First published in Weird Tales, April 1934, reviewed from the Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, illustrated by Mark Schultz, 2002, Del Rey, NY, pages 187-216
The illustrations for this story, of Olivia, the female protagonist through whom we see Conan, are softly done and compelling.
It was not until I began reviewing fiction that I realized that Howard specialized in the novelette, which, as a writer, is my most comfortable length. Given his influence on my outlook I suppose he probably affected my story-length bias as well. Iron Shadows in the Moon is a shorter novelette of 4 chapters, the last being very brief.
It is fascinating—more than it is interesting—to reread fiction that impressed me as a youth. With the Conan material I have done this about every ten years, and have pretty much read the entire series once in the middle of every decade beginning with the 1970s. As I work through this Del Rey compilation of Howard’s work I have often wondered what I would think about my most recent reading of my once favorite Conan tale, as it was always my favorite as a teen. On my grading scale you might guess that four is as low as I go for a Robert E. Howard Conan story, with at least one story [Tower of the Elephant] scoring a six out of five.
Iron Shadows in the Moon starts out with a bang, keeps pace, spreads horrific peril out, and shares some narrative elements with Queen of the Black Coast and some material elements with Rogues in the House, both of which were written at virtually the same time. Having also recently reviewed The Vale of Lost Women—also written about the same time [all four tales within 3 months]—I think that Iron Shadows in the Moon might be Howard’s answer to these other three: back story for Rogues in the House, a way to put Queen of the Black Coast to rest, and perhaps an answer to Vale. As far as Conan’s relationship with his leading ladies this story comes off as a compromise between Queen and Vale.
Iron Shadows in the Moon begins with one of the best vengeance scenes in fiction. Early on I was tempted to title this review ‘The Devils of Vengeance’ or ‘Oh, Gods of Hell’. After this opening scene the story turns to one of a man and woman, outcast on a lonely sea—which is never-the-less circumscribed, as it is a lake within an enemy empire whose army has just slaughtered all of Conan’s brethren, and who Conan has just deprived of one of its leading princes in a most brutal fashion. This is about being alone and wandering within and against an oppressive nation—another Depression Era outlaw tale dressed up as horrific fantasy. Nearly half of the Conan stories are such tales of raging alienation.
The story has a likable cast of disgusting pirates who are maimed in many creatively brutal ways by the various evil governments they have escaped from and to whom they are criminals. There is an excellent natural monster that I will not spoil for you if you have not read it, along with another supernatural horror that is pure Howard in his use of a character’s dream sequence to expose the nature of the horror. In essence—and in terms of this minor story's importance to the investigation of Arуan mysticism in the early 20th Century—Iron Shadows in the Moon is the title; the iron representing the strength of the seer's ancestral bond, the shadows couching his revelations in dream, and the moon, as ever, representing the reflective withering face of ages of mothering civilization leering down on the bound promethean figure of Western Man crippled by his own ascent from the primal form. All of these elements are given story-life in the hands of Howard, who, it would appear, felt himself embodied—more than was usual—in the tenor of this tale of bloody-handed alienation.
When reviewing The Vale of Lost Women, Victoria [a screen writer and novelist who was my partner for these early Conan reviews] was convinced that that story was, or should have been, a draft for something larger. What I do think, after reading Iron Shadows in the Moon, with its pretty realistic and psychologically balanced female companion Olivia, who had a very similar back-story to Livia in Vale of Lost Women, but was more assertive, is that this is the story that Howard wrote in response to Vale being rejected. I have done this, rather than do a rewrite, by taking the elements that worked for the editor and using them in a different story. The thing that really works for Howard in both stories is writing it from the viewpoint of the relatively helpless female character. In Shadows though, Conan is not nearly as morally compromised as he is in Vale, which I have suggested is the reason for it not being published, just as The Frost Giant’s Daughter was not published because of Conan’s callous treatment of Atali.
That said, I like the other tales better. The pirate aspect loses something without Belit’s psychopathy, even as the female viewpoint becomes less shocking with Conan toned down from savage warlord to bandit chief and pirate captain. Indeed, the Conan that we see at the beginning of this story is the Conan that we see all through Vale—the remorseless savage chopping men into blood pudding.
Still, Iron Shadows in the Moon is an appealing tale of alienation; an alienation fantasy really, when soft civilized Olivia, discarded by her rich father for refusing an arranged marriage, says to Conan, “You are a barbarian, and I am an outcast, denied by my people. We are both pariahs, wanderers of the earth.”
On one hand Olivia is not the cringing Livia, and on the other she is not the raging Belit. She is a realistic woman in a shit situation, a situation that gives an outcast man a chance to be accepted by her. Now I understand what I liked about this story so much as a youth, a boy who was winning fights, but not winning any smiles. Iron Shadows in the Moon was a lonely man’s fantasy about meeting a woman, as outcast as he; and, as a lonely boy, it struck quite a cord in me.
James very tantalising review not just for the possible bridges between Vale and Queen but for a likely synthesis of how this author worked.Time and again Howard presents scenarios between men and women, time and again the relationships are unresolved, and Conan is the common element as a male, the male. It suggests interesting things about him and therefore Howard's view of life and love. We are what we write to a very real extent whether we are writing non fiction or pulp. Are we more than we read? Howard throws a lot of very provocative questions at us in these simple pulp scenarios. Good job hope others will comment on these points.
Thanks so much for checking out the review Victoria. I could not have done it that way without the points you brought up in our review of The Vale of Lost Women. Howard was a lonely man for his day, and men of his day had less intimate contact with women than they do now. I think that is why, in his 30s, he spoke so directly to me as a modern teenage reader when it came to relationships with women.
I am about to read one of only two Conan stories in which Conan begins it with a woman. Usually he shows up as a murderous bachelor.
James in this highly digitized age where we no longer make eye contact as we walk down the street, I am wondering if Howard's issues are even more potent for us. We are now the lonely men of our age; our isolation may be a real mirror of his in many ways. Young people are particularly affected, being bombarded with thousands of potentially empty bff relationships and our adults are as conflicted about the opposite sex as he was. Intimate contact with women? Where?.....
Currently this is a huge issue in nonfiction self-help literature.
We might, as men and women, be coming full circle in some ways in regards to our reading preferences. Howard has a bigger audience than ever for instance.
James forgive my darker, Mercury retrograde mood! but I am wondering, as we are both writers and many of our readers may wonder as well—is there poison in the pen?
this relates to my aside that we are somehow connected to what we write, and the success of Silence of the Lambs and Wire in the Blood, a frankly horrifically violent British series. I would have a difficult time imagining that authors could be capable of doing—or perpetrating—the scenarios we put on the page. I know I cant actually read some of this stuff or watch it, and I write horror and fairly violent sci-fi content. Are reading preferences indicative that somehow we are making a bad connection—that elements in the public are delighting in certain kinds of lit, for very harmful reasons? the information age means all is available to all—in a gentler time, such images might never awaken the next serial killer. Conan is fantasy—some of our modern literature that is savagely violent runs right up against that line. The billboards in LA for the Following series say 'when you touch darkness, darkness touches you.' Comment please.
My primary writing field has been nonfiction 'self-help' concerning everyday violence, and secondarily, ritualized violence in the form combat sports. I am currently working on a book on intuited lethality as a critical subtext in 'street' conversations.
There are essentially two types of spectator relationships with violence. I'll use the terms dynamic and horrific. For this comment I will limit myself to ancient Roman spectacle. There were two types of dynamic violence: beast hunting and gladiatorial combat. The two types of horrific violence were executions and plays in which condemned criminals played the parts of doomed characters. [Could you imagine writing dialogue for the doomed actor!] In the early period all you had was the dynamic stuff, then you had a mix, and eventually the audience was more interested in watching people being fed to animals; a clear shift from smaller Republican audiences preferring combat to larger Imperial audiences preferring executions.
Having seen that the ancient Roman tastes shifted from what was essentially military violence [like us viewing the Expendables] to the executions and lethal plays [like us viewing Hostel or Saw #19], it is no surprise that our American of the imperial period in our history [for we do have 930 military bases world wide] is increasingly interested in violence being depicted in which the dying character is a passive victim as opposed to a combat infantrymen charging a bunker.
Humans have always equated violence with power. As a society grows larger with a more intrusive ruling structure, the people within it tend to an interest in cruelty inflicted on the helpless more often, not so much out of a sadistic yearning, but more in terms of having a victim to identify their own helplessness with. The TV show Criminal Minds has been hugely popular, not because the middle-aged women that make up its bedrock viewership cheer for the serial killers—for they want the hunky bald dude to beat the predator up and cuff him and then have the suave elder investigator damn the killer with edifying words—but because they identify with the helplessness of the victim to affect their environment and resist their oppressor.
You really touched on a deep subject here. In his time Howard rubbed people's noses in the brutality of governments and the grime of violent power. I have a sense that he would be really turned off by the current public's identification with the horrific elements over the dynamic. For him horrific violence was something to be extinguished or held at bay by a purer form of violence. Looked at in that light his mixture of the two makes something like the Expendables look childish, and something like Saw seem obscene. Howard would have started out with a Saw setup and then had Jason Statham and Sly come in and set it right.
How much our writing is a reflection of or cause of violence is one of those chicken versus egg casual debates. My sense is it goes both ways.
James, first I want to confess I have never read Robert E Howard's Conan series, but I read his bio, I was raised by Post-Depression males, my father worked in the oilfields, hard rock miner, sheep herder. I can relate to the men he probably knew, they lived hard tough lives, you never cried in front of them, my father boxed, rodeo cowboy, roughneck in the oilfield. They prepared me for a life of hardship, this was before the rich California stated changing our way of life, they brought up real estate, put in ski resorts, made life too expensive for the white trash they seen us as, plus My ranger friend and I did not fit in because of our fathers background, living in a Mormon community and their hard drinking ways,so we became outcasts, so we grew up fighting our way though life. Pariah I know the word well, we are shaped by our environment, we chose the wilds places of Utah and Wyoming to escape, I still thank some of the assholes for the favor, the young men of today's world I do not understand, but they do seem to have a hard time with reality, spend too much time on X box not enough time working or living life as a young men did 50 yrs ago as I. The world is a dark place, but it has beauty to contrast it also, modern life seems toxic to men like us, and I am comfortable to be that way, maybe that's why we loved sci-fiction, it was a form of escape. Your friend Ishmael.
Howard, it seems, was widely misunderstood as an action writer, where he actually wrote about the same stuff that Lovecraft and a modern college professor named Andy Nowicki, wrote and write about in an academic flavored mire of internal conflict. Howard's genius was that he wrote about alienation in such a belligerent manner from both perspectives: the civilized female and the barbaric man. There is not a simper, or a whine, or a doubt in the mind of the alien barbarian, like there is in the tormented souls of Lovecraft's and Nowicki's soft civilized victims of alienation.
Not only are the atmospherics of Howard's stories horrific rather than fantastic, the action is so brutal that he skips the physicality. He's not a biomechanical writer that will describe the gelatinous slide of a cleaved part from the rest of the body—but goes right to the emotion of defiance, dominance, conquest and racial hatred.
To me, reading in my youth, and in my prime, and now on the downward side of life, what Howard wrote about in 1933-34 was the ultimate corruption of Civilized Man, of what he saw American society eventually becoming—of course, presented to his editor in a fantastical veiled manner—as seen through the eyes of a hero that strides onto the scene not to set things right, but to punish the weak and greedy and powerful that thrive therein, and then to fade into legend as the whole rotten world goes up in flames. In other words, I see Howard's fantasy and historical settings as his premonition of our moral predicament, and his heroes such as Kull, Kane and Conan [and Conan most of all] as a type of moral time traveler from a primal age, come to show us what our ancestors would think of Modernity. I get his drift as being along the lines of your suggestion that it would be great fun to bring forward 200 Blackfeet warriors from 1800 and set them loose in an American city.
What Robert E. Howard brings us, as an Arуan mystic obsessed with that which we are driven by our material demons to forget, is the judgment of our ancestors, for our fall, not from grace, but from an honored place.