Formerly published as ‘The Awful Token of His Payment’ and revised with Danica Lorincz.

previously titled ‘Tomorrow Night It Will Be Conan’s Bed You Warm’

The Vale of Lost Women is a three chapter short, that my former co-reviewer, screen writer and novelist, V.J. Waks lamented as something that might have made the bones of an excellent movie.

Taking another look at this, with Danica Lorincz, my editor, I find that as Howard matured as a writer, the extreme masculinity of his heros finds its cleanest expression in the Conan character, who was so outsized, arrogant, and possessed a strain of humor that permits much of the narrative to come from a feminine viewpoint, which accentuates, rather than compromises, the vitality of the hero. The Vale of Lost Women, which was not sold, is one of the more complete examples of this narrative method.

Though the themes of gulfs, trails and barbarism dominate aspects of the story, this is Howard's most racially charged tale other than Black Canaan.

The Vale of Lost Women may have been rejected as a Conan story by the editor of Weird Tales, not because Conan comes off as a brutal, miscegenistic white monster among a world of black fiends, but because this was not a Conan story. This was Livia’s one and only story. Conan was nothing more than the element of the fiendish world she had been carried off to, which she strove to enlist as an ally on purely—even refreshingly in this homogenized day and age—racial grounds.

Livia’s world comes to life vividly in Howard’s hands as she gropes to dumb wakefulness on the eve of the sacrifice of her white virginity to a grotesquely fat toad-like black king. The white fear of blacks rampant in Howard’s day however, was outweighed by the lack of masculine characteristics and parasitic nature evoked by the description of King Bajujh. Crude depictions of black characters, so overworked in Howard’s time, soon fall way like a veil, as the man whom Livia beseeches to rescue her from this disgusting king, turns out to be no better than those who currently own her—just more violent; in effect, worse.

One of Conan’s statements in response to Livia offering herself to him in return for her freedom should suffice: “…I have looked at black sluts until I am sick at the guts.”

Such are the sensibilities of poor Livia’s ‘knight in shining armor.’

Howard, it seems to me, was enthralled with the idea of grass roots bandits striking back at the greater society. In my review of Queen of the Black Coast, which chronologically, in terms of Conan’s career, comes right before this story, I discussed the fact that it was most probably Howard’s version of Bonnie and Clyde. As Howard had grown up in the company and care of some older blacks, he probably had a notion that the black communities of the South [he was a Texan] were one place of refuge for white criminals on the run. The 20th Century interpretation of the Conan character’s status at this point in his career would be as a John Dillinger figure. Conan’s status as a barbarian—and in many of the stories a thief or bandit—is certainly a cloak for Howard’s admiration for Depression Era bank robbers.

There is no need to worry about giving away the second act of the story, for it is cast as inevitable from the outset. The contrast between Chief Conan and King Bajujh, and the crude audacity of the white barbarian, leave no question in the reader’s mind that Conan will betray and kill his host and ally for nothing more than consensual sex with a white woman, whom he reassures would wipe him out in turn [“Truces in this land are made to be broken… What would be blackest treachery in another land, is wisdom here.], as soon as his own usefulness to the king ended.

What Livia—who becomes one of Howard’s more realistically conflicted characters—did not consider, was that Conan was going to annihilate an entire community in the most savage fashion just to spread her legs. This realization, that she has given herself up to a monster worse than she could have imagined causes her to recoil from everything, even her wishes.

Conan had warned her that she had been wrong to trust in the protection of ‘soft bellied’ civilized men, and that he could and would protect her if she were willing to pay the price. I cannot go into any more of the story line here without ruining it.

This is pure atmospheric horror, not with dripping monstrosities and creeping things in the night, but simply the nasty underbelly of humanity and the horrors of the evil that men do, all couched in a fictional world suffused in elder evil. There is never a question in a Conan or Kane story that the day-lit world of civilization is not both bounded by and undermined by mind-blasting evil.

Livia is literally walking naked in an actual man-made hell, which is itself suffused in a cosmic one.

Upon re-reading the last chapter for about the sixth time with an eye toward this review, I was impressed by the feminine quality of this final chapter. Howard, from his early attempts at empathizing with Livia through the naked, luridly generic fears of alienation, bondage and rape, seems, at the outset of Chapter 3, to have assumed a kind of deluded feminine outlook. Howard never let this be anything other than a horror tale. It does not slip into romance, pointless adventure tropes, plot twists, or polemic.

In the first act Livia falls into man made hell, a hell without promise of redemption, but reserving a place for her soul; preserving a chance to die with dignity.

In the second act Livia makes a deal with the mighty barbarian Conan to free her from this hell, but at the expense of her dignity, her soul.

In the final act, Livia has fled from Conan as a small world burns so that he might bed her. She flees out of the human realm of horror into an infinitely vast world of cosmic horror. Conan—much like his pursuit of the goddess in The Frost Giant's Daughter—pursues his escaped sexual property with a savage thirst. Now, having pushed Livia into a hell of monstrous extra-human proportions, Conan finds himself, sheathes his cock and unsheathes his sword to do his duty and fight for the preservation of his racial other half, rather than to possess her on a merely material level. He has his strength, courage, and honor; a quick instinct and goodness coupled with guilelessness in direct contrast with civilization, which completely lacks redemptive qualities.

The Vale of Lost Women is a touchingly savage, overlooked and misunderstood study on how the best in Men can be unlocked by the lost women who have been left suffering under the avalanche of animal passion and material artifice that is the self-made zoo of civilization.

Classic and post-modern feminists will tend to agree that the tale of a man saving a woman from the unseen horrors that circumscribe the human condition is negative and condescending.

Manosphere nerds might reject the notion of a man rescuing such a base, materialistic creature as a woman.

But if looked at from a strictly masculine point of view, Conan and Livia have both been utterly debased by her enslavement. Her escape and his pursuit into a world of horrors greater than that which mankind can contrive, has given them both a chance at redemption. When Conan abandons his lustful pursuit of her soft body and takes up the cause of her defense against the supernatural beings that threaten her, he is transformed at the same time as she is liberated.

From a feminine point of view, Livia is surrounded by repeated violence and inhumanity. The peaceful valley which later appears as a safe haven from the repetition of “forceful hands,” holds an even greater violence issuing from the supernatural. In both worlds, she is to be a sacrifice and has women who keep her hostage for her impending sexual violation, and who are brutish and sexually mocking of her themselves. Home is her only true haven from the rude world.

Both Livia and Conan unquestioningly face what they find, whether natural or supernatural, good or evil, which is why they are able to respond so quickly and in tandem with each other.

The Vale of Lost Women is a story about a man and a woman saving each other from the rude artifices of an evil world through defiant action.