I know I’ve said this before—and have meant it every time—but this is my favorite Conan story! Shadows in Zambolua is the best paced pure adventure of the series. However, there is much to it that speaks to the modern dystopian reader.

Through the eyes of Conan, the rude ‘Western Barbarian’, from an ethnically homogenous egalitarian tribal culture, the listener is treated to the picture of a city ruled by an empire. Zambolua has a hetrogenerous population. The large and varied mixed-race population including “hybrids of all unholy hues and breeds” is ruled by a small elite who employ mercenary forces as police [the military contractors currently working for various domestic agencies come to mind].

Arim Baksh is a sleazy tavern owner who is perhaps the most well wrought villain of Robert E. Howard’s many stories. Conan is a likable loser, bumming around drinking and gambling, with no particular course of action in mind. Zambolua is a city that eats its own and feasts upon the visitor; an imperial city like every modern American metropolis, home to rival ethnicities and classes and ruled by an elite with their eyes on distant foreign prizes.

Conan is the quintessentially independently lethal outsider on the inside, the kind of man that his author, Robert E. Howard, dreamed of when he sat in his writing trance trying to channel the ethnic spirit of his ancient ancestors. Howard’s lethal white loner represented by Conan, trusts to no third party to protect him from the evil that men do, as exemplified by one of his most uncompromising statements, “Your bolts and bars are strong. But I always sleep with steel by my side.”

When coming into Zambolua and being warned of the hazards of rooming with Arim Baksh, Conan states, “I have no goods” indicating that he is an unlikely robbery target, yet does not farm out his survival to government functionaries as does the postmodern American mangina.

This story is cited by literary people as an example of racist writing from a racist time. But to me the scene where the mixed race group of tavern goers look at Conan, knowing that he is about to be set upon by black murderers, and offering no warning, reminds me of thousands of steps I have taken out into the ghetto from a bus or bar whose passengers or patrons shook their heads and wondered if I would make it alone on foot in a city full of black criminals; encouraged as they are by the government and the moneyed elite to prey on poor whites. So, just as Howard envisioned a world of the distant past in which a lone white man must look to his own means for survival in the face of a black menace, tolerated by the elite hiding behind barred doors at night, I live in such a world, and do sleep with steel by my side. If you are some liberal feminist who thinks that the idea of a city stalked by groups of predatory black men is some dark racist fantasy, I invite you to come spend the night on the streets of Baltimore.

And, if you are a woman, keep in mind, that in 2005, according to the Department of Justice, 37,000 white American women were raped by black men, to 10 black women raped by whites, and that the FBI put the later figure at less than 1 for the year 2013. So it seems Howard’s view of some prehistoric fantasy city more closely approximates the reality of postmodern American cities than does our own contemporary view. Howard even presents pornographic idolatry in such a city. Imagine that?

If you are a person living in a city dominated by a class of criminals known to prey upon people of your ethnic group, who are known to be cowards and weaklings hiding behind gates and walls, than read Shadows in Zambolua. I particularly like that Conan is not a good guy, but a bad ass who will put aside good sense to get in a dancing girl’s pajamas.

LibriVox audio books are excellently done and Mark Nelson's reading is excellent as well.