If you missed the last one…
“The Hall of the Dead” was an L. Sprague de Camp composition based on a Robert E. Howard outline. Not surprising, the plot feels like good Conan while the prose lacks the usual fire of good Robert E. Howard. The story appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1967. That was something of a literary coup for a Sword & Sorcery tale, only to be topped by “Ill Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber appearing the same magazine (April 1970) and winning a Hugo and a Nebula! “The Hall of the Dead” was collected in the Lancer book Conan (1967).
Howard did write of a giant slug monster in another series, the James Allison stories. “The Valley of the Worm” (Weird Tales, February 1934) features a gigantic slug-god with strong Lovecraftian overtones. We will never know if REH was thinking of this creature for “The Hall of the Dead” or some other slug monster. The Worm is described thus:
…The mountainous bulk was heaving and billowing, the tentacles were lashing madly, the antennæ writhing and knotting, and the nauseous whiteness had changed to a pale and grisly green…
The sheer nastiness of the worm suggests it is closer to Cthulhu than our slug.
The giant slug is one of two monsters in the story. (We’ll look at the other in the next post.) Conan and a captain of a squad trying to capture him, Nestor, duel outside Larsha. Conan knocks Nestor out and proceeds into the haunted city alone. The people of Shadizar avoid the crumbling city because something keeps eating everyone who goes there. Conan is wary as he climbs the wall and goes in search of palace where a fortune is said to rest.
His first clue as to the guardian is the ground becomes sticky. His sandels make a slurping sound as he walks. This proves to be a gigantic slug trail of slime. The second clue is a bad odor. Then the slug shows up:
At last, around the next corner poured a huge, slimy mass, leprous grey in the moonlight. It glided into the street before him and swiftly advanced upon him, silent save for the sucking sound of its peculiar method of locomotion. From its front end rose a pair of hornlike projections, at least ten feet long, with a shorter pair below. The long horns bent this way and that, and Conan saw that they bore eyes on their ends.
The creature was, in fact, a slug, like the harmless garden slug that leaves a trail of slime in its nightly wanderings. This slug, however, was fifty feet long and as thick through the middle as Conan was tall.
Conan tries to out-run the fast-moving creature:
Moreover, it moved as fast as a man could run. The foetid smell of the thing wafted ahead of it. Momentarily paralysed with astonishment, Conan stared at the vast mass of rubbery flesh bearing down upon him. The slug emitted a sound like that of a man spitting, but magnified many times over.
Galvanized into action at last, the Cimmerian leaped sideways. As he did so, a jet of liquid flashed through the night air, just where he had stood. A tiny droplet struck his shoulder and burned like a coal of fire.
A dangerous game begins, with Conan running through the demolished streets of Larsha. He ducks around corners, trying to keep out of range of the acid spit. Once he has a little breathing room he notices a two storey building still standing, its top crowned with gargoyles. He climbs this but the slug follows. He suddenly gets the idea to push a gargoyle onto the slug. He shoves three more, finally killing it.
The image of Conan racing through the dead city from the giant monster is classic. At one point de Camp describes the monster “like the harmless garden slug“. Such phrases do nothing to build the horror that Howard would have brought to the tale. Patricia Highsmith did a much better job of the creeping horror a few months later with her giant snails in “The Quest for Blank Claveringi” (The Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1967).
Marvel Comics adapted the story in Conan the Barbarian #8, August 1971 as “The Keepers of the Crypt”. In this first version the giant slug is changed to a Gila Monster. (I suppose this was meant to be a tip-of-the-hat to Texas and Robert E. Howard? Conan doesn’t even dump gargoyles on it. What a waste!)
The Conan saga did get giant slugs in “The Crawler in the Mists”, first a Peter Pan Record for children (1976) but later reprinted in Conan the Barbarian #116, November 1980. This story features a robot and the intelligent slug that created it. Conan pushes a column on it. Better. The robot slug was probably because this was intended for children originally.
Better still was Zugthuu the Slitherer, a slug monster from Savage Sword of Conan #2, 1974 called “The Beast From the Abyss”. This was based on a REH fragment expanded by Lin Carter into “Black Abyss” (1967). Kull sets the slug on fire. Zugthuu may have been meant to be the worm from “The Valley of the Worm” which got its own comic version in Supernatural Thrillers #3.
Mike Mignola and Dark Horse gave us Conan #30, July 2006 They had a chance to set the record straight but created a toad-like thing that looks more like a Gila Monster but has serpenty tongues. The thing swallows our hero. Conan cuts his way out before dumping a dragon carving on it and killing it. A weird hybrid of the previous comics.
Conclusion
The giant slug is probably the largest opponent Conan has faced so far in our series of Monsters of the Hyborian Age. In many ways it echoes Thog, another slitherer of great size. The use of a lost or abandoned city is a common setting as well. In a long tradition from weird fiction, crumbling ruins are usually protected by some kind of guardian. Conan even acknowledges this to Nestor, who joins him in his search for wealth: “I don’t smell another slug,” said Conan, “but the treasure might have another guardian.” It does, of course, and we’ll look at them next time.
NB. Now that I think about it, in the third Arthan novel, The Tears of Y’Lala, I have Arthan and his friends chased around an abandoned underground city by a giant monster, not a slug but giant cat infected with a terrible plant sickness. I have to think I was influenced by “The Hall of the Dead” because the scenario is so irresistible. The haunting, empty city and a terror that won’t stop for anything!
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