in "Christianity Today" (print/online)
23 November 2015
This is one of the strangest books I have read in a long while, and also one of the best. It is a novel based on the life of Texas writer Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian and many other memorable characters. Spoiler alert: Youmans’s protagonist, Conall Weaver, commits suicide at the outset, just as Howard did (at age 30), and the story proceeds in reverse chronology. Does this sound daunting? It isn’t at all, if you read with a child’s willingness to be astonished and a grown-up’s hard-won hope that somehow our tangled lives are part of a larger Story, the outlines of which we glimpse even now.
