Shadows in Zamboula
core short fiction 1935 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1935 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.64 (459 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 48 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781681463872 |
Synopsis
Conan arrives in the desert city of Zamboula intending to spend only a single uneventful night before continuing his journey, unaware that the city hides both dangerous political intrigue and roaming, cannibalistic tribesmen who prowl its streets after dark, tolerated by corrupt local authorities. A warning from a stranger and a series of escalating dangers at the inn where he is staying draw Conan into the city's hidden dangers far sooner than he expected, entangling him with a sorcerer's schemes and a woman with her own reasons for wanting him dead or controlled. Conan must survive Zamboula's night streets and uncover who is manipulating events around him before dawn brings any chance of escape.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 14 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Howard's own manuscript title was 'The Man-Eaters of Zamboula'; published under this title in Weird Tales.
- 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 14 of 20: previous Beyond the Black River (1935) · next The Hour of the Dragon (1935)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_in_Zamboula
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