'Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus' (160 pp) was published by Berkley Books in July, 1970. The cover artwork appears to be signed by Jeffrey Jones. A second edition was issued in June 1976, also by Berkley, and features cover art by Vincent Di Fate.
Lin Carter began his 'Thongor' novels in 1965, with 'The Wizard of Lemuria' (1965), but the series really gathered momentum after Lancer Books began publishing its 'Conan' paperbacks starting in 1967 and introduced the sword-and-sorcery genre to an entire generation of Baby Boomers. 'Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus' was the sixth and last of the novels, although Carter continued to publish Thongor short stories and novelettes until 1980.
'Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus' has several plot threads, all of which eventually coalesce in the closing chapters. It seems that Kashtar, the lord of the pirate city of Tarakus, has come into the possession of an eldritch artifact recovered from a ruined city of the wasteland territory of Nianga. This artifact spews forth a beam of light, called the Grey Death, that instantly can convert men into raving lunatics. With the Grey Death as his superweapon, Kashtar intends to lead a fleet of pirates against the great city of Patanga and its ruler, Thongor.
Can Thongor and his comrades-in-arms Barim Redbeard, Karm Karvus, and Charn Thovis counter the menace of the Grey Death and defeat the armada of the Pirates of Tarakus.......or will Patanga be reduced to rubble, its Liege Lord put to the sword, and its people enslaved by their conquerors..... ?
As with the other pieces in the 'Thongor' genre I have read, 'Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus' is a serviceable pastiche of a Conan novel. It maintains the same reverence for purple prose that marks the pulp fiction of the 1930s: few nouns appearing in the pages of 'Pirates' are unaccompanied by an adjective.
Indeed 'Pirates' is the first time in my life I have encountered the adjective 'flamly' twice (which - according to a Google search - is not a word at all). I also was unprepared for the term 'heavily-manicholated', which Carter uses to describe battlements........ ?!
Given that the novel is only 160 pages long, the narrative is necessarily terse, and the chapters brief.
If you are someone who enjoys those Old School sword-and-sorcery tales, and recognizes the genre's limitations, than 'Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus' will be worth picking up, although the fact that it was printed 50 years ago means that surviving copies can be expensive (the 1976 second printing is a bit more affordable).
I guess manchicolated is a misspelled machicolated - from machicolation, which is a defensive feature where a protruding segment of a battlement has a hole in the floor for dropping things on attackers. You can see that if Carter misspelled it, it might not be caught, and if it was simply a mistake in typesetting... Again, who the hell would catch it?
ReplyDeleteNow, flamy... or what was that?
I've been re-reading Thongor, and the novels are still fun, but they definitely worked better when I was twelve. I've paused after the third, since later ones may not be available as e-books yet and I am actually developing a preference for my e-readers over paper.