“The Hour of the Dragon” by Robert E. Howard
Perhaps the original sword & sorcery novel, and indeed one of the best.
The plot: a band of disaffected nobles and a fallen priest gather together to overthrow King Conan of Aquilonia. The fallen priest uses sorcery to summon up Xaltotun of Acheron, once the chief sorcerer of a hellish empire now three thousand years dead. The conspirators plan to use Xaltotun’s powers to overthrow Conan and divide Aquilonia among themselves. With Xaltotun’s aid, the conspirators succeed, but quickly discover that Xaltotun has own ideas, and plans to resurrect his ancient empire of horror and necromancy. Conan manages to escape from Xaltotun, and it’s up to him to save both his kingdom and indeed the entire world from Xaltotun’s infernal grasp.
Howard wrote with a vigor and an energy that few modern writers can match. The popular image of “Conan the Barbarian” is of a muscle-bound Schwarzenegger-esque dullard, but the real Conan is cunning, prone to gloomy pondering, and a man of action. No postmodern angst for him; if Conan were to encounter postmodern angst, he’d split its head with his broadsword, loot the corpse, and keep going.
Consequently, the books crackles with narrative tension. Conan’s up against enemies his sword cannot harm, but he’s not about to let that stop him, and he jumps from greater danger to greater danger in his quest to save his kingdom. Xaltotun makes a formidable foe for Conan; the conspirators who summoned him from the dead seem to represent every idiot politician who conjured up a force (war, demagoguery, reform, whatever) that he can no longer control.
Modern readers might find Howard’s level of racism off-putting. “Dragon” isn’t anywhere near as racist as some of the other stuff Howard wrote (the “Vale of Lost Women” comes to mind), but there’s still some element of it. Of course, nowadays “racist” has been so overused that the word is virtually meaningless, but Howard actually was racist, in that he grew up in early 20th-century Texas, and was therefore quite steeped in the racial Social Darwinism that was mainstream American thought at the time. It would be funny to watch the people who see racism & sexism everywhere in modern SF/F (much in the same way that Torquemada saw heretics everywhere) read “The Hour of the Dragon”. It might give them some healthy perspective, or their heads would explode. One of the two.
But books are products of their time and place. Really good books manage to transcend that – people still read “A Christmas Carol” even though Dickensian London is long gone. “The Hour of the Dragon”, I think, is one of those books.
-JM