u/woulditkillyoutolift

The cover depicts Dark Agnes de Chastillon.

Source: Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art, by Karen Haber (2011).

The Sunset Warrior was one of my favorite books as a teenager, but I thought its sequels had diminishing returns. Anyone read this one?

I'd nominate Dwellers of the Forbidden City as the AD&D module with the most sword & sorcery vibe; it's basically Conan trespassing in a snake-haunted, decadent, pulp civilization. Cook was inspired by REH's Red Nails:

>Red Nails... [is] was what I was clearly going for. It's my favorite Conan story and the city was based off of it. It was originally something I did for my own campaign and then used it as my resume when I applied to TSR.

I love pulp stories and grew up reading a lot of the classic pulp stuff. As a kid I read Conan, Solomon Kane, most al the Tarzan novels, Doc Savage, the Shadow, Vance, Lovecraft, etc. The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by Leiber were among my favorites -- he created this really interesting world and characters that made great stories. Laumer, deCamp, Farmer, Zelazny, Lin Carter, Bloch were a few more. Of course Tolkien, but also a lot of the golden and silver age writers shaped my imagination in junior high and high school.

Best opening paragraphs of a 20th century American novel.

"Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?"—Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy.

Note the people at the bottom of the painting for scale.

Grant was clearly looking at paintings of despair by the old masters for inspiration. One of my favorite Conan covers by any artist. (Although the Bantam cover by Lou Feck is cool too).

Conan amputates limbs, breaks backs, and casually knocks out teeth with his shield. In this image, his enemies aren't just defeated—they're a mass of super-f***ed despair. Grant is clearly evoking paintings by the Old Masters. Click through the images for a gallery of damned, terrified, compressed bodies.

Rich Horton wrote of this: "I think the vaguely promising opening lifts it from utterly awful to merely bad."

Eerie reversed the image and reposed Thelma Starburst's head.

Khlit the Cossack is shrewd, war-hungry, loyal, physically formidable, quietly manipulative, and deeply suspicious of civilization. Sound like anyone we know? Robert E. Howard was an acknowledged fan of Lamb's. There's no magic, demons, or sensuously dangerous women in any of the Khlit stories (at least, not the ones I've read) but much of the rest of the S&S components were in place when Lamb introduced Khlit in 1917.