Customer Reviews

Conan the Defiant (Conan Series)

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This book should be made into a film immediatly!!! sorcerers evil priest monks good monks curses zombie threat of wrold domination with gritty edgy style and a heroic character in the midst of it all like w whirlwind.....if only it did not end so fast and the threads of many characters made it into other models....the indomitable picks up from thsi as perry actually keeps continuity between novels.

by the way arnold was an aesome conan and the movie by milius is #1 of all time right up there with star wars matrix and dune! other reviewer stinky

Perry can right, and his Conan books are great. Well paced with lots of action and adventure, while building the characters.

Conan the Defiant is the second of the five novels which Steve Perry wrote in the fifty-book Tor Series. In William Galen Gray's chronology it is the fourth Conan tale (following Conan of Venarium, Legions of the Dead and The Thing in the Crypt), taking place before Sean Moore's Conan the Hunter.

****MINOR SPOILERS BELOW****

The young Conan comes upon a lone priest being waylaid by five bandits. Impressed with the stranger's skill with a wooden staff, the Cimmerian wades in and helps the man dispatch his opponents. Cengh, a priest of the Suddah Oblates, is later murdered, sending Conan on a quest of justice for his short-time friend.

In typical Conan fashion, he beds Elashi, a desert-bred warrior maiden as well as Tuanne, a beautiful zombie. Yep, a zombie. Being the irresistable stud he is, the trio engage in threesomes all along their trek to the bad guy's castle. This one seems to rate higher than normal on the Conan adolescent fantasies scale.

Neg the Malefic is a necromancer who needs a gem called The Source of Light to raise and unleash a horde of undead minions to conquer the world. Both Conan's and Elisha's quests are a result of Neg's machinations, even though the evil spellcaster has no idea who they are.

There is no shortage of foes in this tale, with undead, the Men with No Eyes, Neg's lackey, the Suddah Oblates, agents in the employ of The One With No Name and an ensorcelled pack of spiders providing more than enough bad guys at every step of the way. With so many enemies to deal with, it is surprising how often Conan finds time to have sex with his two travelling partners.

The story, which is rather linear, works. There is enough tension throughout, with the time element constantly in play and moving things along. The final confrontation is a bit of a letdown and I had to read it a second time, as it didn't quite make sense on the first try. It didn't really work the second time, either.

Conan the Defiant is worth reading for fans of the muscle-bound sword swinger. On its own merits, it is not a bad heroic sorcery tale. You've got fighting, hot women, zombies and an evil sorceror bent on world domination.

This was the first Conan book I ever read. It was years ago, when I didn't know that that ape Schwarzenegger is playing Conan in the films. (YUCKKK!)

Though the book is officially number 30-something in the series, you don't need to read the previous volumes. In fact, the numbers of the books in Conan series don't match the chronological order and all novels are separately readable.

The Conan series plays in a fictional past when the continents had a form different from today, vaguely resembling today's continents. In those pre-ancient countries, technique was somewhere in the medieval level and it was possible to use magic. Conan was a very skilled fighter of extreme strength who's adventures of different kind are described in the series. In this novel, an evil mague rediscovers a long-forgotten way of controlling the dead and is attempting to get the whole world under his power. But he faces unexpected complications when Conan gets accidentally involved in the whole mess.

Conan The Defiant is my favorite Conan book so far. In my opinion, the later books tend to be better than the earlier ones. The first twenty-something volumes have been written quite a long time ago and are just average reading.