In Beyond the Black River Howard gives the reader Conan at his most brutally tribal. This story was very personal for Howard, who inserted himself and his dog into it as two doomed frontier fighters. This is the most obvious America colonial frontier story in the fantasy genre.

The Picts of Howard’s mythology are the bad guys in this story, the Hurons of Last of the Mohicans.

“Another instant and there would be a stranger in Hell,” spoke Conan after butchering a Pict about to ambush the viewpoint character, Balthus. Ironically, Conan was among the horde of screaming savages that had wiped out an old border fort where Balthus’ uncle had long ago been stationed. Conan goes on at length as to how foolish Hyborean [read, European] colonization was, and that the white man had reached the geographical limits of his range through rash and greedy conquest that favored rich investors and not the common man, and could be expected to be pushed back from their frontiers.

Howard does an excellent job of evoking the lonely peril of life under the vast primeval forests that confronted his forefathers when they first came to the shores of North America. In Beyond the Black River the Conan character is obviously an Indian [Cimmerian], battling another tribe of Indians [Picts] on behalf of the white man. Howard is at his best writing about shadowed and brooding forests, feuds, and the bitter passions of hard bitten men. Conan refers to his enemies as “dogs” and “devils” not very often calling them “Picts.”

“The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border men never spoke of them as such.”

“A savage figure of suspicious menace,” is how Conan seems to his companion. After action, it is typically time for sardonic humor, as in the scene where Balthus and Conan find a murdered merchant, “The demon isn’t going to get Tiberias’ head if I can help it,” he growled, “We’ll carry the body back to the fort. It isn’t more than three miles. I never liked the fat bastard, but we can’t have Pictish devils making cursed free with white men’s heads…his throat was torn open and he was selling his otter skins in Hell.”

If you have not read a Howard story, but are a Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour reader, or a fan of western movies, start reading Howard with Beyond the Black River.