Conan of Cimmeria is back and this time he's after a shiny trinket that could fetch him a king's ransom worth of gold. But in order to get his hands on his treasured prize, he'll have to join a band of sneaky tomb robbers, survive palace intrigues, and combat a vile prophet hellbent on raising an army of the dead. Snake wrestlers! Necromancers! Fat kings! S&M queens! Exotic dancers! Tomb raiding! Crom, if you do not like this review, then the hell with you!
Conan the Raider is one of eleven Conan novels produced by Leonard Carpenter, who has the distinction of publishing more Conan related material than even Conan's creator Robert E. Howard. I honestly don't know what the fan consensus is on Carpenter's work, although I can surmise he's not thought of as highly as the creator and some of the other pastiche authors, because I rarely see much discussion of his work on the series despite his prolific output.
Stranded in the desert after a botched attempt to recover the Star of Khorala, a jewel worth more than he could possibly imagine, Conan happens upon a band of tomb raiders led by the roguish innkeeper Otsgar and joins in their cause more out of survival rather than taking any great joy in skulking around ancient burial grounds for baubles. Also included in Ostgar's retinue are his second-in-command Isaiab, the firebrand youth Asrafel, and Ostgar's main squeeze, the exotic Stygian dancer Zafriti. After an Indiana Jones-style episode in a tomb rife with lizardmen, our group reconvenes at Ostgar's inn located in the city of Abaddrah. There, the group conspires to loot the nearly completed tomb of the cruel King Ebnezub... the only problem is, the corpulent Ebnezub isn't quite dead yet. It is, however, a poorly kept secret that the wicked Queen Nitokar is likely poisoning her husband every day, so the king's time is short. What the rumor mongers don't know is that Nitokar is aided in her scheme to take the throne by a dark prophet known as Horaspes, who has his own plans for Abaddrah once Nitokar is installed as solitary ruler. Conan stumbles onto a means to get himself hired on as a digger for Ebnezub's tomb, and the intrigues and turns only spiral from there...
One thing that immediately stands out about this novel is how episodic the structure is. Conan the Raider would make excellent serialized fare back in the heyday of pulp magazines, because Carpenter opted for several different stories all weaved into one longer narrative. I think this evokes Howard's originals more than a reader might first suspect. The initial foray into the desert tomb is akin to a James Bond film's pre-title sequence, then we have an adventure inside Ebnezub's almost-completed tomb, then we shift to a long sequence of Conan spirited away to the palace to perform as a gladiator and meet Ebnezub's legitimate heir Princess Afrit (who obviously has a built-in rivalry to the death with her stepmother Nitokar), then we have Conan actually working in the tombs and gathering inside knowledge of the layout and design of the place, then an escape and reunion with Ostgar's crew, the subsequent raid of Ebnezub's tomb, and a final act where Horaspes steps forward from the shadows and reveals what his sinister plan was all along. This was a novel where I appreciated the less traditional structure and was genuinely surprised at a few of the twists the plot took.
Concerning our hero, it's not the best characterization of pastiche Conan I've ever read, but it's not the worst either. I found Carpenter's Conan to be a little too wordy at times, doubly strange when you consider this is intended to be set not too long after Howard's short story "The Tower of the Elephant", which would mean Conan is still in his younger years and thus still learning the ropes and adjusting to the travails of the adventuring life. There are certain speeches Conan gives to the supporting characters that read more like a world-weary and experienced soldier of fortune than a younger man exploring the world for the first time. Personally, I wish some of the pastiche authors could have resisted the whole Conan chronology pushed by the likes of L. Sprague de Camp (among others) and simply presented us with standalone adventure yarns without concern for where the story truly fits in the character's chronology, but that's just me and my position on the endlessly autistic 'Conan timeline' debate.
Now onto the sex and violence front... well, I hate to disappoint you ravenous dogs, but Conan the Raider is more of a PG-13 affair, which again is not too far removed from Howard's style. There are plenty of battles and there are a few moments of extreme violence, but Carpenter doesn't revel in the gory or stay with it for too long. There's something truly terrible that happens to one minor character, but it occurs off-screen and the reader only briefly learns of the after-effects. The sex scenes are entirely glossed over and we're only treated to the 'smoking cigarettes in bed' kind of aftermath. There are some elements of mild eroticism on display; Carpenter must have had a thing for powerful women practicing extracurricular liaisons without their partners, because there are two of them in this novel. Queen Nitokar is clearly a sadist who openly taunts Conan about enjoying employing her whip on her playthings behind closed doors with the king's consent. And Zafriti is pretty much openly cuckolding Otsgar with some frequency, including at least once with Conan halfway through the novel. It's an interesting quirk in their relationship that Otsgar seems resigned to. I suppose Carpenter added it to either make readers think Otsgar was extra pathetic or that Zafriti was wanton and slightly wicked, but we kinda already knew these things from the moment we met them. The whole Otsgar/Zafriti/Conan situationship is made even more bizarre when we learn very late in the novel that another character has been pining after Zafriti from afar the entire time.
Nitpicks aside, I would definitely recommend Conan the Raider to anyone looking to explore some of the Conan novels if they've exhausted the originals. There are a few nadirs in the Tor series of Conan novels from what I remember, so this is one that easily sets itself aside from those thanks to its quick pace and sense of unexpected adventures. Hail and kill, Conan. Hail and kill.
