Book Review: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

This is the best book. After I read this book I was so amped that I went and found and axe and chopped down a tree. And then I beat the shit out of the tree with my bare knuckles. But right before that, I smoked a crack rock.

Some dude came out of the back door looking all flabbergasted. He said, “What the hell?!” I dismounted the fallen tree and said, “What the hell you?!”

He said, “How did you get back here?! And why on earth did you cut down my tree?! Are you nuts?! Hey, is that my axe?!”

I’d climbed the fence from my house and into this dude’s lawn and had found the axe while rummaging through his shed. I’d also found a chest full of Playboy Magazines and had stolen them, having hoisted the chest over the fence and into my lawn. This had all happened not but five minutes after I’d finished reading the last story in Robert E. Howard’s The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, which is the very best book in existence.

“Well!” screamed the man. He was wearing a bathrobe and had a dark case of five o’clock shadow and looked to be about forty. “Don’t just stare at me like a lunatic! Answer me!”

I didn’t feel inclined to answer his questions. Instead, I bellowed a savage war cry.

He said, “What?! Who are you?!”

I said, “Conan!” And I yanked off my shirt and started pulling out my chest hairs by the handful.

“I’m calling the police!” he said.

“Frank!” cried a frantic, female voice from inside the house. “Frank! What’s going on out here?!”

The creature that emerged from the shadowy gap in the sliding doors was undeniably female. If the ample curves of the body revealed through the thin, silken gown weren’t proof enough, then there was the long, flowing hair of strawberry blonde which I could smell even given the distance. And the smell was that of flowery pheromones, the signature scent of recently exercised feminine sexuality, the ultimate aphrodisiac, and I realized at once that my tree chopping had interrupted some very special goings one within that house.

The lady said, “Who the hell is that asshole in our lawn?!”

I didn’t waste a millisecond.

I put my head down and charged the back patio. The man tried to interfere and I made him regret it, planting my forehead firmly into his upper abdomen and assisting him out of my way. The woman was suddenly within reach, and, heedless to the fact that she’d looked a tad thinner at a distance, I scooped her at the waist and up she went, over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes, one that screamed like a banshee.

She was a heavy one. But I’d been eating my kidney beans and my iron thews held strong beneath her impressive weight. It was primary a challenge of mental taxation. Her fists were balled into weapons and she repeatedly pounded me in the back which was demoralizing. And her banshee wails were so loud, so high pitched and piercing, that I’d not have been surprised if the glass of the sliding back door had suddenly cracked to ruin.

“PUT ME DOWN! PUT ME DOWN! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”

“Hussy!” I snarled. “What does it look like?! I’m rescuing you from slavery! Pipe down! Your banshee cries will alert the sentries!”

“Sentries? What the hell is wrong with you? Frank! Frank! Get the gun and shoot this jerk!”

I was approaching the fence, the same one over which I’d tossed the magazines. And now there was the matter of tossing this prize over, this prize that was bigger and heavier and certainly more awkward. But was I a man or was I something else, something weak and incompetent? No. No, I don’t think so. This man makes no excuses. This man does his shit.

I grunted and leaned forward and picked up the pace. The strain on my back was colossal. I could feel the vertebras being crushed together like a tightly packed shish kabob where the spinal cord was the skewer. My shoulder muscles seethed in fiery excruciation, and my eardrums were ready to burst with the overload of horrible, high pitched banshee wails. I gritted my teeth so hard that I cracked a molar. And then, the moment of truth, the moment when the fence, a wooden thing of six feet in height, was close enough for the toss, and I bent and the crunching knees and then leapt forward and –

Together, my lady and I barreled through the fence, converting a great portion to splintery shambles. We crashed down in my own lawn. A rusty nail stuck me in the upper leg, three or four inches from my scrotum. I thanked Crom, The God of the Grim Mountain, that my important organs were unharmed.

The woman was sitting on the back of my head and hollering something I couldn’t quite understand through the barrier that was her huge ass. After several minutes, I was losing oxygen and dying. At last, she got off of me. The police were on the scene. Frank was explaining to them how I stole his Playboys and then chopped down his tree and assaulted him and then tried to kidnap his wife.

As a man of direct action, I was just about to seize the axe from the yard to which I now had easy access through the busted fence and fight the cops to the death. But it soon occurred to me that I was pretty much paralyzed from injuries. The police called and ambulance and I was taken to jail on a stretcher.

The moral of the story: Don’t read The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, which is the best book, unless you’re willing to pay a hefty price.

COMING SOON: GREAT EXPECTATIONS