‘The Iron Tower’

James LaFond's impressions of It Is the King or His Ghost: Chapter 10 of Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon 

Reading from pages 148-155 of the DelRey edition.

The illustration of Conan dressed as a one-eyed old pilgrim walking through the crowded streets of the city he so recently left with a crown on his head is faithful to the text, down to the failure of the loose robes in concealing the “hard lines” of his frame.

The rescue of Albiona from The Iron Tower reflected a standard trope of Howard’s time, an almost obligatory rescue of a damsel in distress. It also served pulp convention by keeping a feminine figure on the page in as many installments as possible. But Howard overdoes the entire chapter in brutal wise, with his butchery of traitors conducted with savage malice on the part of the reverted savage.

Irony spiced with menace.  Butchery basted in irony.  Vengeance savored in savage exultation.  The shame of cruel cold law supplanted by the true justice of judge, jury and executioner as one flew as much in the face of the false moral banality of Howard’s America as it does in our own bland version.

Foremost among the evils of civilization, evils magnified by the evil of modernity, all things that were antithetical to what it was to be human across the many innumerable generation of our natural ancestors are:

-Law,

-Order,

-Justice,

-Imprisonment,

-Trial,

-Judgment,

-And proxy execution.

All of these and more of the avarice corruption our society is built upon are dashed into gory gobs by Howard as he depicts Conan snuffing out the life of the royal headsman and taking his scything place on behalf of the dainty condemned.  Howard’s heroes, unlike most others of his time, were permitted by their creator free reign for their passions, particularly their deep and abiding hatreds.

Maiming and disemboweling one traitor, Conan curses, “…Die as thieves die!” and then grunts, “Lie there and bleed to death.”

In top pulp form another plot twist confronts the furious barbarian as he cuts his way out of another palace, as he does in most tales, and many times in this one, the chief object of Conan and indeed all of his heroes seems to be the violent extraction of the hero and a woman from the clutches of some monolithic example of civilized architecture.

Diction of Note

-Impulsion, the act of impelling, driving onward, pushing.