 My work here on YouTube is supported by viewers. Please follow the links in the description below where you can make one-time donations or you can go to the 30-second sci-fi website and pledge a small monthly amount to become a sponsor. Shadow of the Vulture is the one and only Red Sonja story that Robert E. Howard ever wrote published in 1934. It's the story of Gottfried von Kombach, an Austrian barbarian with a tremendous yellow beard and mustache who is targeted for assassination by Suleyman the Magnificent, who was the actual Emperor of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-16th century and the story winds up in the Siege of Vienna in 1529. There are seven chapters. Sonya shows up about halfway through. She is not the half-naked barbarian in a chainmail bikini that we see in the picture here, which I used to get your attention and I'm sure it worked. She is a Viennese canineer. She is fully clothed and armored. She carries pistols and a scimitar and personality-wise, she is every bit the Red Sonja that we would imagine. She calls Gottfried a spanked schoolgirl and one of my favorite bits of the story is the way she handles a knife-wielding attacker. You have to read it to believe it. I am not familiar with Robert E. Howard's larger body of work. The two stories I'm reviewing here, however, I consider to be very good and I highly recommend them. I would characterize his style as a cross between Edgar Rice Burroughs and HP Lovecraft. He has the fast-paced adventure style of Burroughs with the vocabulary of Lovecraft and it makes for excellent and exciting reading. Excellent world-building, too. I was very impressed with how quickly Howard made me understand and believe these fantasy worlds of his. My second story here, a Conan story, is called Tower of the Elephant. Unlike the previous story, Conan's adventures take place in a fictitious prehistoric world called the Hyborian Age. Anyway, Tower of the Elephant is one of Howard's earliest Conan stories. Conan is a young barbarian, newly arrived in the city of Thieves. There is a legendary bejeweled tower in the center of the city called the Tower of the Elephant. Conan has heard that there is a magical jewel beyond all price for the stealing there. The story does not go in the direction that you think it will. An example of the authentic touches that Howard puts in his stories, Conan does not know why the tower is called the Tower of the Elephant and he doesn't know what an elephant is. This is the kind of little detail that makes Howard's stories believable and I'm impressed. Please remember to press that like button. It helps my videos get seen and then subscribe so you can come back next time. I do science fiction book TV and movie reviews all the time and please consider becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below.