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Cover of The God in the Bowl

The God in the Bowl

core short fiction 1975 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn

Record

First published1975
Original language EN
Work typeshort fiction
Canon statuscore
Reader rating3.66 (318 ratings, collected 2026-09-13)
Page count19
First-edition ISBN9780441116713

Synopsis

In the Nemedian city of Numalia, Conan breaks into a merchant's private museum intending to steal a valuable artifact, only to find himself trapped inside when the building's owner is discovered murdered under mysterious circumstances. With the museum sealed and Conan the obvious suspect among those present, suspicion quickly falls on him, even though he insists on his innocence of the killing itself. The true cause turns out to be connected to a sealed sarcophagus recently delivered from Stygia, and Conan must survive the night and clear his name by uncovering what, rather than who, was really responsible for the murder.

Where it sits

Notes

  • Complete Howard manuscript rejected by Weird Tales in his lifetime. A heavily rewritten version by L. Sprague de Camp was first published in 1952 (Space Science Fiction, Sep) -- this database registers a different text, not that rewrite. Howard's own restored/unaltered text was first printed in THE TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT (Donald M. Grant, 1975), predating the more widely-cited Wandering Star (2002)/Del Rey 'The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian' (2003) scholarly editions by decades. Correction 2026-08-06: this entry previously listed 1996, sourced from an unverified secondary claim; 1975 is the correct first-appearance year for Howard's own text per reh.world's detailed publication history (Grant 1975 restored text -> Grosset & Dunlap 1978 -> Wandering Star 2002 -> Del Rey 2003 -> Gollancz 2006). No rating-platform work page distinguishes Howard's restored text from de Camp's rewrite -- the only standalone rating-platform page under this title (work id 17567455) is explicitly the 1952 de Camp version, a different registered work by this project's own rule, so it is not used for this book's rating. Reader-rating data collection for this specific book is not expected to be resolvable through the standard per-book rating-platform lookup; it would require either the rating platform adding a distinct restored-text edition page, or a documented exception to the standard lookup.
  • 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.

Sources

← Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn dossier · All universes

Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.