Conan the Victorious [Mass Market Paperback]

Whatever the reason, Jordan's last date with Robert E. Howard's literary child subtly disappoints. It is overstuffed with political intrigue and double-crosses and not enough adventure, magic, or the exotic. This is especially disappointing since it takes place mostly in Vendhya, Howard's fantasy version of India seen in "The People of the Black Circle"; if any locale should feel exotic, it should be this one. It's true that political maneuvering has an important place in many of Robert E. Howard's Conan works as well as his historical adventure stories for Oriental Stories/Magic Carpet, but Jordan lets an avalanche of scheming slow down the pace of the story. (A good comparison would be with Howard's "Hawks over Egypt"which staggers under too much intrigue in too little space, but that was a work Howard didn't sell in his lifetime.) Any short synopsis can't begin to explain the extra characters and subplots that clog up "Conan the Victorious". With so many characters and plots and counterplots, the novel relies heavily on information exchange between characters instead of action and movement. Many of the subplots get a short shrift, and the details fade over the long stretches while the other storylines compete for space. When the pay-offs for some of the subplots come due, they have marginal effect and seem as if the author merely forgot about them until he suddenly needed them for the finale.

These problems would become symptomatic of many of the pastiches to come: too much plot, too little development, and a limp finale. In this case, the ending is particularly weak. The demon and the army of the dead are too rapidly disposed of in the quick rush to the last chapter, and the coda fails to patch up the numerous plot holes and story points that Jordan dashed over earlier. Jordan's Conan career started so promisingly in the fast and imaginative "Conan the Invincible," but by this last novel, his party with the Cimmerian had definitely come to a bleary end.

Fortunately, the next novel, "Conan the Valorous," introduced author John Maddox Roberts, who would pen some of the better pastiche novels.