Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza

Adventures of Conan

by Roland J. Green

Few places are as desolate as the Thanza Mountains on the border of Nemedia and Aqilonia. Few areas are so remote, so dangerous, or so inaccessible...which is why Conan chose these mountains as the perfect spot in the world for Conan to be.

Unfortunately, it is the single worst spot in the world for Conan to be.

Bandits and sorcerers--and worse--inhabit this lonely realm. Worst of all, it is the home of the Soul of Thanza. He who possesses the Soul will become the Death Lord--a post unfilled for many thousands of years. If the Death Lord should come into his full power, mountains will move, seas will be pushed back, the earth itself will shiver, and dead men will rise to fight again. No army of puny humans will be able to stand against the Death lord. Only one man would even dare to try--Conan the Cimmerian!

Genres: Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery

267 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 1997

About the author

Roland James Green is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and editor. He has written as Roland Green and Roland J. Green; and had 28 books in the Richard Blade series published under the pen name 'Jeffrey Lord'.

Reviews

[Bill Riggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Green does Conan right in this novel. I have been disappointed in most of his Conan works but this time he finally nails it. Animated skeletons, fierce monsters and sorcerers abound as Conan leads a varied band of warriors on a suicide mission to defeat the Death Lord of Thanza. The action is consistent and story driven with hardly a dull moment.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another adequate Conan pastiche... I'd probably be more enthusiastic if I didn't feel it should have tried harder to live up to the Howard legacy. Green explores an older Conan here than in most of his other books in the series, and he seems a bit more introspective in between romps with the ladies and blood-letting brawls. He still mourns Belit, which plays an important part in the plot, and is in hiding in a remote area, but that doesn't stop plenty of sorcerous trouble from finding him. There's a very nifty battle with skeletons that evokes the Harryhausen legacy quite well, and it's a fast-paced and action-packed tale. I don't care for the cover; Conan looks more like a bored heavy metal fan at a violin recital than a rampaging Cimmerian.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another rescued tome... I've never read any Conan so I thought I'd give it a try. The setting is vaguely like Lord of the Rings but with a bit of sex and lots of blood. Reasonably entertaining so far. I didn't realize so many writers have contributed to the Conan canon! So far the author deploys a few too many similes for my taste.

Blood here, blood there, blood everywhere(sex too). A rousing adventure. Conan has just fallen into a deep dark pit in a mountain a la Gandalf in LOTR! He hasn't hit bottom yet...

Finished last night with this rousing and entertaining, though at times a bit confusing, tale. A solid 3.5* fantasy offering.

- The Slayers(skeleton fighters) reminded me of the movie "Jason and the Argonauts" - another good oldie.

- So far I'm the only reviewer for this book.

[iasa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pretty standard Conan novel; there is fighting, a pretty girl, and sorcery. A relaxing way to spend a few hours.

[Lewis Stone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well bugger me with a broadsword. Roland Green finally did it. He finally wrote another enjoyable (if not spectacular) Conan pastiche.

This is Green's seventh Conan effort, and the last one in the extensive Tor run. Of his previous six, the only other pastiche of his that I generally enjoyed was Conan the Guardian. But after many other duds, I wasn't sure if he had it in him to write another decent entry... yet at the last hurdle, he delivered again.

There was a lot I enjoyed about this one. Conan is written reasonably well, the pacing is consistently solid, the secondary characters are interesting enough, and there are plenty of fun sword and sorcery elements at play. With warring bandits, dark sorcery in the wilderness, flying serpents, water dragons lurking in the deep, floating mountains, and skeletal armies marching alongside Conan, this was a fun popcorn read that rarely had a dull moment.

Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't all good, mostly due to Green's flaws as a writer. His prose remains clunky and awkward, he continues to overuse childishly simple analogies (though not as badly as his previous entries), and he constantly tries to force every single passage or piece of dialogue to sound as witty, wise, and fanciful as possible. However, he doesn't have the skill to pull this off, so it just makes his prose often confusing and difficult to follow, and sometimes downright grating to read.

Yet even so, none of these flaws seemed quite as prevalent as in most of Green's other pastiches, and this book offered enough to keep me entertained from the beginning to the end. With all that said, this gets a fairly solid three stars from me and joins Conan the Guardian as a Roland Green pastiche I wouldn't mind reading again.

And so ends the Tor run! Not with a bang, but far from the whimper I feared. Cheers, Roland. Your Conan works might have been patchy at best... but in the few instances where you got them more right than wrong, I had a good time reading them.

[H. P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Roland Green wrote seven Conan pastiches. He also wrote most of the infamous Richard Blade books. I have four of his Conan books—Conan at the Demon’s Gate, Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza, Conan and the Mists of Doom, and Conan the Guardian. He gets points for better than average titles, at least. I’m not moving on from Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza anytime soon. After one book, I’m ready to relegate Roland Green to the lower tier of Tor pastiche writers along with Steve Perry and Leonard Carpenter. Their books, at least in my experience, are a long step down from the Robert Jordan and John Maddox Roberts books.

Conan has a price on his head in more than one country and an angry pimp on his heels, so he enrolls in the “Thanza Rangers” being organized to root bandits out from the mountains between Aquilonia and Nemedia. I think I like Conan the best as a soldier. At the same time, bandit chiefs Lysinka and Grolin are seeking the Soul of Thanza, which can give the bearer power over death.

For the most part this isn’t a very creative story. I’ve read about Conan squaring off against a lot of sorcerers by now (although this isn’t quite that), and Lysinka is a poor man’s Karela. Green has a curiously longwinded writing style. Characters will engage in extended dialogue during a fight (a major pet peeve of mind) and Green will take a page and a half to say what Howard could have dispensed with with a single evocative sentence. It’s not a long book, but the first two-thirds dragged for me. But the fight with a water dragon in an underground cave is a highlight, as are a troop of skeleton warriors.

[Stuart Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

After traveling the known world, serving as Captain of the Guard in most major cities, being a notorious thief in most others, and being a successful pirate on both the Western Ocean and the Viyalet Sea, Conan has finally become famous. Which means that the King of Ophir has placed a huge bounty on Conan's head and he needs to exit poste haste. In a bid to avoid capture he joins the newly formed Thanza Rangers, whose charge is to rid the Thanza mountains of bandits.

Said bandits are currently working together to find a great treasure, the Soul of Thanza. The Rangers encounter the bandits and some of them are killed and some of them run away and some of them become friends. Conan leads men into battle, has sexy time with some wenches, kills some snakes, and breaks the wind.

Nice Conan story where a straightforward plot is made interesting through superior writing. The story jumps from character to character, and Green is not afraid to leave characters behind when their usefulness is at an end. And it's nice that the people of Hyborea have finally started to figure out that there aren't dozens of giant blue eyed barbarians named Conan roaming the world wreaking havoc, and a lot of problems could be solved by the simple offer of 1000 gold pieces for the head of just one Cimmerian.

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bortsett från det hoppande perspektivet var detta en ganska charmig liten bok. Grundintrigen är enkel - antagonisten söker ett föremål som visar sig ha egen vilja; i sökandet skadar han conans följeslagare, som bestämmer sig för att söka och sedan utkräva hämnd. Prosan är otymplig, men den flyter och fokuserar till stora delar på rätt saker. Jag skulle inte säga att den kommer i närheten av verkligt bra fantasy, men den är i en god top tredjedel iaf.

[Clint · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tornans are usually fun. This one was a nice distraction. A popcorn read. The plot doesn’t always make much sense, or even try too hard to explain itself, but it zips along.

I don’t know much about Roland Green. I know he wrote most of the Dray Prescott novels, but I have read none of those, nor anything else by Green that I’m aware of. I have a few more Tornans by him. I would read more.

[Duane Olds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now THAT was a hell of a Conan adventure. I will be sure to read more of this authors addition to the series.

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as wildly uneven as some of his others... but just kind of meh the whole way through...