Cast the furs from your shoulders and recline by the fire. It spits warmth while the night wind cuts like steel, and the sleet grinds its teeth against the timbers. The frosty tempest is of little consequence to us, however, for we have meat and wine and tales of high adventure!

Let us gaze into the mists of the past, shortly after the age when a man mountain known as Mr. T marched forth and razed all in his pop culture path, the armies of Nintendo conquered the inner realms and Ninjas crept everywhere. It was a time when libraries had paperback vaults that smelled of must and life! Many an adolescent boy was lost in the labyrinth of their stories. This I know, for I was one! The rusty squeal of turnstile racks and shelves that towered to the heavens: these were the décor of the Fiction Temples, and many esoteric discoveries awaited explorers within their aisles.

I tried to channel Robert E. Howard there because he is a writer I hold in high esteem. If you don’t know Howard’s name, you likely do know his most famous invention, Conan the Barbarian.

I still remember the first Conan book I read, which happened to be the “last” Conan book in the series — Conan of the Isles. I don’t know what exactly prompted me to pick it up from the library’s paperback vault. I reckon I was familiar with Arnold Schwarzenegger (although I had not seen his Conan movie) and that was enough to add Conan of the Isles to the stack of books I checked out. I have a dim recollection of reading that book while I was sick. The part that stands out to me the most is when Conan was being chased by a ginormous horde of rats in an underground cavern. Conan positioned himself on a narrow rock bridge over an underground river. Then the rats could only come at him a few at a time. Conan swiped his sword back and forth and killed thousands of rats over a lengthy period of time until his strength finally gave out and he toppled into the river (why didn’t he just jump into the river in the first place? Embrace the premise, not the logic).

Conan of the Isles was not actually written by Conan inventor Robert E. Howard but rather some of his disciples. However, I eventually read a lot of the Howard stuff and added a decent selection of his stuff to my bookshelf. There are lessons a writer can learn from Robert E. Howard. For example, I once read a story by him that was about the ghost of an escaped circus gorilla haunting a house. This shows any idea can be pulled off if the writer has the chutzpah to do it, and Howard had it in spades. I still like reading Howard every now and again simply because his bombastic prose is a delight.

Another book I discovered that paperback room that stands out in my memory was a Ray Bradbury collection. It contained his fun stories, the ones with killer babies and lonely automated homes in a nuclear wasteland, rather than the prose-poetry story style he seemed to eventually settle into.

I discovered Robert McCammon in that paperback room, too. I remember always looking at his book covers but never taking the plunge. I’m not sure why. I think maybe because the covers seemed a little too dangerous to me. Eventually, I checked him out.

One of the neatest books I found in that paperback room was Killer by Peter Tonkin. Get this, a group of folks are trapped on an ice berg, and they start getting picked off one by one by a group of killer whales that are led by a killer whale that was trained by the military.

I found so many great books in that paperback room. The library is still there, but I have not been back to it in years. Maybe I need to return and see if all those little treasures are still there. It’s possible. A few years ago I ended up in my elementary school’s library. Would you believe I still found books on the shelf I had checked out as a kid? Even more amazing, some of them still had the library card inside of them with my name still written on it. That pretty much blew my mind. However, I did see some books had disappeared. I hope they were read to tatters rather than being judged too intense for younger readers. These sort of books included the Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators books and the Twilight series of horror books (not to be confused with the vampire Twilight brand).

I don’t know if reading can ever be as magical again as it is when you are in that golden period of adolescence when you don’t even have a clue as to what exists to discover. You simply come across great book after great book and author after author to further explore in the library aisles. The era probably also had something to do with it. I don’t think publishers take as many chances with the B-list paperbacks anymore. On the flip side, we have the Internet to find all of that stuff now. You have to take the good with the bad. For now, throw another log on the fire and let the wind howl outside. Perhaps it will bring us a visitor like Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet…