Red Nails.

Deep in a forgotten jungle stands a city under one great roof, and within its lamplit halls a dying people wage a hatred so old and so total that even Conan, no stranger to carnage, finds himself in a place beyond ordinary savagery.

What it's about

Red Nails is among the last of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian, and one of his darkest. Conan and the fierce warrior-woman Valeria come upon a strange, self-enclosed city whose inhabitants have divided into two mutually murderous clans, locked for generations in a claustrophobic war of ambush, torture and sorcery. What begins as a search for refuge becomes a descent into a decadent and doomed world with its own terrible rules.

Themes

The story broods on decadence and decay, on the way an isolated society can rot into obsessive hatred, and on the thin line between civilisation and barbarism, here strikingly inverted. Howard sets the vital, straightforward brutality of his outsiders against the twisted refinement of the city's dying factions, and the contrast gives the tale its grim power. Cruelty, endurance and survival run through every scene.

Why it still matters

Howard effectively founded the sword-and-sorcery genre, and Conan is its archetypal hero; Red Nails shows the author at the height of his intensity, often regarded as one of the finest and most atmospheric of the whole series. Its lush, morbid imagination has influenced fantasy and adventure writing for generations. As a late work, it carries a distinctive bleak maturity.

Who it's for

For fans of Conan and classic sword-and-sorcery, for readers who like their fantasy vivid, violent and richly atmospheric, and for anyone wanting to encounter the pulp imagination at its most feverishly inventive.