First published in Weird Tales August 1934, reading from Del Ray’s The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Illustrated by Mark Shultz, 2003, pages 321-348

Again the work of Mark Shultz illuminates the text with a dark insight, often picking an angle un-guessed by the first time reader. Mark obviously reread the collection numerous times. His rendering of the Lord of Dagon is chilling.

This is the sequel to Iron Shadows in the Moon. This time a slave girl of particular physical qualities and defiant spirit is used—to her utter horror—as bait by an imperial official to entrap Conan, who is heading a gang of Cossack-like bandits.

The story begins with my favorite Howard prologue. It is the brief tale of the last moments of a fisherman’s life, a fisherman who discovers that a thunder storm has awakened an ancient horror on the ‘castellated isle of Xapur’, home to the ruins of a long dead civilization.

Howard’s interest in oriental adventure comes to the surface here. In many ways this might have been an adventure set in Iran of the 1700s, with the scheming officials of the oriental potentate of Turan laying a trap for the barbarian bandit.

The Devil in Iron has long been my favorite Conan story—but not any longer. Most of Howard’s Conan tales are more concerned with the brutal allegory of civilization versus barbarism, and tend to skimp on the gross aspects of the plot, leaving many later writers to assume Howard was just a pulp hack. Howard does provide the dark atmospheric horror he used so well. However it comes off as more of an overlay here. In other respects though, it is the most strongly plotted Conan tale. For me, as a youth, interested in Conan kicking ass and getting laid, this was the Conan tale. Now, as an aging man, looking into the seams of the world, I see The Devil in Iron as a very cool, but among the least substantial of Howard’s remarkable Conan series.

That said, The Devil in Iron, remains a story of deep allegorical quality—just not on the level of the other stories Howard did in this vein. The subtext of this tale may be read as the cyclic nature of life [represented by the lance of lightning], bringing forth waves of rising races, who then conquer, idle, wither, and pass, falling in syncopation with the rise of yet other tribes. The fisherman in the first chapter represents the modern person raiding the past only for its material—its artifice—seeing the world as merely a resource pool to be plundered, rather than a life force its own, able to reap destruction on the meddling creature Man, who wrongly thinks he knows the laws by which the Universe is, or is not, governed. The Devil in Iron represents the unnatural forces set loose in the world by Man's rise over his environment. Ironically, those best equipped to deal with such an unnatural force of destruction, is the barbarian; the outlander who is not yet a slave to the constructs of Mankind, who, ironically, is viewed as a devil by his civilized foes.

The racial nuances of this yarn are redolent with politically incorrect reality, as timeless as the attraction between the sexes and the rivalry of tribes. Listen to the audio book with some guilt ridden white liberal and a ghetto gang banger, and you will find you have less in common with the privileged white than the media martyr black, for the Liberal cannot understand Conan, and the Butha will!

Token Liberal friend, repeat after Octavia, "I am no market-block slut!"

Token black friend, say her master's rejoinder, "You are merely a slave!"

If any filmmaker ever decided to do Conan justice by setting him in a film adapted directly from a Conan story by Howard, than The Devil in Iron, would probably make the best-paced movie of the lot.