First published in Weird Tales in September 1933 as The Slithering Shadow

This reading is taken from the Coming of Conan The Cimmerian, pages 219 to 247, with 5 illustrations by Mark Schultz

Mark’s illustrations evoke the dreamy quality of the story. His rendering of Natala brings to mind Frazetta’s Conan babes from the 12 issue paperback series that I read as a boy.

In yet another early 1933/34 tale of the fanciful Hyborian Age and his barbarian hero, Howard has Conan begin an adventure as the last survivor of a defeated army that had been betrayed. Taking into account Howard’s bitterness over the rape of his nation’s economy by the financial class [which I think inspired his image of conniving sorcerers], and the fact that striking union men and out of work veterans had been attacked and crushed repeatedly by the U.S military in recent years, I cannot help but think this story might have been inspired by some frustrated WWI veteran Howard might have encountered in a West Texas oil town.

In 1933/34 Howard was all over the place with his female characters: Belit the she-devil pirate, Olivia the fallen and conflicted noble woman, and poor timid Livia the abducted sex slave. Natala, Conan’s steady camp girl, falls somewhere between Livia and Olivia in terms of assertiveness. She is, a girl. She is also realistically portrayed as being both heavily dependent on and jealous of Conan, who is soon the object of a bewitching seductresses’ lust. Natala is not just a helpless sex kitten, but a realistic companion.

Howard uses perspective shifts more deftly in this story than in his other offerings for this year. Being a short novelette Xuthal of The Dusk is his ideal length, and never drags. Howard’s pacing was so much better than other fantasy writers. He was a brutally concise alternative to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Howard was considered the hack of the two. But his stuff holds up better going on a century later.

As with most of Howard’s Conan tales this one is redolent with creeping menace. Natala is fearful of Xuthal from the outset. “Is it a city, Conan?” She whispered, too fearful to hope. “Or is it but a shadow?”

Conan is less circumspect with his opinions of the sleeping city in the desert, with comments such as, “this devil-haunted pile” and “damned degenerates!”

When the decadent inhabitants of this lost city finally succeed in separating Natala from Conan, he goes on a four-page rampage. If once, in film, someone would film a running fight like this maniacal masterpiece for an action movie, I would be thrilled. The scenes in which Conan runs after and from people at the same time while he is slaughtering them with a saber reads like it should be directed by whoever did the Bourne series.

There is still horror ahead for Conan, and he faces the toughest monster Howard had yet set before him. In the meantime, Natala is being sexually tortured by the evil Stygian beauty Thalis, who should have been paired off in catfight against Belit—and there remain more clumsy ‘city-bred’ swordsmen for Conan to cleave through.

In terms of Howard's broadest and deepest themes, racial memory and the evils of civilization, Xuthal of the Dusk is pregenant with both. Not only are the citizens of this lost city degenerates and sex fiends, but they loll away their dreamy lives in a drugged stupor, reasoning this to be compensation for the horror that eventually comes for them all in the night; the shadowy, slithering, all-consuming menace that their false city is built upon, and for which this lost race of men are nothing but food. The "damned degenerates" of Xuthal are nothing more than food; their vaunted city a sacrificial pen for the tranquilized lives necessary to feed a deeply buried lie.