I saw this at my local library and just had to give it a try. Robert E. Howard hasn’t steered me wrong yet, but honestly I wasn’t expecting too much—and I was pleasantly surprised to find my expectations were wrong.
This book contains seven El Borak stories, three with Kirby O’Donnell, and one with Steve Clarney. All of them are reasonably good, but the El Borak stories are the main course.
They’re all adventure stories that take place in South Asia, usually in what we now call Afghanistan, with some branching out into the Himalayas and possibly ranging into modern Pakistan and India. The settings are lawless and foreign, yet Francis Xavier Gordon, a.k.a. El Borak, thrives in them.
He’s a nigh-unstoppable force, getting into and out of a lot of scrapes. He seems to be in Asia just for the adventure. Where Steve Clarney is pretty clearly a treasure hunter, Gordon is more likely to throw treasure and authority away than let it make him complacent.
The stories themselves have a lot of repeated elements, but they’re rearranged enough to still be pretty interesting. Some of the frequent bits: two groups racing to one spot; a secret message that needs to reach its destination; a group of untrustworthy warriors; short-term truces; pitched battles; dark cults; ancient treasures; betrayal. The strength of these stories isn’t so much in deep and layered character development or mind-blowingly creative plotting. They’re pure adventures, sometimes with the slightest whiff of the strange or fantastic, but usually quite grounded.
Instead, there are two elements of these stories that I found fascinating. First, the unrelenting action and tension. Howard keeps stress levels high, making the stories surprisingly good at enticing you to turn the next page.
But the second element is what really blew me away. In these stories, even more than the Kane or Kull stories I’ve read before, Howard’s word choice is impeccable. He somehow manages to choose these words that perfectly encapsulate some movement, appearance, or sound, and create an amazingly vivid impression for the reader. He knows words that I know, but that I don’t know well enough to use deftly in my own writing.
One of the elements I found most notable in The Winter King was the word choice in the first chapter. Howard accomplishes a similar height regularly during the El Borak stories.
It was a far greater demonstration of writing skill than I expected from relatively simple adventures.
If I had to criticize these stories, I would make a few minor points. First, there’s a lot of non-English vocabulary in them that is not always well-explained. As a reader, I find this a little irritating today, and imagine how confounding it was in the mid-1930s.
Second, Howard’s repertoire of Arabic/Turkish/etc. names is a bit limited. Compared to his expansive English vocabulary, we find a lot of characters with nearly identical names throughout the stories.
Finally, I felt like the constant tension and action made reading the stories a little bit tiring. This book was longer than I expected, and in order to finish it in time to make this review, I had to sit with it for some fairly long uninterrupted periods. The constant high tension meant that the longer stories got very close to wearing out their welcome for me. I suspect that a more leisurely read would not have had this problem.
Once again, I’m impressed by Robert E. Howard. I wasn’t expecting much from "desert adventures,” and I’m pleased to say that I was wrong.
If you’re a fan of adventure stories, these come highly recommended. If you’re a writer and you want to see some amazing examples of word choice, this is worth a look, too.
Grab a copy here. And as always, more details and spoilers in the embedded video.
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