Conan: Lord of the Mount - Stephen Graham Jones

CONAN: LORD OF THE MOUNT by Stephen Graham Jones is the first in a new series of short stories and novellas based on characters created by Robert E. Howard, written by various hands and published by Titan Books. I avoided reading any reviews of it after it was published earlier this week until I’d had a chance to read it myself, but I couldn’t help but be aware that the reaction to it has been somewhat mixed.

The story starts out with Conan waking up after a battle, apparently the only survivor from the force he was aligned with, falling in with a lotus addict who’s driving a small group of cows to market, getting sidetracked to a deserted castle where a man-eating beast supposedly lives, and battling said beast. That’s the extent of the plot.

I had never read anything by Stephen Graham Jones and was only vaguely familiar with his name, knowing him to be an author of horror novels. Not necessarily somebody I’d think of as writing a Conan pastiche. I don’t doubt that he likes the character and is a fan of Robert E. Howard’s work, but to be honest, for a couple of reasons I think he misses the mark in LORD OF THE MOUNT.

The first reason is the pacing. The story is slow to develop with the first half just meandering along, not much happening except that Jones does lay the groundwork for some plot developments that come along later. He does so without any of the characters actually doing anything other than talking, though. Howard didn’t always start his stories with action, but there’s always something happening in an REH yarn, some sense of movement and suspense. I didn’t find any of that in the opening scenes of LORD OF THE MOUNT.

The other problem I have with this story is that I think Jones doesn’t quite have Conan’s character down. I can’t provide specifics without getting into spoiler territory, but during the battle with the monster there’s one moment when Conan does something that seems totally out of character for him, and in the end of the story he comes across to me as wantonly, unnecessarily cruel. Not that he wouldn’t have gotten his revenge on someone who wronged him, but the way he goes about it doesn’t ring true to me.

Now that I think about it, I believe the nature of the threat Conan faces could have been developed a bit more, too.

All that said, the battle is quite good for the most part, and except for those two moments that jumped out at me, Conan’s dialogue works fairly well. Jones’s description of the abandoned castle is excellent, and the pace does pick up nicely in the second half of the story. LORD OF THE MOUNT isn’t terrible, by any means, but it’s not really to my taste, either. If you want to check it out and form your own opinion—and if you’re a Howard fan, you probably should—it’s available as an e-book on Amazon.

Overall, I’m pleased that Titan Books is launching this series of new stories based on Howard’s characters. I’m an REH purist in that I think his original work should be available and not tampered with by modern-day editing. When I first became involved in Howard fandom nearly thirty years ago, very little of Howard’s work was in print, and none of his Conan stories were available in new editions. In fact, they were being suppressed by various corporate entities. This has changed over the years, of course. Just about everything Howard wrote can be found now in textually accurate editions. I have no objection to pastiches in general. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to take that stance, considering how many millions of words I’ve written using characters, settings, and situations created by other authors. So I’m fine with Howard pastiches and will continue to read the ones that interest me.