Conan the Barbarian (The Complete Chronicles)
Howard invented sword and sorcery in 1932 and created the template for every muscled fantasy hero since. Conan himself is more complex than the archetype suggests; Howard's Hyborian Age is a melancholy world of lost civilizations and declining empires.
The structural sameness is the loudest complaint: lost city, evil sorcerer, monstrous threat, woman in danger, with “lot of repetition in the stories, copy-and-paste sentences between them.” Readers flag that the “innate superiority of whiteness is presumed in a strong way,” a baseline assumption rather than isolated lines, and one critic marks the worst offender among them “one of Robert E. Howard’s worst, most vitriolically racist stories.” Readers name The Vale of Lost Women as the story they regret reading. The women are written “strong, but still victims most of the time,” reduced to prizes. Quality is uneven, some entries thin and abruptly ended from pulp deadlines.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
