The final chapter of Almuric is an intense, non-stop myopic in which Esau’s outnumbered apemen battle the winged demons, their stalwart human slaves and the horrors of the tunnelcombed mesa and the ancient city at its top. The Yagas are depicted as civilized, devoting their nights to obscene and drunken pleasures and sleeping late. Perhaps the charges that Howard rated blacks as inferior morally, leveled by casual modern reviewers of Almuric, stem from the fact that Howard’s black demons behave almost precisely as do the hip hop generation of African Americans. As Howard ceaselessly depicts such a degenerate end for every civilized race, we can’t seriously accuse him of maliciously racist time-travel.

While the civilized demons covort, drugged through their “frenzied debauchery” the avenging apemen stalk silently—in a very Indian-like way—through the night, like panthers, Howard’s favorite totemic metaphor for both hero and villain.

I cannot, in good conscience, ruin the ending, but will leave the reader with a few passages that exemplify the spirit of this gory finale. Howard uses the term “holocaust” descriptively, more than a decade before it was brought into general and specific use.

“The Akkis [human slaves of the demons] pressed in on us in a great crescent, almost crushing us against the men behind us. They lined the walls, yelling and screaming and brandishing their weapons. There were no bows or missiles among them; their winged masters were careful to keep such things out of their hands…the winged men were swarming out of their citadel like hornets out of a nest…”

“…any race will fight when a foe has invaded its last stronghold, and these winged devils were no weaklings.”

[It remains more important to the narrative—by far—that these devils are winged, rather than black, which is rarely the accented aspect of their description.]

“A thousand ages of cruelty and oppression were being repaid, and red was the payment. The sword was blind; Yaga women as well as men fell beneath it. But knowing the fiendishness of those sleek black females, I could not pity them.”

[Yes, my Harm City urban survival readers will find here a case for Howard as a time traveler, venting about the dark future, but I see this as purely artistic imagery, with the evil race associated with the color of oblivion.]

The queen, Yasmeena, does not go easily into the night and makes a powerful villain to her last wicked breath.