33 Books Like The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

This book was my first journey into the Underdark, and I swear I could feel the oppressive dark pressing in while reading it.

Drizzt Do’Urden’s struggle hit me harder than any surface-dweller’s tale—here’s someone born into cruelty, yet refusing to accept it as his destiny. The action is fast and cinematic, but what I loved most is the quiet defiance running through every page.

Drizzt isn’t just fighting with blades; he’s fighting for the right to choose who he is. For me, that made the book unforgettable.

When I learned that this novel and the epic series that followed were, in fact, a chronicle of the tabletop role-playing adventures by the authors and their friends, it became my introduction to the massive world of Dungeons & Dragons.

That such creativity and imagination could be sparked by playing a game was a life-altering event that propelled me not only to play it but would eventually inspire me to write my own book series.

A classic tale of heroism and adventure, the original Dragonlance Chronicles perfectly blends all the best qualities of high fantasy, including some well-timed moments of humor that had me genuinely laughing out loud.

I love this book as the beginning of the Myth Series because it was one of the first fantasy books that I felt was accessible. It had great character development and a good mix of drama and comedy. Instead of being a typical long-drawn-out fantasy, there is action and adventure.

When the next book in the series came out, I would reread the previous books so I had everything clearly in mind for the new installment. This series made me a voracious reader.

This was another classic story that I wanted to read as I had heard so much about it, I’d even read a graphic novel that was an adaptation of a story in the same series and loved it. I finally got my hands on the book and was not disappointed.

The story mixes eldritch horror with fantasy, and I am transported to that world and immersed! Never mind that it introduced one of my favorite D&D settings, Lahnkmar: The City of Thieves.

This is a short story featuring Conan, and one of, if not, my favourite (it has tough competition from Red Nails and Wolves Beyond the Border). Simple, straight-up, sword and sorcery action. Howard’s Conan was the first real fantasy I fell in love with (before discovering Lord of the Rings). Epic character, but straightforward stories. The opposite of the sprawling epic. One of my books is a collection of sword and sorcery stories, and the first story is heavily influenced by The Tower of the Elephant. The otherworldly aspect, magic, (but not all-encompassing magic), a quest, and ultimately a choice between good and evil. I can’t not recommend a Conan story when talking about fantasy.

Written one hundred years ago, the original Conan stories brought alive a world so rich in culture and history that it is still badly imitated by hundreds of authors.

Besides great writing of action and suspense, Howard also presented theories about evolution and civilization and colorful prose with a very strong vocabulary that stimulated my young mind. Far from the brutish Conan to which we’ve become accustomed, the original was given to philosophical discussion that shows Howard had a remarkable intellect.

Master storyteller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a few things to say about Atlantis. In The Maracot Deep, young zoologist Cyrus Headley travels to the edge of a deep ocean trench with a team of explorers. Suddenly, a giant sea monster attacks them and hurls them down into the trench. The explorers are rescued by the survivors of the destroyed Atlantis, who have dwelled on the seafloor for the past 8,000 years. Will Headley and his companions ever return to the surface again, or will they remain trapped for the rest of their lives like the Atlanteans? Readers expecting this novel to be like his earlier Sherlock Holms stories are in for a surprise, as it explores the spiritual and occult ideas he pondered later in his life.

Howard's style is compelling, dragging you through the story with an inescapable inevitability. His characters possess stark, almost brutal qualities, sure of their place in the world they inhabit, even when facing the unknown. With mighty warriors such as Conan, we know they cannot lose but when it comes to Howard's horror stories, success is not so certain.

Best known for creating Conan The Barbarian, Howard fathered the weird western genre with his seminal 1932 short story "The Horror From The Mound," collected here along with "The Thunder-Rider" and "Old Garfield’s Heart." Reading these early genre mashup stories of conquistador vampires, reincarnation, and Native American magic in high school was like tasting peanut butter and chocolate for the first time. They made new notions bloom like a field in my mind. You could take the gritty frontier of Lonesome Dove and introduce an element of the magical fantastic, and if you respected both genres, come up with something entirely new. I especially appreciated the culture clash of the frontier.

It’s something I explore a lot in my own work; that disparate peoples meet, mix, and come away changed by the encounter. This is an idea that Howard, who adored research and folklore, represents pretty well in "Old Garfield’s… show more.

This was the first book compiled by Cathy and Arnie Fenner on the art of grandmaster fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. My first thought was to choose the Ballantine collection of his work because of its nostalgic quality (I was fifteen when I bought it), but this much later Underwood collection went way beyond a simple collection of art due to the care and love put into the production by the Fenner’s, who knew frank personally and admired his art. It's a big art book and the images fill the pages. If I have one gripe about art books in general it’s that the images are nearly always too small, not so here, this is a beautiful showcase that I have treasured and re-read hundreds of times.