‘Conan And The Emerald Lotus’ – John C. Hocking (Titan Books)

 

Page Count: 243 Pages

I was pretty excited to see Titan & Heroic Signatures go all in with their ‘Conan’ line so I’ve been making sure to pick up the new ‘Conan’ novels as they’ve been published. Because it’s me though… It’s now a couple of years (ish) in and I’ve got a lovely stack of fresh ‘Conan’ reading that I haven’t even touched. What? I’m very much the ‘mood reader’ these days and the stars never quite aligned… Until now.

I’m having a lot of fun, at the moment, with my new mission to read the actual books on my actual shelves (turns out that bookshops aren’t the only places with loads of unread books, who’d have thought it…?) and the other day, I found myself in the mood for a little Sword & Sorcery. I’d heard a lot of good things about John C. Hocking’s ‘Conan And The Emerald Lotus’ so off I went to Titan’s ‘City of the Dead’ omnibus and got reading. A few days later, here I am.

One wizard is bad. Two are a disaster...And a deadly disaster, too. For Conan, after refusing to help the evil wizard Ethram-Fal, has been cursed with a spell that is slowly, inexorably squeezing the life from his mighty frame.

The only person who can banish the spell--besides Ethram-Fal, of course--is the sorceress Zelandra, a raven-haired beauty who practices only white magic...or so she says. Zelandra has offered to lift the spell from the Cimmerian, if only he will do her one small favor: steal the deadly Emerald Lotus from the clutches of Ethram-Fal in his impregnable desert fortress.

No good can come of this, Conan thinks to himself. Once sorcery gets mixed up in it, the whole job goes to hell!

Unfortunately, he's right.

‘Conan And The Emerald Lotus’ has all the ingredients needed for a decent ‘Conan’ pastiche and for the most part, that’s exactly what I got here. Conan lands himself in the kind of trouble that takes an entire book to work his way out of; involving many a sword fight (against the living and the dead) and three sorcerers, at least two of whom are evil. Add some desert warriors and monstrous plant life and like I said, you have all the ingredients you need for a ‘Conan’ adventure that has plenty to keep your eye on the page. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? There aren’t any real surprises here but the journey is a lot of fun with Conan, and his fellow travelers, never short of something to pit their wits against. And Hocking does a very good job of lining these obstacles up for Conan to encounter; it teeters on ‘video game level’ territory, at times (defeat this, face that…) but also gives us a lot of detailed backdrop at the same time, almost without our realizing. This is a very rich world that we get to follow Conan through.

It’s a bit of a shame then (although not a deal breaker by any means) that while the ingredients are all there; there are occasions when they could have been left to cook a little longer. And that’s the last time I talk about cooking here ;o)

I’m thinking about a long running sub-plot that is built up over the course of the book, through a series of encounters, only to filed firmly under ‘anti-climax’ as the threat is dealt with far too quickly to have made sticking with it worthwhile. Same kind of thing happens to the original owner of Ethram-Fal’s castle, turns up full of promise and is dealt with before he can start paying off some of that potential. Almost treated like an afterthought when there was potentially a lot more that could have been done with him.

These moments don’t gel with the rest of the book but like I said, it’s not a deal-breaker at all. Hocking has a real eye for spectacle and delivers set piece events that buzz with real energy. Or, in the case of the ravenous Emerald Lotus… rustle ;o) ‘Conan And The Emerald Lotus’ felt a bit uneven to me but delivered when it counted; I’ll take that.