THE PEOPLE OF THE SUMMIT

Alright, we're adding a new voice to the authorship. So far, we have read...

• 5 stories written by Robert E. Howard alone
• 3 stories begun by Howard and finished or revised by another
• 3 stories by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter writing together
• and one that I didn't expect to read that was plotted by Andrew Offutt (but the version we read was by Roy Thomas).

But for the first time, we're getting a story that combines L. Sprague de Camp and Swedish author Björn Nyberg. My first encounter with Nyberg's Conan writing was the Savage Sword adaption of "The Star of Khorala," which I thought was pretty good.

Nyberg is kind of interesting in that he's go very little in his bibliography. There's one Conan novel, a few Conan short stories, two other stories written in the late 50s, and a quick essay titled "Conan and Myself." According to that essay, he was just a Conan fan who started banging away at a typewriter with the intention of improving his WPM and figured the way to do that was by writing a sequel to the novel Conan the Conqueror. Apparently, people liked it and eventually de Camp gave it the once-over, and it was published.

That sounds surprisingly easy, but less surprising when you go on the official Conan website and see that they literally have a button that anyone can press that's like, "Hey, do you want to use Conan for an idea you have? Just ask us!" I wonder if that's how Conan gets licensed for stuff like the MK1 character pack. Heroic Signatures is surprisingly easy to reach. They respond to things like Youtube comments and are generally really nice.

In "Conan and Myself," Nyberg writes that his conversations with de Camp revealed that de Camp thought Conan's years as a mercenary in the Turanian army were perhaps the most interesting and most unexplored part of Conan's career, and that's exactly what's happening in "The People of the Summit." While I can't say it's uninteresting, I definitely don't think it's the most interesting part of his career by a huge margin.

This story opens with Conan and a young Turanian named Jamal as the only survivors of an ambush by the Khozgari, looking for a way to escape. They are being watched by Shanya Karaz, the daughter of a Khozgari chief, who they decide to hold hostage until they can reach the safety of the city Samara. Against the advice of Shanya, they head south into the Misty Mountains (were these guys big Tolkein fans?) and encounter a horrifying monkey-like race.

"The People of the Summit" has some unique antagonists. In the high, dark, misty peaks, there's a chalky, skull-faced ancient people who are dying out. They kidnap, or, I suppose, re-kidnap, Shanya from Conan in order to revitalize their race. They're holed-up in a keep on the highest peak, and it's all pretty fucking cool, especially when a gigantic, egg-like spider comes out to kill Conan and the Cimmerian ends up pushing him off a cliff. Conan makes such quick work of the chalky folks that it's good he has an actual challenge. 

My copy of Conan the Swordsman features a "People of the Summit" cover. That's Jamal in his distinctively Turanian garb.

Conan seems to be continuing to grow in his skills, because we see him do some things in this story that we haven't gotten yet. Usually when Conan encounters something very supernatural, he has a moment where our authors note that he freezes in fear because he hates and distrusts the paranormal so much. Here, though, Conan quickly shakes it off and acts rather than standing with his mouth agape thinking shitshitshitshitshit. 

Additionally, while encountering cairns of round stones which he recognizes to be graves of long-dead mountain people, he carefully steps around them in order to show respect for their passing, which is something unlike what we've ever seen him do. Yes, he does end up needing to huck the rounded stones at at the egg spider to force it off the cliff, but he only does that when he's out of options. 

I have to admit, Conan's movements are getting a little bit harder to track. My first map that I made was mostly pretty easy. The spots that didn't have exact placements (like the field of battle at the start of "The Hand of Nergal") were pretty easy to place because our only description was "a field by a river." But this story is making it a little harder to tell exactly where Conan is. I can't find a map with the Misty Mountains marked on it. I live in Colorado, so I'm used to sub-ranges having names, like the San Juan Rockies or Sangre de Cristo Rockies, but I'm wondering if the "Misty Mountains" is just a descriptive nickname give to a section of the Yimsha Mountains. We know Conan is trying to escape the ambush by moving south, and it's probably south out of Hyrkania, I think. And Samara is stated to be only a two-day ride from the edge of the mountains, so we have to be somewhere along the bottom of the Vilayet Sea, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

"The People of the Summit" is a fun, solid Conan story with an interesting setting that makes for a good time. Nyberg's alright! I'm excited that our next story, "The Curse of the Monolith," will take us much farther to the east than we've ever been to the land of Khitai.

★★★★☆