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Title: The Pool of the Black One
Series:
Conan Chronicles #6
Author: Robert Howard
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages:
41
Words: 11K
Publish: 1933
This is the first published story about Conan being a pirate instead of a mercenary. And this isn’t so much about him being a pirate as him becoming one at the story’s end.
The gist of the story is that Conan and the crew of the ship fight a bunch of giant black men on an island and barely survive. There’s a pool that turns people into little stone statues but that’s about the only “supernatural” part of the story. Otherwise, it’s just a survival story.
I was really wavering about to give it just 3stars, but I’m really interested in Conan’s adventures as a pirate and so this origin story gave the overall story the bump it needed.
★★★✬☆
From Bookstooge
"The Pool of the Black One" is a novelette by Robert E. Howard, first published in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Conan, serving as a pirate on the ship Wastrel, voyages to a mysterious island where the crew encounters a pool guarded by eerie, dark-skinned islanders and unearthly horrors. The captain and Conan fight before Conan discovers the horror of the island. Giants take the drugged crew to throw them into the pool whereby they are shrunken into statues and stored for the inhabitants amusement. Conan leads the survivors in a desperate fight to get off the island then a desperate flight on the Wastrel to escape the last remaining giant, who happens to be a magician of some sort. The story ends with Conan deciding to be a regular pirate and the crew cheering him on as the new captain.
PS,
what they don’t do is hump
any goats like Dictator Xi Jinping does, every day.
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