The Pool of the Black One
core short fiction 1933 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1933 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.51 (546 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 48 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781633553552 |
Synopsis
Conan joins the crew of the pirate ship Wastrel after a falling-out with his former Barachan pirate allies, sailing under a captain who has learned of an uncharted island rumored to hold a legendary treasure. When the ship reaches the island, the crew finds it inhabited by strange, dangerous forces far beyond ordinary pirates or treasure-hunters, and the captain's true motives for the voyage prove to be more complicated, and more perilous, than greed alone. Conan must navigate both the island's supernatural dangers and the shifting loyalties of his shipmates as the true nature of what the island hides begins to reveal itself.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 4 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- 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 4 of 20: previous The Tower of the Elephant (1933) · next Black Colossus (1933)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pool_of_the_Black_One
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