CONAN AND THE SPIDER GOD

It dawns on me that Catherine Crook de Camp may be the severely under-sung hero of Conan the Cimmerian. 

​Catherine was a double-major at Barnard College, a school that is not considered an Ivy League institution by seeming technicality alone, from which she graduated magna cum laude. She was a teacher after that (big ups to a fellow educator) before she became a science fiction writer as well as a nonfiction writer whose main concern seemed to be writing about other genre fiction. She was also, as some have noted, married to L. Sprague de Camp, a person I have mentioned on this blog probably more times than anyone other than Robert Ervin Howard. Because we've got two de Camps in this story, I'm going to refer to everyone by their first names for once.

Catherine's resume says to me that she was a very skilled writer whose credits have been frustratingly erased, so we can really only speculate as to how much she did. However, it seems like she might be the mastermind behind the great 1980 Conan pastiche novel, Conan and the Spider God.

---

Catherine's husband Sprague (Lyon?) had begun working together with Lin Carter on Conan stories in the early 1950s, eventually producing a pretty sizable body of work- at least half of this blog has to be about their writing. Gary Romeo at Sprague de Camp Fan has an excellent, illuminating post about how the two writers worked together. 

Apparently, Sprague, being the writer with more experience, generally had Lin write the first draft and then he would iron out the second one. He claimed that this was because the more experienced writer would be more aware of things like errors, but I feel like it betrays something else about their partnership.

"In collaboration with [Fletcher] Pratt and later with Carter, the collaborators found that it worked best if the younger writer (at least, younger in writing experience) did the rough draft and the older one the final. The younger writer is apt to have greater facility and be more fertile with ideas, while the older one is more alert for errors, infelicities, mistakes of grammar, inconsistencies, etc. With Pratt, he was the older; with Carter, he was the younger. In each case we got together and roughed out the plot first; then the junior author went home, wrote a synopsis or treatment (which he might or might not show the senior author) and then did the rough draft. The senior collaborator wrote the final draft and submitted it to the junior for minor changes before sending it out. We found out that when we reversed the procedure it didn’t work well."

I could be wrong here, but this seems to me like Sprague all but admitting that he wasn't a very skilled plotter of stories (or at the very least that he was a worse plotter), and maybe I only think that because it really squares with my perception of these writers. Lin's writing seems to be a little ham-fisted and wonky, as I noted of Lin's posthumous collaboration with Robert E. Howard on "The Hand of Nergal." Many of the Conan stories written by Sprague and Lin were rewrites of stories Lin had created for his character Thongor: "The Thing in the Crypt," "The Curse of the Monolith," "The Lair of the Ice-Worm," "The Gem in the Tower..." But it seems like Sprague might have been the more skilled wordsmith- Lin without Sprague reads a little worse. 

Therefore, it's my belief that Lin was the person who was probably the better plotter, and responsible for most of the story elements, with Sprague punching up Lin's prose. The two had a long and fruitful partnership, but it didn't last forever. 

---

In the 1970s, Lin Carter starts to drop off the map of the Hyborian Age a bit. There are rumblings online of Lin and Sprague having a falling out between them. Details are scant, but it seems widely accepted that something happened. Lin was also struggling with alcoholism, so that may have negatively affected his ability to work with Sprague. The 1972 novel Conan the Liberator saw Lin pretty much drop the ball and exit the novel's writing process barely a month in. 

"Carter started on his part but pooped out early in 1972. (We began on January 27.) After some months of fiddling around and trying to get him to work, Catherine and I gave up, and Catherine did the rest of the collaboration."

Though the 1978 short story "The Ivory Goddess" is credited to both Lin and Sprague, Lin apparently didn't write a word of it (though he still got paid). Who picked up the slack on Lin's end? Well, apparently it was Catherine. The same thing happened on the group's novelization of the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie: Lin sat it out, but got a writing credit and a paycheck, while Catherine collected neither byline nor bag.

So how did Conan and the Spider God, a novel written without Lin Carter and credited to L. Sprague de Camp alone get to be so good? It's probably Catherine! Sprague did credit her as having provided "editorial assistance," and the Conan lay scholarship online seems to be in agreement that this novel was largely her work. 

Conan and the Spider God, published by Bantam Books in 1980, is definitely one of the better novel-length Conan adventures, and it's a really fun story overall. The story takes place as the endpiece to Conan's Turanian mercenary days- there's a misunderstanding that causes Conan to flee Aghrupur in Turan for the west, back toward Zamora where he spent some of his prior years. To my delight, the start of this story connects nicely to the prologue of "The Blood-Stained God," which de Camp had written about 25 years earlier. We finally get to know what that "unruly episode" was!​

Conan gets blamed for the kidnapping of Jamilah, royalty of Turan, and eventually ends up at the Zamorian city of Yezud. Some of the events in the early part of the book feel a little random and like they're there to pad out the runtime, but it eventually settles in. Yezud is the home to the cult of Zath, gigantic spider god and all-around corrupt theocracy built up in Zath's temples. Conan takes an assumed identity (using his father's name, Nial) and works undercover as a blacksmith in the city for a while while getting closer to the people there. He is smitten with Rubadeh, a dancing girl and acolyte for Zath, who, unlike many women of Conan stories, has her own dreams, goals, and past, and isn't completely head-over-heels with our barbarian. Perhaps the deft hand of Catherine? Unlike many Conan novels, characters have time to become more fully-formed and we get more time to come to like friends like Captain Catigern, and loathe the villain Harpagus.

It's paced well, albeit very differently than REH ever wrote. Instead of being a whiz-bang action story, it's more of a slow burn. Conan is surrounded by potential enemies: the empire of Turan is on his trail and wants him dead. The cult of Zath could find out at any moment who he really is. The high priest Harpagus probably already knows who he is but is eerily quiet about it. Conan is always in danger, well before the giant spider enters the story. 

The novel really begins to shine in the last 30 pages or so in which we get a daring rescue of Jamilah, a clever thievery scene that makes Conan infiltrate and work without his sword, and a truly horrifying episode in the tunnels beneath Yezud where lurks the giant spider Zath and the desiccated remains of her live meals.

---

This 1984 edition of the book has such a cool cover and I can't find the artist's name anywhere.

Like many of the best Conan stories, Conan and the Spider God has some valuable commentary about the nature of power, especially power claiming moral authority. Perhaps the most important line in the novel is when a character points out that the priests of Zath love virtue, almost to the point of vice. Conan, and us by extension, is forced to wait and watch as a huge herd of sheep are driven in front of him to be slaughtered to the spider god, and while lambs to the slaughter isn't exactly the most original metaphor, it feels appropriate. After all, this book was published at the dawn of the Reagan administration in which the Gipper and the "moral majority" stripped away social programs and gutted services for things like education. During my masters degree, we had several courses on the history of education and it feels like three-quarters of our problems in public ed. began with Reagan. And now I'm sitting here reading this novel about a month away from the start of another criminal presidency, waiting for him to unleash his Children of Zath. I know the Conan fanbase skews conservative, so I probably just had quite a few people close the tab they were reading this on. 

Anyway, isn't this blog supposed to be about the chronology of Conan stories? Let's get to that. 

Spider God takes place at the end of Conan's Turanian mercenary period, right before "The Blood-Stained God." It says that he spent about two years with the Turanians, and now he's back in Zamora for a little more theiving before heading over to the Western Ocean for "Queen of the Black Coast." It's noted several times that the effigy of Zath in the temple is more than twice the size of the spider Conan fought in "The Tower of the Elephant," and even Zath's children are larger than that arachnid. Conan makes several comments about the barbarity of supposed civilization and is working on holding his tongue a little better, which he definitely grows at. "Guarding his tongue" and "weighing his words" are one of his biggest adjustments to civilization, he says. This is much scarier when you're hiding amongst your enemies.

---

While researching this novel, I came across a pretty hilarious review of it which can only be accessed via the Wayback Machine. While I almost completely disagree with it, the writer had some pretty funny lines lampooning what he saw as an inexcusably bad novel.

"I fear no commentary of mine will be half so successful in furnishing the rope to hang it by than the book’s own turgid prose."

He says of Conan's rescue of a witch early in the book:

"But before he gets to Yezud though he does interrupt his journey just long enough to save a witch called Nyssa from being burnt at the stake. Again no readily plausible explanation is forthcoming about why he should choose to do this apart from the rather limp contention that “the protection of women, regardless of age, form, or station, was one of the few imperatives of his barbarian code”. The most risible aspect of this sorry episode comes though when Conan struggles to outdistance the pursuing pack of pitchfork wielding yokels and has to be saved by the witch casting a glamour spell of illusion. Memories of “The Black Stranger” and of a limping Conan outrunning a Pictish war-party can seldom have seemed more remote."

About a scene in which Conan orders a more upscale wine than he is prone to:

"Hook Howard’s grave up to a generator and I reckon the dynamo revolutions produced by this particular passage could power a city block."

As the reviewer careens toward a conclusion:

"​As is all too painfully apparent from the above, this is a quite appalling book. Literally jaw droppingly abject in actual fact. I’m quite at a loss to recall the last time I came across a novel anywhere near as incompetently conceived and executed as this one. The whole sloppy narrative is entirely driven by contrivance and coincidence from start to finish. It is utterly impoverished in imagination and displays not even the most meagre sense of any sort of enthusiasm whatsoever on the part of the author."

Unfortunately, our reviewer is not all fun and games.

"And then you ventured your suggestion that the book was actually written by de Camp’s wife, and in an instant the reason for every one of the novel’s abundance of faults became blindingly clear. Simply put, this is a woman’s book and its Conan is a woman’s concept of what makes an acceptable hero...

At the risk of appearing irreparably chauvinist, I would also suggest that the use of a spider as a central feature indicates the governing hand of a woman in the creation of the book. Spiders are far more of a female fear than a male one, as a thousand cartoons and sit-com cliches will testify to."

You do sound irreparably chauvinist, bud. It's sad how many times I've come across the assertion that women can't write sword & sorcery because they're somehow allergic to badassery or secretly trying to castrate male heroes. The assertion that Catherine Crook de Camp must be responsible for this book because women are more afraid of spiders than men, judging by the highly scientific study of cartoons and sitcoms is especially funny.

We agree that this book was probably mostly Catherine de Camp and less L. Sprague, but I've got to say that she's done an excellent job here to outpace her husband for one of the better Conan novels.

★★★★☆