Howard’s treatment of Almuric as a surreal dreamscape continues in this mind-numbing account of a planet transited by horrors under dominant heavenly bodies, with both the sun and the moon waxing ominously.
The plot continues taking predictable genre turns. However, the tale is so mythic, that this seems fitting. The plot is not nearly as important as the setting and its torturously buffeted characters.
Interestingly, in this supposedly sexist tale of a sexist author, we have tiny Altha, the arch-feminine, asserting her will at her own peril—acting heroically among a tribe of brutish, white apemen. We should also not forget that the evil denizens of the city in the last chapter were also evil, white primates:
“I heard her sobbing. Among the hazy, tortured impressions of that dreary trek, that stands out most clearly—Altha sobbing in the night, terrible with loneliness and despair in the immensity of shadowed world and moaning darkness.”
As Esau continues impotent to deal with his many enemies—despite his immense prowess. Altha strikes off far more boldly—and in a girlish way—than ever typical of female characters in the genre and in a much more real fashion that what one now reads in modern adventure novels, in which the woman asserts herself as a beautiful man, not as a woman.
In Howard’s hands, Almuric, on the surface a silly fantasy construct, congeals as a kind of moral crucible for the formation of the masculine and the feminine.
