At 157 pages, set for 300 words per page in the mass market paperback edition by Ace, with a word count estimated at 45,000, easily meeting the required classification of a novel, which is 40,000 or more words.

I have read commentary that Almuric was incomplete, yet find it a complete short novel, without the need for a single additional passage. Indeed, a postscript in the Tolkien fashion would have utterly ruined it. There are enough grammatical errors to indicate that an additional draft—perhaps fleshing out the mysterious dwellers in the ruined city—may have been contemplated and then discarded, with minor revisions left undone. Whatever the story of this interplanetary adventure in manuscript form, it was not published until after the author’s death and stands as a complete novel, with superior energy and narrative depth to most of the offerings in its now past genre.

It seems that Howard wrote Almuric before he fully formed his ultimate heroic vision. Esau Cairn, along with Kull, Conn of the Spears of Clontarf, Black Vulmea and Cormac MacArt, are Gaelic war heroes, all tigerish, dark-haired and somber, who prefigure his greatest Character, Conan, a prehistoric Gaelic prototype, who never, in his dozens of adventures, encounters another man of his race, but remains true to his ethnic heritage. Almuric is, in its entirety, a fable about the dualistic theme of civilized degeneracy clashing with barbaric honesty that runs like a red-hot thread through the corded thews of every Conan story, and in that respect may be properly regarded as the thematic loom which Howard employed most often in the weaving of his most enduring yarns.

Read Almuric on a blustery, winter day.