SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT (A.K.A. IRON SHADOWS IN THE MOON)

What's in a name, or rather, a title? In my opinion, quite a bit. I wrote briefly when we read "The Lair of the Ice Worm" how that title gave too much away from the story. I gave "The Castle of Terror" a pass, but "Shadows in the Moonlight" confuses me.

"Iron Shadows in the Moon," Robert E. Howard's original title for this Conan story, is a fucking banger of a title. It alludes to some of the more exciting aspects of the story (both the black iron statues in the ruins and the gigantic ancient creature who chases Conan and Olivia several times) while also sounding cryptic and interesting. Are the iron shadows being caused by the moon? Are they being cast onto the moon from something on Earth? It's a great title.

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That's why I find it really lame that between submission and publication time, this story's title was changed and ultimately appeared in the April 1934 edition of Weird Tales as "Shadows in the Moonlight." This isn't the worst title of all time or anything, but it's certainly a step down from the original and feels much more generic. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that the story directly preceding this one in the chronology has almost the same title, "Shadows in the Dark."

In fact, there are lots of repetitive titles in this series. There are shadows in the dark, in the moonlight, in Zamboula, in the skull. There are lots of black things: coasts, colossuses, tears, circles, ones in pools, rivers sphinxes. There are red nails, citadels of scarlet, moons of blood, gods with crimson stains...

Anyway, Howard penned this story along with two others in November or December 1932, so this is one of the original batch of Conan stories that he pumped out in his first year of the Hyborian Age.

The setting of this story is fun, albeit unoriginal. Conan has traveled really far offscreen between the last story and this. He's gone from the port of Messantia in Argos all the way to the Vilayet Sea, close to where he spent most of his days as a Turanian mercenary. The story explicitly tells us that Conan spent some time with raiders impartially plundering Koth, Zamora and Turan between then and now. According to the L. Sprague de Camp introduction in the reprinted version of this story, Conan should be about 30, which makes sense to me. We spend most of this story on an island in the middle of the sea, complete with an ancient ruin untouched for centuries. Those ruins and the black, iron statues in them are tied for the best aspect of the story, I would say.

After selling "Black Colossus" to Weird Tales, Howard apparently decided that quality and strong characters were not essential for convincing Farnsworth Wright to buy your story (odd that it's that story that told him that seeing as "Black Colossus" is one of his best) as he banged out this story, "Xuthal of the Dusk" and "The Pool of the Black One" in the next months. Still, this tale has some really fun characterization that I guess Howard just lucked into. Conan's spat with a group of pirates is entertaining and nearly laugh-out-loud funny. They bicker like teenagers and Conan is forced to recount their idiocy:

"Crom, what a day it has been! Such haggling and wrangling I never heard. I'm nearly deaf. Aratus wished to cut out my heart, and Ivanos refused, to spite Aratus, whom he hates. All day long they snarled and spat at one another, and the crew quickly grew too drunk to vote either way—"

He later makes them beg to get back on their ship, all the while making him captain of them. You can practically hear the ass-kissing as they climb aboard. 

"Shadows in the Moonlight" moves fairly quick and the fact that Howard holds off on revealing the monsters for quite some time gives it a solid sense of tension and mystery. Conan ends the story by sailing off into the Vilayet Sea with Olivia on his arm. Olivia says she'll fallow him the world over, but I have a feeling she'll be yesterday's news by the time we see him again. 

This story feels about as stock as some of its characters- it's far from a bad time, but far from the best either. 

Up next is "The Road of the Eagles," which I absolutely loved when I read the Roy Thomas Savage Sword adaption, but I've never picked up the original!

★★☆☆​☆