The Black Stranger
core novella 1987 Conan the Barbarian
Record
| First published | 1987 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novella |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.75 (87 ratings, collected 2026-08-06) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345461537 |
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan the Barbarian
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 20 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Complete Howard manuscript rejected by Weird Tales in his lifetime. De Camp separately rewrote it into a different, altered story titled 'The Treasure of Tranicos' (1953); Howard's own unaltered text was not printed until the Echoes of Valor anthology (1987), later restored in Del Rey's The Conquering Sword of Conan (2005). This entry registers Howard's own text, not the 1953 de Camp rewrite.
- 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 20 of 20: previous The God in the Bowl (1975)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
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