THE VALE OF LOST WOMEN

Well, here it is. The first one-star review I'm putting on a Conan story and the absolute worst one so far. 

​In February of 1933, about a month after selling "Rogues in the House" to Weird Tales, Robert E. Howard was feeling a little bit burned out on the Conan character. In the course of a year since his trip to Mission, Texas where he first envisioned Cimmeria and then stories just poured out of him, involuntarily, if he's to be believed, about this barbarian creation, he had penned twelve Conan tales. Nine of them he sold to Weird Tales, but only three of them had made it to print. Howard had a burgeoning interest in writing western stories during this time, and apparently noted that the Depression was hitting his industry hard, was hoping to diversify his storytelling.

According to "Hyborian Genesis," Patrice Louinet says that we can probably trace "The Vale of Lost Women" back to one pen pal of Howard's, who told him a story about white Texans getting captured by Native Americans in the 1830s:

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“In 1836, when the Texans were fighting for their freedom, the Comanches were particularly bold in raiding the scattered settlements, and it was in one of those raids that Fort Parker fell. Seven hundred Comanches and Kiowas literally wiped it off the earth, with most of its inhabitants. . . . Fort Parker passed into oblivion, and among the women and children taken captive were Cynthia Anne Parker, nine years old, and her brother John, a child of six.

“They were not held by the same clans. John came to manhood as an Indian, but he never forgot his white blood. The sight of a young Mexican girl, Donna Juanity Espinosa, in captivity among the red men, wakened the slumbering heritage of his blood. He escaped from the tribe, carrying her with him, and they were married. . . .”

Louinet hypothesizes that Howard was trying to imbue his story with the themes of many westerns: about the dangers of the frontier. He feels that those themes were lost in translation to the fantasy setting. What we're left with, according to Louinet, is "unsettling reading." I'll go a step further and call it an irredeemably racist excuse for a fantasy story.

I agree with Louinet that Howard missed when it came to writing a "weird western," but what he managed to do was imbue this story with every "going native" anxiety that white people had held since colonial America. We saw it in The Last of the Mohicans in 1757, we saw it in the film The Birth of a Nation in 1915, and it's alive and well in "The Vale of Lost Women" in 1933. I'm not being hyperbolic about this- every description of black characters in this story is pretty horrifically racist. By the time Conan says, "I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man," I was just about ready to be done. 

Even from just a literary perspective, I find stories like this to be of unacceptably low quality. Howard, who has proven time and again to be able to be able to whisk us away to lands undreamed of, he can't imagine a black culture not completely infected by his own vile views. Howard frequently uses skin color as a shorthand for goodness. White is purity and morality, and darker skin sits on a spectrum of immoral to straight-up subhuman.

​I haven't ever read the Roy Thomas Marvel Comics adaption of this story, and I would be interested to. Sometimes Thomas very subtly sands off some of the rougher edges of Howard.

I'm genuinely not trying to put Howard's racism front-and-center in these posts, mostly because I'm trying to have a good time by reading and writing about one of my favorite fictional characters, but this story makes it impossible to ignore. I often see hand-waving about the racism of the time. "It was the 30s, what do you expect?" I don't think we have to accept that. My grandfather told me a story once about how a kid in town called one of his only black classmates the n-word when they were in school. My grandpa and some other kids beat the shit out of him, and "He didn't say that word no more," according to my grandpa. That was in the early 40s. 

The only good thing about this story is that it is told from the perspective of the girl Livia entirely, which makes it a little unique in the Conan canon. 

After burning ​Bêlit's ship the Tigress upon her death, Conan has been living in Kush and making a name for himself with his fighting strength. He's farther south than he's ever been on the map.

Howard took a break of a few months to write stories that had nothing to do with Conan after this one. There's no record that he ever submitted it to Weird Tales, and it was published for the first time in Magazine of Horror in 1967. Horrifying indeed. If only this slop had stayed in trunk. 

"The Castle of Terror" is up next. Sounds cool!

★☆☆☆☆

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