Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

The Story So Far

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a pirate-turned-mercenary who abandoned her ship to avoid an unwanted marriage proposal, only then to also desert the band of mercenaries she had joined, after killing one of the officers. She’s currently a fugitive, but she’s not alone, for it turns out Conan, who was in the same army as Valeria, also deserted and followed her trail—partly out of curiosity but also because he makes no secret of having the hots for the female warrior. (You gotta give Conan credit: the man is upfront about what he wants.) Valeria is not so smitten with the legendary Cimmerian. At the same time the two are probably better off together than each going their separate ways, for the moment. Their bickering is interrupted when a dragon of the forest they’ve taken refuge in devours their horses off-screen, with Our Heroes™ looking to be another meal. The dragon is not the fire-breathing dragon of medieval folklore, nor the slim serpent with wings of ancient China, but a dinosaur-like beast whose belly drags on the ground and who’s got more teeth than a dentist could possibly hope to count. With the help of a makeshift spear and the juice of a poison fruit, Conan incapacitates the dragon and Our Heroes™ flee the forest, into a wide plain and then into a massive interior city. Xuchotl is an ancient city that’s partly underground and totally encased by a dome, and at first it looks to be abandoned. When Conan splits from Valeria to do some investigating, the latter stumbles onto a couple of the city’s inhabitants and gets herself into a battle she really did not anticipate. The first installment ends with Valeria and Techotl, a member of the Tecuhltli, fending off some ravenous dogs. This first installment actually ends in the middle of the second chapter; I’m not sure if this is a criticism, I just wanted to point that out. The question then is: Where could Conan be?

Enhancing Image

Of course this had to be unintended, but I find it interesting that the first installment started and ended without Conan, only for the second installment (which is actually just the second chapter continued) to reintroduce him as fast as possible. Also, aside from the action scene at the beginning, this middle chunk of Red Nails will be much more focused on building character and the world of Xuchotl. There’s a lot less fighting and a lot more dialogue. This is not really a bad thing, since Xuchotl is one of the more imaginatively realized settings for a Conan story. Right after Howard wrote Red Nails, about a year before its publication, he admitted in letters that it would not only be his last Conan story but also probably the last fantasy story he ever wrote—mind you he was only 29 when he said this. The notion that someone so young could feel that they’ve said all they could say about a character, never mind a whole genre, might strike us as crazy, but I do believe that even had Howard lived to a nice old age it’s unlikely he at the very least would’ve written more Conan stories. Red Nails was the grand finale of the series, even if it doesn’t exactly feel like one; but also Howard really pulled out all the stops with the action, worldbuilding, and character moments. It’s also, it must be said, possibly the sexiest of the Conan stories, but that’s for me to give the details of in just a moment. For now we must be content with being introduced to the rest of the Tecuhltli, who stand opposed to the clan on the other end of the city, the Xotalancas. Turns out the city had already been built and had its own indigenous population when the founders of these clans had arrived. Given that said indigenous population is not longer here, you can guess what happened, although curiously the original people of Xuchotl are also said to have been brutal and decadent in their own right.

Thus Conan and Valeria find themselves caught in the middle of a war between dying clans (there are no children among the Tecuhltli and presumably the same goes for the enemy) that has been going on for fifty years, so that basically nobody alive now was around to witness how it had all started. When we meet the rulers of the Tecuhltli, Olmec and his wife Tascela, we get the feeling that something is very off, not least because Tascela looks to be young and beautiful but is, in fact, at least in her seventies, given that she was an adult when the war started and indeed the big reason for why it had started in the first place. How she has retained her youth is a mystery—for now. During Olmec’s big exposition dump about the history of the clans, Tascela also seems weirdly focused on Valeria, as if transfixed by her beauty. (It’s worth mentioning that while homosexuality was sometimes mentioned in mainstream fiction of the time, it was sort of taboo in the genre magazines, so that even the implication of it here is Howard teasing the reader.) Now, my dumb ass thought going in that the story’s title referred to red fingernails, but actually it’s referring to red nails impaled in the Tecuhltlis’ headquarters, each representing a slain enemy. Granted, the red nails could also refer, if only metaphorically, to Valeria, who after all is of the Red Brotherhood. For better or worse Conan is rendered the secondary protagonist while Valeria is the real hero(ine) of Red Nails; and in case there was any doubt of this she once again takes hold of the narrative in the fourth chapter, which is where the second installment ends and which is short but pretty memorable. Red Nails could be considered a logical successor as well as a companion piece to Beyond the Black River, which in some ways it’s very different from but also in other ways similar. We go from the frontier to what is basically a buried city, and the POV character who follows Conan is female instead of male, but their premises are similar enough.

Now, let’s talk about the torture scene, although it’s actually not the torture scene that provided the cover for the previous issue of Weird Tales. After their meeting with Olmec and Tascela, Conan and Valeria once again part ways for the moment, with the latter going to take a nice post-battle nap. She wakes suddenly, however, to find that Yasala, Tascela’s servant girl, had tried to pull a Bill Cosby on her with the help of a black lotus, a blossom “whose scent brings deep sleep.” Valeria is very cross about this, especially because Yasala refuses to explain herself. Valeria then does what any normal person would do and decides to strip Yasala naked and tie her down, for the purposes of strangely erotic torture with a lash. Now, as somebody who is not particularly into BDSM (although I’m not opposed to it), I have to admit that what follows is pretty hot, to the point where I would be surprised how it made its way into Weird Tales in the ’30s if not for the fact that paying kink lip service was actually far from uncommon for the magazine at this time. (There are, in fact, multiple Robert E. Howard stories that made the cover for this very reason, courtesy of Margaret Brundage.) Indeed, I can imagine that reading Weird Tales in the early-to-mid-’30s (the magazine cleaned up its act towards the end of the decade, at least when it came to the covers) and being introduced to BDSM this way. Shit must’ve blown some minds. Anyway, Valeria gives Yasala a good thrashing until the latter finally gives in, saying the Bill Cosby routine was part of Tascela’s scheme. Once Valeria unstraps her she throws some wine in Valeria’s face for her troubles and runs off the catacombs, where it’s implied she meets her death off-screen. Meanwhile Valeria hears the clashing of swords in another direction, implying that the Xotalancas are at the gates.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for the delay, but I hope the wait was worth it. Red Nails is shaping up to be yet another top-tier Conan story, but we still have a good chunk of it to go. I’ve read enough Conan at this point, a lot of it outside the confines of this site, to separate the mediocre (because there are a few Conan stories where Howard was clearly phoning it in) from the good stuff. It helps a lot that Valeria herself is a very fun character, who in some alternate timeline probably could’ve gotten her own spinoff series. I’ve read into the possible inspirations behind Valeria, with the most likely contenders being C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, whose first couple stories Howard had very likely read by the time he wrote Red Nails; and then there’s Novalyne Price, Howard’s girlfriend at the time. The details of Howard and Price’s relationship are unspeakably depressing, so I won’t go into it, but it seems he had based Valeria’s tenacity on Price. (I’ve been reading Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, and there’s a good chance I’ll be done with it by the time I finish reviewing Red Nails.) My point is that I was looking for a palate cleanser after the dismaying experience that was reading the first installment of E. E. Smith’s Triplanetary, and I’m happy to say Red Nails is meeting my expectations.

See you next time.

Who Goes There?

E. E. Smith has I guess the distinction of having the first serial I started to review but simply could not finish. I’m already a couple days behind in my schedule as it is. It would’ve been one thing if I did not enjoy reading Triplanetary (which is certainly the case, mind you), but Smith was also maybe a victim of bad timing. We are cursed to live in interesting times. Both in my personal life and in the outside world there have been some, let’s say disturbances. My question then is, if I’m not gonna continue my review of Triplanetary, what could I use as a substitute for the rest of the month? There were many options; as you probably know, a lot of novels and novellas were serialized in three installments. But for me the answer was obvious: I’d be returning to Robert E. Howard.

Despite the fact that he committed suicide when he was only thirty, Robert E. Howard can lay claim to being the most influential American fantasy writer of all time, not to mention being arguably the greatest of the pulp writers who never broke into mainstream or “slick” fiction. He began writing with the hopes of being published when he was 15, although he wouldn’t actually make his first fiction sale until he was 17 or 18; little did he know, when he started writing at 15, that his life was already halfway over. But once Howard started getting published, he never stopped—not even when he died. Almost too many short stories and poems to count were published, either complete or as fragments, in the decades following Howard’s death in 1936. He wrote nonstop for about a dozen years, and for practically every pulp and genre market, except, weirdly enough, science fiction, which he didn’t seem to have much if any interest in. He wrote fantasy, horror, Westerns, historical adventures, and even sports stories (Howard was especially fond of boxing). He also ran several different series focusing on a colorful roster of courageous and quite masculine heroes, from Solomon Kane and the sailor Steve Costigan to, of course, Conan the Barbarian. Conan is one of the most iconic characters in fiction, and he was also Howard’s final fantasy hero, being a culmination of themes and tropes Howard had developed. Red Nails was the last Conan story Howard had completed; the first installment would’ve been on newsstands around the time of Howard’s death. I had been meaning to get to this one for a while.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Weird Tales, July to October (the August and September issues were combined) 1936. Since this is Conan it’s been reprinted quite a few times, including 13 Short Fantasy Novels (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh) and too many Howard collections to count. It’s also on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a pirate-turned-mercenary who’s currently a fugitive, having killed an officer in Zarallo’s Free Companions, an army of mercenaries and, ironically from what we hear about it, not free at all. Another member of that army was Conan, and like Valeria he too deserted, albeit for different reasons. Since this is the third Conan story I’ve reviewed, I think acknowledging formula is in order. Howard wrote a lot, and like anyone who writes enough for long enough he fell back on formula and certain turns of phrase, and even how he would structure his plots. With the Conan series the idea is that the “real” protagonist is not Conan, but some third party who has their own adventure, including their own personal stakes, and who sees Conan’s exploits from the outside. There are some exceptions, but most of the Conan stories do not start with Conan as the focus characters. Valeria herself is by no means the only female main character in a Conan story, but she’s certainly a contender for the feistiest, alongside Bêlit from “Queen of the Black Coast.” But whereas readers might recall Conan’s relationship with Bêlit being genuinely romantic (if also ill-fated), his interest in Valeria is more purely carnal. Indeed Conan and Valeria’s relationship is about as explicitly sexual as one could’ve gotten in ’30s pulp magazines without the characters having actual sex (at least not yet). Valeria compares Conan to a stallion and at one point Conan threatens to spank Valeria in a way that is clearly more meant to be taken as kinky teasing rather than punishment.

Of course, Valeria is a tsundere who is not so taken with Conan’s teasing and raw machismo, although there’s the sense that she can’t help but admire him as a fellow warrior. I’ve read up a bit on Red Nails and one criticism I’ve seen repeated is that for someone who is described as a bad bitch, and who takes a lot of pride in her supposed abilities as a fighter, Valeria is not as strong as she appears. This may prove more valid than it seems to me initially, but I like the idea of a pirate lady who is perhaps a little out of her depth when fighting on land—you could say like a fish out of water. She also clearly resents being on the receiving end of misogyny and mockery from her male colleagues, saying, “Why won’t men let me live a man’s life?” at one point. (Obviously such a sentiment reads different nowadays, what with our understanding of genderqueerness, although Valeria is at the very least gender-nonconforming.) Due to the episodic nature of the Conan series it can be hard to lay out some internal chronology, but I’m pretty sure Red Nails takes place after “Queen of the Black Coast” since Conan has already lived as a pirate by the time of the former, although he makes no mention of Bêlit. I like how these two are former pirates who’ve come to land under different circumstances, with Conan’s last ship getting sunk in battle and Valeria quite literally jumping ship to avoid an unwanted marriage proposal. Also it’s worth mentioning that despite being written after some of the darkest entries in the series (“Queen of the Black Coast” and Beyond the Black River especially), Red Nails starts off considerably lighter in tone, insofar as it reads like a more typical pulp adventure.

But of course, there’s trouble afoot. As Conan and Valeria leave their horses and really get down to bickering with each other, they realize too late that they really should’ve kept a better eye on those horses. A dragon ate them both, somehow, making such short work of the animals that their bones made a distinctive crunching sound. Our Heroes™ have come face-to-face with a dragon, a beast about as large as an elephant with “huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified,” a head larger than a crocodile’s, a belly that drags on the ground, “absurdly short legs,” and a long and flexible tail. It’s basically a walking tank with a trash compactor for a mouth. Much of the first installment of Red Nails has to do with getting around this dragon, which was not quite what I was expecting, since what I had heard most about this novella was the main setting—but we’ll get to that in a moment. It looks like Our Heroes™ are cooked, but Conan comes up with an ingenious tactic that might (just maybe) kill the dragon. He makes a spear and covers the tip with the juice of a poisonous fruit, then aiming for a spot on the dragon that isn’t totally covered with scaly armor. It works, or at least it works well enough, with Conan and Valeria running off, leaving the poisoned dragon to die a slow death—maybe. I have a feeling this will not be the last we see of it. Finally we come upon a city on the plain, although it’s no ordinary city but one that seems at least partly underground, being totally kept indoors as if under a dome. Being on the run, and with no other signs of civilization in sight, Conan and Valeria enter the interior and probably abandoned city. It took long enough, but in the back end of this installment we do finally enter Xuchotl.

There Be Spoilers Here

This first installment starts and ends with Valeria by herself, since she and Conan are separated for a time once they’ve entered the city. Conan goes off to investigate by himself and leaves Valeria by herself, which turns out to have been a bad move. Valeria finds herself caught in the midst of a battle between two clans that lurk in the city, those of Tecuhltli and those of Xotalanc, having been rescued by a scarred man named Techotl, who comes from the former clan. The builders of the city seem to have died or fled, but they’ve left a great deal in their wake. People reading Red Nails expecting Conan to have more time on the page than he does will be surprised and probably disappointed. The idea, I suppose, is that Conan is simply too powerful a character to be consistently in the midst of the action, so Howard came up with reasons for his to be somewhere else. (Tolkien had a habit of doing this with Gandalf, as another example.) Conversely, if Valeria was out of her depth before then she’s almost useless by the end of this installment. So there’s that.

A Step Farther Out

Ah, it feels good to be back. It’s been over a year since I last got to write about Conan, and Howard’s fiction generally. I’m sure someone out there will blame more for pussying out with Triplanetary, but life is short and I will not, at least for the moment, waste it on trudging through terrible writing. It’s not even like I get paid for any of this. It could also be that I returned to Howard because I’m turning thirty in eight months and I can’t say I’m happy about that. It got me thinking about Howard again, for his life story is surely one of the most tragic in the history of genre writing; but, on the plus side, while he never married or had children, anyone who loves fantasy of the blood-and-thunder variety has a least a bit of Robert E. Howard in their heritage. It’s like how some white Europeans have, to this day, a sliver of neanderthal in their DNA. A relic from an ancient time. Modern fantasy writing, it seems to me, plays things too safe and sanitary, so that we could really use a darker, bloodier, sexier fantasy—albeit not that much of it. You don’t wanna have too much of a good thing, after all.

See you next time.