The Hour of the Dragon
core novel 1935 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1935 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.11 (5,059 ratings, collected 2026-08-06) |
| Page count | 296 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781681463896 |
Synopsis
King Conan, now ruling Aquilonia in his forties after years on the throne, faces a conspiracy of disaffected nobles who resurrect the long-dead Acheronian sorcerer Xaltotun and enlist his terrible magic to help overthrow him. The conspiracy succeeds in toppling Conan's rule and leaving his kingdom in chaos, and Conan himself is captured and imprisoned, stripped of the throne he fought for years earlier. Forced to escape and rebuild from nothing, the deposed king sets out on a sweeping quest across the Hyborian world, seeking allies, information about Xaltotun's power, and a way to reclaim both his kingdom and his life from the conspirators who took them.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 15 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Howard's only full-length Conan novel; serialized in 5 parts, Weird Tales Dec 1935-Apr 1936. Also submitted as a standalone book to UK publisher Dennis Archer in 1934, who went bankrupt before printing; first true book publication was the 1950 Gnome Press edition (retitled 'Conan the Conqueror').
- 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 15 of 20: previous Shadows in Zamboula (1935) · next Red Nails (1936)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hour_of_the_Dragon
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