'The God in the Bowl' – Robert E. Howard

So there I am, banging on about which 'Conan' comics you should and shouldn't be reading, and it occurred to me that I haven't actually covered any of Howard's original tales (not here, anyway). Yesterday evening then, saw me pick a 'Conan' tale more or less at random (the one criteria being that it needed to be short enough for me to read before I fell asleep...) and that tale was 'The God in the Bowl'. An interesting fact before I talk about the content of the story itself... 'The God in the Bowl' was actually rejected by 'Weird Tales' and not actually published until long after Robert E. Howard's death; in September 1952's edition of 'Space Science Fiction' as it happens. So there you go, now on with the story.

In the Nemedian city of Numalia, a night watchman enters the great museum to find the strangled corpse of the owner and curator. Above the corpse stands none other Conan of Cimmeria...

The Watch are called and Conan interrogated but he swears his innocence, in the case of the murder at least. If Conan didn't do it though... who, or what, did?

'The God in the Bowl' is essentially a detective story where Conan is framed as the villain in order to give Howard a little extra time to set up and then present the monster right at the end. It's a read then that comes across as feeling slightly stilted, possibly because the nature of the initial confrontation means that, for the greater part of the tale, Conan is constantly on the edge of bursting into action but never quite manages it. It's also a story that almost sidelines Conan in his own adventure, concentrating instead on the investigation of the magistrate Demetrio that determines Conan's innocence. We all know that Conan is innocent though so it feels like a bit of a waste of time setting that revelation up so slowly when we know that the real action is to be had elsewhere.

When it all finally kicks off though... The creeping menance of the monster is overshadowed by the appearance of the nobleman who sent Conan into the museum in the first place. So that's another small hurdle to jump before we can see what we actually came for. The ensuing fight is written with as much vigour as ever but... where's the monster?

There's a genuinely unsettling moment where a guard sees the monster but doesn't realise what it is. The actual showdown itself gives us a beast that, in the tradition of Howard's monsters, hints at a dark past even older than the kingdoms that Conan travels through. I love peeling back the layers of history in Howard's 'Conan' tales. The monster is dispatched very easily though and although Conan's subsequent flight shows us how horrifying the monster was, it all feels more than a little anti-climactic.

'The God in the Bowl' has some moments where the potential in the story shines through but these aren't enough, on their own, to ultimately carry the story to a better place than where it ends up. The worst of Howard's tales can still offer a lot to the reader but not this one and certainly not to me. Not the best tale to 'kind of randomly' pick then. Hopefully I'll have better luck next time...