As a final statement I have to make my discontent known about a sentence made in the afterword where Stirling gives thanks: “To the folks at Titan Books, for deciding to do a new series hewing more closely to R. E. Howard’s vision.” To my ears that sounds like a slam to what came before. I sincerely doubt this book will be as successful as the Lancer/Ace series and probably not even the Tor series. I hope I’m wrong but a slam against what I (and millions, in the case of the Lancers) enjoyed before does not seem the best foot to start the new journey. When Titan announced this book and the revitalizing of NEW Conan books, I was excited. I still am, even though this one was not fantastic.

I didn't really think Conan could be boring, but I found myself drifting all the time I was reading this. The first half of this book is why I titled this review as I did; on no less than 3 occasions our iron-thewed barbarian hero watches from the sidelines as Valeria participates in the main action. The first and last are excusable, the second is so utterly out of character for Conan I began to fear Valeria would usurp Conan's place in his own story. Avoiding spoilers, Conan watches from the shadows as Valeria duels a gang of men who outnumber her more than five times and not only carries the day, but does so in such good health she can scramble up the side of a building Assassin's Creed style. In case the author ever reads this I say to him; if you'd like to write a story or stories focusing on Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, I and many other Conan fans would read it happily. Super-Persistent Predator: The novel features a considerable variety of dangerous predators that pursue their victims with a vicious persistence at odds with their known behavior. Justified Trope because there is nothing natural about the animals' behavior, it is the result of the sorcery of a Priest of Set who is compelling them to try to kill Valeria. Said sorcerer/priest also puts a dying curse on Conan to make every predator in the region come after him. This was a great decision. Stirling writes to his own strengths. He really knows how to capture the intimate close-up nature of adventuring in the savage Hyborian Age, with all the creatures, cultures, languages and worldbuilding we have loved for a century. Most important of all is that he has almost perfectly encapsulated the character of Conan. He knows how Conan speaks, how he acts, what motivates and drives him, what he looks like, how he feels about other people, and on and on. It is a closer look at the character, yet not in any way unfamiliar, than we've ever had.Honestly, I think Stirling read a bunch of Conan stuff just so he could make fact lists. I think he completely ignored the snappy tautness of Robert E. Howard's writing...one of the main strengths of any Conan story. Oh, well, that and the sorcery that Stirling hints at, but doesn't really dive into with both feet like Howard did. Lest some interpret that as a criticism, I want to stress that I do not mean it as such. Robert Jordan was the first Tor Conan author and he set the pattern: Novel length stories, Horny Conan, and references to past (y’know, the really great ones, by Robert E. Howard!) adventures. It was a successful formula that worked and the first author to write Conan pastiche, L. Sprague de Camp, blessed it. However, as far as this fan's concerned it didn't make much difference to me. I loved what was on offer here as I found myself immensely impressed by Stirling's knowledge and command of the lore, history, geography, peoples, cultures and characters, that when things are mentioned it feels consistent with the source material. The world and people are similar enough to me that the difference of writing style and even genre to an extent do not bother me whatsoever. I absolutely love this book for all that it is. As other reviewers stated it does drag sometimes as again we are used to Conan driving the action forward and getting to the heart of a problem and resolving it (although he needed a lot of external help during Hour of the Dragon, not gonna lie). Here, in his earlier years he is not a king, and follows other masters. He is known to have been a thief, a mercenary, a soldier, a pirate, whatever warms the bed and fills the belly. This will be a little frustrating to some who prefer Conan and his villains to mostly drive the plot as he is bound to the quest of his soldiery or mercenary band. I loved this book. It is almost everything I was hoping for and expecting. Stirling, I haven't read any of your other works (YET) but I am a huge fan of what you did here. I can see a few people getting disappointed by the weaker sorcery elements in a sword and sorcery tale, and honestly it felt more like a grimdark / epic low fantasy rendition than the classics. You experience the grit, the realism, the detailed explanations of foods and wines, clothing and cultures, military formations, etc.

The book also contains a new map (presumably by De La Torre). This new map contains more detail than the Lancer/Ace (the gold standard) maps did. I wish they had printed it in a larger size. I do have a minor complaint about fonts used in the text. The book uses both italics and bold italics. At first I thought this was a clever way of replacing quotes for the character’s thoughts. But the motif is used inconsistently.The line “Robert E. Howard’s Conan” is guaranteed to bother those short-sighted fans who merely want to virtue signal that this is NOT Robert E. Howard’s Conan. Yeah, it is. It’s the character created by REH. The same appellation “Robert E. Howard’s Conan” appears on the Modiphius Gamebooks and no one complains. While the source material remains Robert E. Howard’s extraordinary body of work, the vast majority of his output was fiction as short as 4,000 words or less, while a full-length novel that gives readers what they deserve needs to hover closer to 80,000 words or more. Telling a story of that length requires a specific skill set. The Afterword is a sad thing. It is an apology for the righteous and indignant for Howard's "original manuscript. Raw and powerful, it's also very much of its time–written almost a century ago, when our culture could be less socially aware and genre fiction in particular often exhibited rough edges some of today's readers may find jarring." Those of us who believed in Conan at the right moment in our lives never stop believing. We might not grow up to become him, but we never grow out of him, either.”—Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Only Good Indians No Ending: The novel ends with Conan and Valeria in the middle of nowhere rushing to investigate what has just killed their horses. Anyone wanting to know what happened next will need to read Red Nails to find out how that is resolved.