CONAN AND THE SPIDER GOD by L. Sprague De Camp
Fresh off De Camp and Nyberg's Conan the Avenger, and continuing to hack through the non-Howard Conans, this was a good choice for review. Listed as the fifth of the Bantam books, Conan and the Spider God is new to me, though I have owned a battered copy of it for many, many years. As one does, I have a paperback collection that massively outweighs my free time. This means I get to evaluate this tale solely on first impressions.
At the other end of Conan's career from Conan the Avenger, this is an adventure of Conan's youth. He starts out as a recently-promoted captain in the royal guard of King Yildiz of Turan, but must quickly abandon the post. Conan kills his superior officer in an argument over a woman and, reluctant to return to Zamora, flees into the marshes at the edge of the Vilayet Sea. After his horse is stolen during a chance encounter with a hypnotist, Conan makes his way to Yezud, a city nestled in the mountains between Zamora and Turan.
Assuming the name and profession of his father, Nial the Blacksmith, Conan hides out in Yezud. He learns the strangers he met on the marsh stole something more important than his horse-- they have the favorite wife of King Yildiz! "Nial" also discovers the high priest of Zath, spider god of Yezud, plans to cleanse Zamora with a mysterious scourge. A chance encounter with the Turanian ambassador ends in a commission to rescue Yildiz's wife. Oh, did I forget to mention Conan also falls in love?
Because this is a tale of Conan's youth, a lot can be overlooked or explained away, including his infatuation with Rudabeh, . A beautiful dancer in the temple of the spider god, Rudabeh refuses to be seduced by Conan unless he forsakes his nomadic lifestyle and settles down with her. Anyone even halfway familiar with the Conan character knows this is never going to happen.
However, De Camp writes the situation as if Conan is in a legitimate quandary. This is neither the first nor the last bit of clumsy mischaracterization on De Camp's part. Conan learns a charm against hypnotism from a blind seer, and later he employs a magical powder and a sorcerous lockpick. Any one of these on its own would be no problem, but taken together it pushes Conan and the Spider God to a place where it could only be considered apocryphal.
Before he left his homeland Conan certainly must have had opportunities to marry and settle down. However exotic and beguiling Rudabeh is, it seems unlikely Conan would be tempted to settle down so soon after leaving Cimmeria. De Camp adds a layer of star-crossed romance not usually found in a Conan story, and I'm not sure that I like it. It doesn't ring quite true.
In other encounters with hypnotism, Conan's resistance is attributed to his raw strength of will. Are we instead to believe that every time Conan shook off an attempt to mesmerize him he was imagining the sage's garden and doing multiplication tables in his head? De Camp is explaining away something that never before required explanation-- and he's using math to do it!
Finally, however superstitious he is, Conan has often used magic in one form or another, especially against those armed with magic of their own. Conan and the Spider God takes place after "Tower of the Elephant" where Conan delivered the heart of Yag-Kosha-- and destruction --to the wizard Yara. In "People of the Black Circle", still in his future, Conan will draw strength from Khemsa's magical girdle to ward off the powers of the black seers of Yimsha. In "Beyond the Black River", Conan will draw a mystic sign in the dirt to ward off the beasts of Zogar Sag. Conan is more than his superstitions and no stranger to magic, but twice in one story is too much for me.
All of which leaves me in a strange place. This isn't a bad story. I'm just not sure it is a Conan story. Hell, for large portions of it, everyone calls him Nial. He stays in one place for the majority of the tale, when travel or at least movement characterizes so many of Conan's adventures. Things seem very stationary, a waiting game.
But not every story has to be a straight up hack-and-slash running battle either. I kind of like Conan on the run and undercover. The problem is the little touches are all off. Young Conan falling for a local temple dancer? Okay, sure, but Conan doesn't get so unnerved by an underground chamber that he has to stop himself from running away screaming. He doesn't actually do it. It's just the fact that De Camp presented it as if Conan might.
There's other stuff like that, but nothing too terrible. The dreaded "swamp cat" Conan battles in an early chapter is described as rabbit-like in construction, balancing on a heavy tail and using its massive back legs to spring at its prey. The rabbit comparison makes it hard to take seriously. A different, less fantastic prehistoric beast would have served better.
My personal feeling is readers can safely give this one a miss. Completists interested in every iteration of the Conan character will find things to ponder. Conan is a mythic figure and I choose to classify these sort of entries in his saga as (understandably) lesser known variations on his legend.