment. I wanted to read this novel in the hope that some new Conan - one of the staples of escapist fiction - would give me respite from the culture war. Instead, I find it meekly flying the banner of the enemy. By Crom, were he able to find life free from the page, Howard's Conan would take up the sword in his mighty thews and smote this vile pretender tome from existence and consign it to the blackest, everlasting depths of the stygian abyss.
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