Conan the Champion

More Conan is always good for one's health. Conan the Champion, by John Maddox Roberts, it surprisingly good. I picked it up on the assumption that it was yet more mass-produced junk extruded from the vast Conan novel grinding machine they've got hidden away somewhere that takes raw beef and steel and turns them into a Authentic Barbarian-With-Rippling-Muscles Flavoured Product, but this was better than that. Certainly an improvement over Mercenary.

In this tale, Conan is shipwrecked at the start of winter in the northern reaches of the Vilayet Sea, and is stuck with nothing to do over winter, so he heads off to seek the employment of one of the local petty kings. Demons are encountered, battles fought, epic deeds done. The local northern tribes are nicely barbaric, done in the true style of a Robert E Howard barbarian tribe. There's a rather silly interlude in an alternate dimension that appears to be little more then filler, but other than that the story flows quite well. Apparently Roberts said in an interview that his publishers keep making him extend the length of his novels, and there are definitely a couple of parts that seem to have been thrown in to pad out the story and don't add much at all to the overall plot.

If I see more of Roberts' Conan novels, I will certainly pick them up - this was quite entertaining.