THE CURSE OF THE MONOLITH (A.K.A. "CONAN AND THE CENOTAPH")

We have never been this far east. I don't know if we'll ever get this far east again! In "The Curse of the Monolith" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, we are with Conan in the large nation of Khitai, the Hyborian predecessor for Chinese culture.

This story was published in 1968 in the magazine Worlds of Fantasy under a different title, strangely. It was titled there as "Conan and the Cenotaph," but was renamed to "The Curse of the Monolith" when it was reprinted in the book Conan of Cimmeria starting the following year. Once again, the Internet Archive is coming in clutch because I've been able to read the Ace Books titles Conan, Conan the Swordsman, and now Conan of Cimmeria all for free on that awesome site. 

I would really love to know how people kept up with Conan stories in the 60s since they were being published in such different places. Were magazines like Worlds of Fantasy available widely at drug store magazine racks? I wonder how much hunting-down you had to do if you were a sci-fi fan back then. I would imagine you would have to rely a lot on word of mouth or a really reliable store clerk to be able to grab many publications like that. I'm 32, so I do remember before information on just about everything was available on the internet. Specifically, I remember gobbling up as many episodes of The Twilight Zone as I could on the New Year's Even marathon every year, hawking the magazine rack for Amazing Spider-Man comics, and trying to figure out every channel that showed Star Trek reruns. But all of that was when I was like 16 at the most. Now there are vast, fan-run wikis for every interest. 

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In terms of our narrative, Conan has now been a Turanian merc for over a year. We get another mention of his friend Juna in this one. While Juna was given a cushy job as captain of the guard in Aghrapur by King Yildiz, Conan is still out on the road. He's brought an offer of a trade treaty to Kusan, which is a small kingdom in western Khitai. I'm not sure we ever get to see eastern Khitai- most maps of the Hyborian Age are pretty barren over there, implying that we don't get much detail about adventures further east. I read one time that a very late trek in Conan's career (after his Kingship of Aquilonia) takes him even to the Hyborian analogue for Japan, but I'm not sure which story that was in.

Kusan is very different to most of the kingdoms we've seen so far. There's lots of what you might expect in an imagined version of China from the perspect of an American in the 1960s. The villain of the piece, Duke Feng, has a voice that is described as catlike several times. Last year when I read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I noticed that he also described Chinese men (in that case spoken by dock workers in California during the late 1800s) as men with "speech like cats." Is this some weird, old-timey stereotype?

Duke Feng is a pretty fun villain. You can tell he's up to absolutely no good from his very first line, but what he's up to hangs in the air. When he traps Conan using the magnetized monolith, he sits a ways off on a hill and menacingly starts playing a shrill tune on a flute, so that's cool. 

Conan doesn't like Feng much, judging his foppish ways, but also for the first time admitting some envy over how Feng is effortlessly charming to people. Conan is said to have polished up a bit while traveling with the Turanians and is, dare I say it, somewhat of a polyglot now. The story makes note that his Khitan language is little more than a smattering of words, but he's doing very well with Hyrkanian language. 

This was a quick little Conan story: maybe a little bit inconsequential, even if it does represent a massive step across the map. It was adapted into Savage Sword #33, which I must have read (I'm into at least issue 70 by now) but I can't remember at all. It has a bangin' cover with some excellent color work on it.

I'm beginning to notice a pattern. The de Camp and Carter stories aren't usually quite as good as the Howard-penned tales. Honestly, there is a huge number of Conan writers who treat Howard as kind of unassailable, and I think he's far from that, but I will say that de Camp and Carter aren't usually quite as good. Luckily for me, Howard is back (kind of) in the next story in our chronology, "The Blood-Stained God."

★★★☆☆

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