‘The Box of Zarothus’

The Fang of the Dragon: Chapter 12 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 171-181 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

Howard, the author, finds himself in a strange place at this point of the only Conan novel. The standout tales of adventure he had built the character on were generally the immediate result of ill-chance, blunder and desperation. Not only is Conan generally broke or on the run or both, but his entire situation is a surprise, which brings out the best in his barbaric personality. However, with King Conan releasing himself from a hopeless civil war he starts out on a quest that is nearly Tolkienesque, except of course that Howard’s Conan pre-dates Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Howard is now in the position of taking the character which is the creation of the realistic 3-to-5 chapter pulp yarn and having to draft him into a novel, the novel being the most inauthentic, forced, unnatural, unrealistic and affected for of literature, possibly rivaling hip hop and gangster rap is the lower form of human language art. 

The end results of this misuse of the heroic pulp character as a sentimental vehicle unfold across the final chapters of the book and are threefold:

-1. The overuse of serendipity, something which most novels and their video spawn suffer from.

-2. The introduction of gross sympathy into the hitherto hard-boiled world of Conan.

-3. The development of more interesting and intense characters than most novelists use in an entire long form book. 

The remainder of this reader’s impressions will avoid spoiling the plot by focusing on the incredible array of rogues and monsters cast into the fantastical winds of Howard’s imagination one chapter at a time, creating and discarding the characters necessary for a novella in what must have been a single evening of writing.

But first Howard retrogresses his protagonist back down the Road of Kings:

“He looked the part of the hired fighting-man, who had known the vicissitudes of fortune, plunder and wealth one day, an empty purse and close-drawn belt the next.

“…more than looking the part, he felt the part; the awakening of old memories…with no thought for the morrow, and no desire save sparkling ale, red lips, and  a keen sword to swing on all the battlefields of the war.”

The passage above smacks as sentiment to the sissy who has not known real apex fighting men, but to someone who has known many, it strikes an authentic chord.

Three fascinating characters, the brutal Valbroso, his cunning henchman Belosa and their captive fence of filched goods, Zorathus whose un-openable iron chest leaves Conan as part of a meat-headed trio of thugs seeking the secret of their desperate Gordian Knot.

This story also features ghouls, a mainstay monster of the Dungeons & Dragons game that drew heavily on the works of Howard, with their focus on the undead and subterranean stages of adventure.

To close the chapter a working sketch of Conan battling ghouls afoot faces a full panel scene of the horsed barbarian cleaving the fiends from the back of his rearing steed.