Conan - Conan and the Spider God

L. Sprague de Camp collaborated with Lin Carter and Bjorn Nybert to author several Conan stories. However, he only attempted one solo Conan effort, the 1980 Bantam paperback Conan and the Spider God. The novel was also published in hardcover in 1984 by Robert Hale, and reprinted twice by Ace, once in 1989 and again in 1991. Tor also published the book as a hardcover and paperback, and collected it as part of Sagas of Conan in 2004. The novel was adapted into comic form in Savage Sword of Conan #207-210 in 1993.

In the book's first few chapters, Conan is on the fugitive trail after slaying a fellow officer in the Turanian military - over a girl, of course. His quest to flee his pursuers places him on wacky adventures that essentially just fill paperback pages until de Camp settles on an actual plot. In these pages, Conan fights a swamp cat, rescues an old lady from a burning stake, and meets a blind man who utters some prophetic nonsense. The most interesting of these side quests is Conan's night with mysterious Zamorian merchants. It is in their camp that Conan discovers the men have captured King Yildiz's favorite wife, although at the time, he thinks she is just a mysterious female traveler. 

Eventually, Conan arrives in Yezud and is still being pursued by Turanian guards. It is here that the book settles into a long, boring narrative as the titular hero becomes a blacksmith, romances a woman named Rubadeh, and learns that the town's priests are divided, one half serving the King and the others serving a spider god named Zath. Conan is intrigued by the division and learns that Zath is really a giant statue of a spider, complete with gemstones representing the deity's eyes. Conan also learns that King Yildiz's wife is being held captive in a tower there guarded by a tiger. His quest is to continue infiltrating the city's political and military circumference, steal the gemstones, rescue the wife, and ride into peace and tranquility with the love of his life Rubadeh.

Obviously, there are only two real reasons to read or own de Camp's critically-panned pile of trash – Bob Larkin's Bantam paperback cover and the idea that Conan fights a large spider. Beyond those two things, the book is completely worthless (as much as it pains me to call a book disposable). This isn't Robert E. Howard's Conan. It isn't even a worthy Marvel interpretation that dominates the Tor paperback line. Instead, de Camp is making up his own version of Conan, one that cries, pines for love, debates becoming married, and is submissive to authority. This is a mere shell of Howard's nihilistic pulp hero. 

If his sympathetic and deranged take on Conan's character isn't insulting enough, de Camp even borrows entire scenes from Howard's work. In the setup to the book's finale, Conan provides spoiled meat to the tiger prowling around the base of the tower. Once the tiger “dies”, Conan scales the tower, gets the wife, and comes down only to be surprised that the tiger isn't dead. He kills it with his sword and continues on. This is from The Tower of the Elephant, in which Conan's ally Taurus blows magic lotus dust on a lion prowling the base of a tower. Conan eventually comes down from the tower and is surprised to find there is another lion there that he must kill with his sword. Same thing. The book is riddled with this stuff.

Conan and the Spider God is a boring, uninspired novel that rests securely in the basement of Conan literature. It can't possibly get any worse than this, thus earning my not-so-coveted ranking as a Hall of Shame member.