Red Nails
- Written By Robert E. Howard
Red Nails
- Robert E. Howard
A dead city. A blood feud with no ending. A darkness older than either.
Valeria of the Red Brotherhood has left men and armies behind her, and she means to leave Conan too — until the thing that’s been stalking them through the jungle finally attacks. Forced to fight side-by-side, they stumble through the walls of a city that shouldn’t exist. Xuchotl rises windowless and silent from the trees, sealed off from the world that forgot it generations ago.
Inside, they find not ruins but survivors, two clans of a once-great people, barricaded in opposite wings of the same hidden city, and locked in a vendetta too old to recall or resist. Within hours of their arrival, Conan and Valeria get pulled into the feud, conscripted as weapons for hire in a war with no territory left to win and nothing to fight for but the fighting itself. Presiding over all of it is a queen who’s found a way to cheat the years, while someone else pays the price.
Red Nails marks the final word in Robert E. Howard’s Conan series, a story that helped elevate his pulp writings into one of literature’s defining fusions of weird fiction and frontier adventure.
“Once the sword was drawn there was no turning back; for blood called for blood, and vengeance followed swift on the heels of atrocity.”
About the Author
- Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard was born in 1906 and spent most of his life in Cross Plains, Texas. Writing for the pulp magazine Weird Tales through the late 1920s and early ’30s, he created the character of Conan in 1932, launching the sword and sorcery genre later popularized by 1960s authors like Fritz Leiber, who coined the term in reference to Howard’s work. Howard described Conan arriving nearly whole in his imagination. In a 1935 letter to fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith, Howard wrote that Conan seemed to step “full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series,” describing the character as an amalgamation of the prizefighters, gunmen, and roughnecks he’d known throughout his life, fused by a process he was unable to fully explain.
The stories that followed — among them “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Queen of the Black Coast,” and the full-length novel The Hour of the Dragon — built out a character and a world that would shape fantasy fiction for decades.
Red Nails was among the last Conan stories Howard completed, published by Weird Tales in 1936. The novella pushed sword and sorcery somewhere darker than the genre had gone before, into a claustrophobic, airless maze of blind grudges and ancient rivalries. Howard died by suicide that same year at 30, but his famous “barbarian” hero has outlived him by decades, reshaped by authors, comic artists, and filmmakers ever since.
