Customer Reviews

Conan: Red Nails

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
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This is one of Robert E. Howard's (1906-1936) best stories ever! He's the creator of Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Red Sonja, Kull, Solomon Kane, and many other characters and even poetry and horror stories! He's the best writer and poet ever! It's Free!

Red Nails starts out with a prehistoric monster chasing Valeria with Conan in hot pursuit. They climb a tree and from their the story gets really good.

If you've never read a REH story you're in for a real treat! Read Red Nails for free and then get the REH Ominbus 99 stories for only $1.99 and read other outstanding stories he's written.

Beyond The Black River, Red Nails, and Tower of The Elephant are three of my favorite REH Conan stories.

Other suggested REH stories: Blood and Thunder, The Life and Art of REH by Mark Finn, One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis his girlfriend, The Dark Barbarian by Don Herron, The Collected Letters Vol 1-3 of REH, The Collected Poetry of REH, and Two-Gun Bob.

One of the better Robert E. Howard tales of Conan, this novella has Conan in amorous pursuit of the adventuress and former pirate, Valeria of the Red Brotherhood. Valeria remains stand-offish and wary of Conan's advances, but action is precipitated in the form of a dinosaur that flushes them out of the jungle across a dry plain to the traditional lost city. There they meet two factions of a dying race, locked in a death struggle to exterminate each other. Blood, death, degeneracy, lust, and ancient magic mix in equal parts from there.

The distinctiveness of this volume is that this is the first form where the story stands alone, published without being part of a collection or pulp magazine serialization. My copy has held up well physically over 35 years, as all my Donald M. Grant publications have. Fantasy illustrator George Barr has four color plates (attached to colored pages rather than bound in), four full-page line illustrations, and seven half-page chapter page illustrations, with some odds and ends thrown in. Barr is an interesting choice for Conan, since he is less of the blood and guts type (Frazetta). The color illustrations, which are his usual softer colorizations dependent more on design than action (though he does throw in one scene of frenzied mayhem) are very different in execution from his ink work, which depend on heavily contoured lines.

This remains my favorite of all the Conan novels that Donald M. Grant published, both for the story and the illustrations.

Conan is travelling, finds a dead woman, and then encounters Valeria of the Red Brotherhood. After trading some insults, they have the misfortune to stumble across a dragon.

Then they have fun in an abandoned city full of crazed warriors, two evil, leering royals, and a third undead type one. Capture, bondage, slayage, all the great stuff in this tale of a fantastic partnership.

First of all, I started reading "Conan the Barbarian" books by Robert E Howard when I was 9 years old. With the help of a dictionary, I parsed the wickedly exciting stories and fell in love with this genre.
Meanwhile, revisiting this story now as an adult, and being able to appreciate it for the masterpiece it is, well, it's just wonderful.
You can't go wrong with this one as an introduction to the sword and sorcery genre. His scenes and stories are so weirdly beautiful, it can take your breath away.
Consider this "Conan 101" and enjoy. I promise, you'll be back for more.
Oh, DO NOT confuse all Conan stories for the genuine articles written by Robert E Howard. And take into consideration that as the author matured, so did his character, Conan.
Nuff said. Enjoy.
I envy you the moment of your first reading of a Conan story.

I read the comic adaptation of Red Nails long before I read this book, and I must say the book is a great deal more enjoyable than the comic. However, with Robert E. Howard, "enjoyable" is a relative term. I honestly don't think he intended for his stories to be enjoyed. They are far too dark, depressing, and hopeless for terms like "enjoyable" to apply. What Howard does in Red Nails, just as he did in The Shadow of the Vulture, is paint a picture of the absolute worst in human nature. The city of Xuchotl is basically a look at human nature under a magnifying glass, devolved to its lowest possible state, until mere existence itself becomes a hellish nightmare that can only be endured by saying goodbye to one's sanity. On the surface, Howard's stories seem to be simple action/adventure fare, but a closer look reveals the stuff that we find in our worst nightmares, the visions and feelings that we have in our darkest moments. I can settle the debates about Howard's mental state right now: he was a disturbed individual. He had to have been touched to write such cynical, dark and hopeless stories. Even his main character, Conan, doesn't fill the role of the "good" triumphing over evil, for in Howard's world there is no real good. Rather Conan is a representation of the raw, primal urge to survive, no matter what the odds. It's not that Conan is any more virtuous than the creatures and men he fights--it's that he simply knows what it takes to remain standing in the end. And that seems to be one of the questions Howard asks in his stories: is it better to be one of the slain, or one of the few left alive at the story's end? Is it really worth it for the ones still standing, given how random, cruel, and merciless the universe is? What exactly do we fight for, if to be locked in combat is mankind's most basic state? This is not a tale that I'll be revisiting, although it was an entertaining read.

One the very first fantasy novels I read, I am interested in finding an available copy. Am also searching for a copy of "The Hour of the Dragon", by Howard as well.

Take a trip into our barbaric past, when the white race did not question the necessity of manifest destiny or the need to subdue non- whites by violence, and women existed as chattel and threat to male dominance. This collection of stories is not politically correct, and hopefully readers' enjoyment will contend with their discomfort at Howard's obvious racism and sexism. Readers should know that Howard was destroyed by the very system he so faithfully represents in his stories; he committed suicide during the Great Depression due to his distressed economic situation. For a blunt representation of the mind set that led to the internment camps, the Tuskegee medical experiments, and Hiroshima/ Nagasaki, this anthology is unsurpassed. Sword and sorcery/fantasy fans may wish that these stories are "simple, escapist fun", but there never is such a thing.