Year of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day 12 (Conan the Barbarian: The People of the Black Circle)

Title: Conan the Barbarian: The People of the Black Circle
Author: Robert Ervin Howard
Themes: Masculinity vs Femininity
Quotes: "Kingdoms have fallen when a woman's slim white hands pulled the strings of destiny."
Reading/Listening Time: 3 hours, 49 minutes

Review:

If no one's ever made a movie out of this book they very definitely should get on that, because it already reads like a really fun "B" movie action flick. It's got a great hero and heroine, and a deliciously vile and complicated villain.

It puts me in mind of the Indiana Jones movies (the old ones, not the new) if they paid more attention to the love-interest and she actually got to contribute her POV to the story a bit more.

Conan is a bit of a brute: he lives in a magical world but that's not gonna stop him from smashing things up whenever he can. I guess the appeal of him is mostly that he's so macho and, like, a walking status symbol at this point in his life.

And he kind of has to match wits with Yasmina, who's like a priestess-queen-incarnation of a hindu deity. And she's the more magic character, in fact she even gets her own "Avatar-state" sequence, which was pretty cool.

She and her brother are being accosted by these dark-cultist priests who want to take over. And, like, there's no physical fight yet, but her brother knows he's gonna go crazy so he basically commits assisted suicide and warns his sister about the evil cultists.

At the start, Conan is just trying to kidnap somebody so he can get monies and she's just trying to escape the bad guys. And they have this neat little back and forth bantering that's kind of cute, and in the process they end up kinda joining forces (even thought he technically kidnapped her, and still plans on holding her for ransom.)

The way it ends up, where they're not together but they kinda have this romantic and personal appreciation for each other that they didn't have before, is exactly appropriate for the type of book this is.

Some parts of it are just so cheesy, but like fun cheesy. Like, I would actually buy popcorn for this...

There's also the bits with the villain. There's actually a couple of them, but the main one I'm thinking of has this kind of Macbeth thing going on where his wife is kind of egging him on to do horrible stuff and take more power...It's great fun!

Rating: 3/5 (Not quite a masterpiece, but still very enjoyable)