Screenplay: Oliver Stone and John Milius
Novelisation: L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

Oliver Stone’s barking mad original screenplay had been reined in by director John Milius’ subsequent rewrite, but Conan The Barbarian still bore scant resemblance to the writings of Robert E. Howard. The novelisation does an interesting job of relating Milius’ story in a pastiche Howard style, however. The book’s landscape isn’t quite as weirdly empty as the film’s; we spend more time with Conan during his pit-fighting years; and Conan escapes his gladiatorial life thanks to a handy earthquake, rather than simply being freed. He also has a lot more to say in the book than he does when Arnold plays him.

L. Sprague de Camp was Conan’s custodian in print for years, publishing collections of Conan stories that mixed Howard’s writing with his own. He even rewrote Howard on several occasions, taking Howard’s non-Conan stories and putting Conan in them. The business in the film with Conan chased by wolves and stumbling upon a cavern where he finds a sword on the body of a dead Atlantean comes from Camp’s own story The Thing In The Crypt. Roy Thomas had already adapted it for Marvel comics, which is where Milius likely first read it. So for that sequence, Camp, in the novelisation, is adapting Milius, who adapted Thomas, who adapted Camp. If a story’s worth telling, it’s worth telling four times.