SHADOWS IN THE SKULL

Well, we've come to the final story for our chronology.

The further I've gotten into Conan's late life, the more I kind of wish that I had stopped at The Hour of the Dragon, which would have been such a fitting end to everything. "The Witch of the Mists" was painfully mediocre, "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" was hot, boiled ass, and "Red Moon of Zembabwei" had far too few good ideas.

Weirdly enough, I've gotten the feeling as I've been reading this set of stories (that clearly de Camp and Carter envisioned as a novel-in-pieces, and a follow-up to Conan the Buccaneer), it feels like writers whose gas tanks have run dry, and they're trying to fill out the end of Conan's life long after they should've stopped writing the guy.

But they did really good work after these stories: decent-to-good Conan tales "Legions of the Dead," "Shadows in the Dark," "The People of the Summit," "The Star of Khorala," "The Gem in the Tower," "The Ivory Goddess," and "Moon of Blood" were all written after this boresome foursome, and they are all leagues better than the Old Man Conan stories. So I don't really get what happened here. Along with the three previous tales, this one was adapted into the King Conan Marvel comic in the early 80s. Since it was written by Roy Thomas and penciled by John Buscema, both of whom are Conan comic greats, it might be better than the original. I stared at back issues of King Conan 1-4 at my local comic shop the other day and couldn't bring myself to spend the $16 to get all four of them, so for now, I'll have to imagine they're the better versions.

Like the others that came directly before "Shadows in the Skull," there are numerous references to previous events in Conan's life, and several that surprised me. I don't think we've had a single mention of Juma or the events of "The City of Skulls" in any story since.

---

"None surpasses them in manhood; my old comrade Juma could take on three of your Aquilonian knights with his bare hands and come out grinning."

We get a reference to Conan's Turanian mercenary days and even to "The Curse of the Monolith," and of course to Conan the Buccaneer.

Conan is still chasing Thoth-Amon south across the Hyborian continent, to the edge of the known world. There's probably a little bit too much time at the beginning spent on documenting that journey- it feels like padding and doesn't amount to much in either terms of plot development or sharp writing, but we get there eventually. Conan, riding one the of the wyverns from "Red Moon of Zembabwei," arrives at a gigantic skull set into the side of a mountain, which, when viewed from ground level, is actually an opulent palace.

Unsurprisingly, not all is kosher in this skull-shaped palace and Thoth-Amon is not far away. Conan ultimately fights the green-clad wizard on a beach on the southernmost tip of the continent, farther away from Cimmeria than he's ever been.

There are some interesting callbacks to King Kull of Atlantis in "Shadows in the Skull," and I think it's one of the better ideas the narrative has. The serpent people of the edge of the world had fought against Kull in Valusia and they fled to the farthest reaches of the continent. It provides kind of a nice bookending to the vibe: some of the last foes Conan fights are some of the oldest there are.

---

This isn't exactly important or anything, but this story has one unimaginably bad line within it in which Conan is talking about the black warriors of the southern kingdoms:

"I've lived amongst them, fought with them, and fought against them, until they call me 'the black king with a white skin.'"

Nobody calls you that, Conan. To quote one of my favorite Youtubers, Dan Olson, "Cringe. This makes me cringe. There's no other word for it. It's embarrassing." It reminds me of that picture of the white guy standing in front of the MLK memorial in DC.

I do appreciate that there are some vague gestures toward the over-arching themes of the Conan saga in this story. Thoth-Amon, relying on the power of others, on the complication and cost of wizardry, is rapidly draining life out of himself and ultimately needs to complete rituals in which he gains the serpent god Set's favor to have power. Conan, on the other hand, needs nobody's help and gets the job done himself.

Unfortunately, this is a little muddied by de Camp and Carter, framing the story slightly differently with Conan as an agent of "Mitra the Light-Bringer," rather than Crom's smashing-and-grabbing barbarian. The fact that Conn ultimately kills Thoth rather than Conan is just a little bit anticlimactic. 

Thus ends the final short story that I'm reading for this chronology. Conan does eventually apparently decide that he's done with his kingship and ships off to the western ocean with some Barachan pirates in Conan of the Isles, but that novel has pretty mediocre reviews. 

That means our final entry in the chronology will be the poem "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian."

★★☆☆​☆

---