Bran Mak Morn: The Last King Book

A fantastic collection of stories, but in a different way than Howard's Conan.

Where reading Conan gives you the feeling of a man besting all of the odds and laughing in the face of danger, the Bran Mak Morn stories are more haunting and-in a way-sad. Bran is the king of a dying, deformed people that are quickly fading from the world. Where Conan attempts to tame the wild and laughs in the face of civilization, Bran desperately fights to keep the wild places free in the face of unstoppable progress.

This is more than just the tales of Morn, however. Here, we find the tales of the Picts as a people. To really understand what the Picts meant to Howard is to understand Howard himself. More than Conan or Kane, Howard's Picts were the soul of his work in a lot of ways. They represented, for him, the savage, wild, free (and thus true) man. From boxers and cowboys to barbarians and knights, every untamed man that Howard wrote about were shadows and whispers of this wild race.