Beyond the Black River
core novella 1935 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1935 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novella |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.01 (788 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 352 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781681463780 |
Synopsis
On Aquilonia's newly settled frontier along the Black River, the Pictish wizard Zogar Sag has begun summoning supernatural creatures and rousing the Pictish tribes toward an uprising that threatens to overrun the province's isolated forts and settlements. Conan, serving as a scout and advisor to the frontier's defenders, is called on to stop Zogar Sag before his growing following can unite the normally fractious Pictish clans into a single devastating force. Accompanied by a small band of scouts and a young, inexperienced settler named Balthus, Conan pushes deep into hostile, magic-haunted territory beyond the river, where the line between ordinary warfare and something far more monstrous quickly begins to blur.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 13 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Serialized in 2 parts, Weird Tales May-Jun 1935.
- From the series record (The Conan Stories): 20 works wholly written by Robert E. Howard himself (16 published in his lifetime, 1932-1936, plus 4 complete manuscripts he finished but that were rejected by Weird Tales and only published posthumously in his own unaltered text, 1954-1996), the modern Del Rey 'Original Conan' trilogy (ed. Patrice Louinet, 2002-2005) presents all 20 together as the definitive, textually-restored, Howard-only edition. No internal in-story chronological order is recorded here: at least six independent, mutually disagreeing chronologies have been proposed by different editors/scholars since 1936 (Miller/Clark, de Camp's two versions, William Galen Gray, Joe Marek, Dale Rippke), and Howard himself is documented as having 'had little more than a general idea of the character's career path' and deliberately wrote the stories out of sequence, the same principled non-invention applied to Steven Brust's Dragaera. Book order here follows first-publication-of-the-actual-registered-text year, which is a sourced fact, not an invented reading order.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Conan Stories: position 13 of 20: previous Jewels of Gwahlur (1935) · next Shadows in Zamboula (1935)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Black_River
← Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.