Robert E. Howard, "Red Nails"

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Because writers have intentions of their own, a reader should respond to any story as it reveals itself on the page, and not as it could have developed in the reader's imagination.

With all of this in mind, I consider my response to Robert E. Howard's Conan story, "Red Nails," unfair. Still, the conviction of my response forces me to accept it with obvious reservations.

To the adventure modes of Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Howard brought a distinctive touch of supernatural horror. This made his work stand out, but in various degrees of intensity. Stories like "The Shadow Kingdom" and "Worms of the Earth" emphasize their moods of dread and strangeness, while other stories focus more on physical action. For the most part, Howard's Conan stories fit the second pattern.

In that sense, I feel that "Red Nails" became a lost opportunity. The story develops into a tale of action and physical conflict like many other Conan stories, but it begins as a tale of potential horror.

The primary source of this mood comes from the setting, an apparently-deserted city that is in fact one vast building with cavernous hallways and balustrades in perpetual twilight, where dying factions who have never set foot outside ambush and torture each other in the darkness.

As a writer, Howard lacked the visual precision of Clark Ashton Smith, but like Smith, he understood the value of setting as a narrative engine. His vast building offers little in the way of any physical presence, but it does provide expressionistic hints of jade green, blood red, and cat's-eye gleams from supernatural gems. As Conan wanders through each dim hallway, he drags the reader along to find what he finds; this propels the story with a sense of immersion despite the absence of detail.

For me, this immersion works best early in "Red Nails," when Conan has no idea of where he is and of what exactly he is witnessing. He uncovers hints of a twilit war fought by crazed people, and the result is a mood of morbid strangeness that I wish Howard had maintained right to the end. Instead, Howard explains everything from top to bottom: who these people are, why they fight, how they ended up in this Gothic trap. To his credit, Howard's exposition never slows the narrative drive, but it does reduce an eerie sense of mystery into yet another typical Conan tale.

Many readers consider this a good Conan adventure, and as a tale of pulp swordplay and treachery, it does the job. Yet I wish that Howard had pursued his initial hints of that twilit building and its incomprehensible inhabitants. He had a setting of eerie potential that he turned into something ordinary, and I suspect that he felt the loss, because while the story goes on, he pulled more and more supernatural elements out of his hat in a patchwork effort to top himself. None of these escalations was necessary. What he had needed was right there, on the page, right from the start.

Writers have their own goals; as a reader, I should accept these, but every now and then, I feel as if other directions would have led to more striking outcomes. Like the feuding clans of "Red Nails," Howard the writer of horror clashed with Howard the writer of Conan, and in this battle, Conan won.