Conan: City of the Dead
Conan: City of the Dead #1-2
by John C. Hocking, Richard Pace
Why You'll Love This
This book fuses sword-and-sorcery brutality with Lovecraftian body horror in ways Robert E. Howard probably would have envied.
- Great if you want: classic Conan muscle paired with genuinely unsettling cosmic dread
- The experience: relentless and visceral — monsters, magic, and mounting dread throughout
- The writing: Hocking captures Howard's pulp energy while pushing the horror darker and stranger
- Skip if: subtle, character-driven fantasy matters more to you than action and atmosphere
About This Book
Conan the Cimmerian has always walked a world where sorcery is as dangerous as any blade, but here the darkness runs deeper and stranger than most sword-and-sorcery dares to go. Collected in a single volume, two connected epics pit Conan against threats that are less about supernatural power and more about what happens when human ambition weaponizes the unnatural — addictive plants that warp sorcerers into something no longer human, and a plague that transforms an entire city into a waking nightmare. The stakes feel genuinely dire, and the horror beneath the heroics has real teeth.
What distinguishes this volume is Hocking's prose, which channels Robert E. Howard's muscular rhythm without simply imitating it. The action sequences are visceral and precisely choreographed, but it's the atmosphere that lingers — a creeping dread borrowed from Lovecraftian tradition, woven into the Hyborian Age with surprising naturalism. Having the sequel appear alongside the original story also rewards readers with a sense of narrative scope rarely achieved in franchise fantasy, letting both tales breathe and resonate against each other across a satisfying 540 pages.