loonyblog.

This has not been an easy week. Our baby girl, born back on Super Tuesday, was diagnosed with choanal atresia, a scary sounding issue that was preventing her from properly breathing through her nose. This required surgery, which she’s had, and is recovering from now. More info (and still more pictures of our little prizefighter) is up over at AliceBergman.com.

In any event, as I said, this was not an easy week. Alice was transferred to UCSF Children’s Hospital last weekend (once it was determined that whatever was causing her breathing problem wouldn’t be able to be addressed locally), and we’ve been going back and forth to the city every day.

During these times of uncertainty, it’s not at all uncommon for a person to reach out for some kind of solace. For me, that something was Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

The funny thing is that I’m really not joking. When we were sitting around waiting for our week old daughter to come back from surgery (or even worse, when we were waiting around waiting around to wait around for when she might actually go in to surgery), I escaped into the world of Hyboria.
I had with me at the hospital The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, the first volume of the complete Robert E. Howard Conan adventures, and would read this whenever I needed to get away. For some reason I can’t entirely explain, I found this to be extremely comforting.

There’s something so simple, so pure, about these stories. In all of them, Conan is this gruff (but surprisingly intelligent) brute, the women are all voluptuous and sexy, and the enemies are always deserving of their ultimate fates. There’s never any ambiguity, although there are frequently some nice surprises (I had no idea, for example, how much Howard had in common with his contemporary Mr. Howard Philips Lovecraft). Also, those Mark Schultz illustrations are fantastic (nice to see him back in form all these years after Xenozoic Tales disappeared).

Mostly though, it was all about leaving behind anything even remotely resembling reality. This was a world of sex, violence and magic. I love deep fantasy too, but I don’t think Tolkien’s brand would have done the same thing. This was simple escapism, and it’s some of the best I’ve read since I was a kid. I’m not saying the next time there’s a major event in your life you should look to Robert E. Howard and Conan for solace or anything…

…but it can’t hurt.

Hey, it worked for me.