THE GOD IN THE BOWL

“The God in the Bowl” always seems to be a less-remembered Conan story. If I had to guess why, I’d say that it’s because it is fairly light on action, though it mostly makes up for it in suspense. Conan is essentially in the entire thing, but as a story that takes place mostly in one room and most of the ink spent on one-off characters levying accusations at one another, I can see why it wouldn’t be somebody’s favorite. ​

Sorry to subject you to the same picture everyone uses for this story, but there aren't that many good pics out there for it.

This story is apparently one of Howard’s earliest: written in three drafts in March 1932, and probably written the very same month that he revised the rejected King Kull story “By This Axe I Rule!” into “The Phoenix on the Sword” and wrote “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” it was penned only about a month after Howard fully formed Conan in his mind and began to set his adventures to the page. However, it didn’t make it to publication until after Howard’s death, first appearing in the magazine Space Science Fiction in September 1952. According to Patrice Louimet’s “Hyborian Genesis” essay (which, by the way, has been so illustrative and helpful to place these early stories in context), REH mailed off “The Phoenix on the Sword” and “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales at the same time and didn’t even wait to get a response before he started writing “The God in the Bowl.” ​

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It’s a little surprising to me that Conan’s literary history begins with so much failure: Howard rewrote “Phoenix” because his Kull story had been rejected, and “Frost-Giant” had to be re-written into an unrelated version for it to not be rejected, and then you have “Bowl,” which never made it to publication in his lifetime. All of these stories eventually made it in some form or another, but there’s probably a lesson about practice, perseverance, and patience, the kind that I would like to impart to my high school students. 

​I read while doing some research that sci-fi author Cora Buhlert called “The God in the Bowl” Howard doing Agatha Christie, but it feels more to me like Howard’s version of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It’s lacking a C. Auguste Dupin character, but it presents much the same situation. Someone has been murdered, there’s no way anybody could have avoided being seen while coming or going, and (my bad for spoiling stories that are 92 and 183 years-old, I guess), the murderer ultimately turns out to be non-human. I feel like it’s easy to guess the real murderer here (whereas if you had given me 100 guesses, I wouldn’t have hazarded “It was a gorilla” to try to solve “Rue Morgue”) with the guards noting the strange, black rope that’s so high up a column only a snake could have crawled up it, and a few other hints like that. Conan gets mixed up in the investigation because he’s entered this museum to steal a jewel-encrusted goblet. Most of the first half of the story is spent proving that there’s no way the murderer could have gotten out, so they’re probably still in the museum, which increases the tension. The ending, though quick, is a pretty excellent and horrifying monster scene.​

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In a way that surprised me, "The God in the Bowl" is actually a pretty interesting chapter for Conan in terms of how it fits into the themes of his overall canon. In his essay "Barbarism Ascendant," Frank Coffman quotes scholar Gilbert Keith Chesterton on the purpose of police stories from a 1902 essay called "A Defense of Detective Stories:"

...the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the face that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates.

I really like that line of thinking. While we, the readers, know that Conan probably isn't the bad guy in this story- slaying random people doesn't seem like his style- he really is the antagonist in that he is the barbarous interloper, upsetting the "order" of the "civilized" world with his barbarian ways. He's a threat to these civilized people, if not physically, then philosophically.

Even if this story is considered one of the lesser Hyborian tales, there’s a lot to like here. The opulent museum in which the whole thing takes place is a unique setting for a Conan story. While basically none of the Nemedian guard characters are very likable, that just makes it more fun when Conan is stabbing them in the legs and plucking their eyes out. I winced while reading that part of the story, but in a good way. Additionally, the bowl of the title once again hints at an even more ancient past, with its diadem belonging to the giant-kings (or “monster-kings,” hell yeah) of the ancestors of Stygia. I know I’ve noted several times now that I love a good glimpse of eons-ancient mysteries. Speaking of which, I think this is our first chronological mention of Thoth-Amon, who goes onto be the closest thing Conan has to an arch-nemesis.

There’s quite a bit of controversy surrounding the edits that L. Sprague de Camp made to this story when he edited it for publication in the 50s, but it seems like Howard’s has been mostly restored as the canonical version and de Camp’s is rarely reprinted anymore. My beefy copy of The Complete Chronicles of Conan is 18 years old, and it features Howard’s, not de Camp’s.

de Camp was not much of a fan of this story (which is perhaps why he made so many edits to it), writing, “‘The God in the Bowl’ tries, not very skillfully, to combine adventure-fantasy with a detective story,” and neither were many contemporaries, though it seems like modern opinions are a little kinder to it. While I like it, I can’t say it’s close to one of the best of the bunch.

In terms of continuity, we can continue to see Conan growing in his skills, if not his maturity. He’s able to hold his tongue a little better than before, though he’s unable to stop himself from giving away slightly too much of his motive at one point and his temper is pretty flaring. Additionally, and this may be my only gripe with this story, can Conan come up with a better insult than “dog?” I swear he uses it about twenty-five times over the course of twelve pages or so. 

Well, we’ve almost reached the end of the thief stories. Conan is now moving west from Zamora, to Numalia on the eastern side of Nemedia. I’ve hit a bit of a snag, though. “Rogues in the House,” which I’m reading next, takes place in Corinthia, which sits to the east of Nemedia. If Conan’s thief stories happen in an east-to-west direction, shouldn’t Conan have already passed through Corinthia? I guess we’ll see if I figure this out through some new information or if the two stories should probably swap places. 

★★★☆☆

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