So I'm standing in my kitchen at 11:30 PM waiting for ramen water to boil — because that's what thesis procrastination looks like at this stage of my academic career — and I figure hey, 24 minutes, I can knock out a Conan story before bed. And honestly? That's the perfect way to experience "Gods of the North." It's basically a D&D one-shot in audiobook form. You get a battlefield aftermath, a mysterious supernatural woman, a chase through frozen wastes, and a frost giant. Twenty-four minutes. Done. Ramen's not even cool yet.
Conan Before the Legend, Running on Berserker Fumes
This is Robert E. Howard's "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," and it sits at the very beginning of Conan's chronological timeline — young Conan, pre-legend, running with Aesir war parties up in frozen Nordheim. The setup is pure sword-and-sorcery economy: eighty men dead on an icy plain, Conan the last one standing, and then Atali appears. She's the daughter of a frost giant, barely clothed in some gossamer veil that Howard describes with the kind of breathless pulp energy that tells you exactly what decade this was written in.
What keeps Howard worth listening to almost a century later is the raw mythological charge running through every sentence. Atali taunts Conan, he chases her across miles of snow in what amounts to a berserker fugue state, and the whole thing feels less like a fantasy adventure and more like a Norse myth filtered through a 1930s Texas writer who'd been reading too much saga poetry. The frost giant showing up at the climax is basically a boss encounter — and I mean that with full affection. This reads like someone's session recap where the barbarian failed every single Wisdom save and the DM just kept rolling with it.
But let's be real about what this story IS. It's a vignette. A sketch. There's no layered magic system to dissect, no political intrigue, no character arc. Conan sees woman, Conan chases woman across the tundra, Conan fights giant. That's the whole thing. I reviewed Coming of Conan the Cimmerian with exactly the same caveat — Howard's economy is a feature, but it means you're reading sketches, not murals. If you're expecting depth — systems, factions, progression — wrong aisle entirely. This is the literary equivalent of a really well-drawn splash page.
And yeah, the chase itself lands rough by modern standards. Conan's intentions during that pursuit are pretty explicitly what you'd expect from 1930s pulp, and Howard doesn't soften it. Worth flagging because some listeners will bounce hard off that, and that's a legitimate reaction.
What Phil Chenevert Actually Sounds Like Behind the Mic
Chenevert reads this with a no-frills, deliberate cadence — like a guy sitting across from you at a campfire who's done this story before and knows where the beats land. He doesn't do theatrical character voices. Atali doesn't get some ethereal lilt, Conan doesn't get a guttural growl. It's more of a unified storytelling voice, steady and measured, which honestly works for Howard's prose because the writing itself is already doing the heavy lifting. Howard wrote sentences like he was swinging a broadsword — short, blunt, punchy — and Chenevert has the good sense not to get in the way of that.
I've heard him take the same restraint into weirder material, like Mr. Spaceship, where letting the prose carry itself also turned out to be the right call.The production is clean. No weird audio artifacts, no background hum, no jarring cuts. For what amounts to a micro-length recording of a pulp short story, the technical quality is surprisingly tidy.
But here's the honest tension with 24 minutes: you barely have time to settle into a narrator's rhythm before it's over. By the time you've adjusted your headphones and found the right volume, Conan's already squaring up with the frost giant. Some listeners called this "too short," which is a funny complaint about a short story being... short. But I get the feeling behind it. You want more. Howard died at 30 and left us wanting more of everything he touched.
Start Somewhere Else, Come Back Here Later
If you've never read Howard, do NOT start here. This is a decent appetizer but a terrible introduction to what the man could actually do. Go find "The Tower of the Elephant" or "Queen of the Black Coast" first — those stories show Howard operating with room to breathe, building atmosphere and stakes that this little vignette just doesn't have space for. Shadows in Zamboula scratches that same itch — fuller, darker Howard where the plot actually breathes — and it's another short sit if your free time is as fragmented as mine. Come back to "Gods of the North" once you're already hooked.
But if you're already a Conan fan filling gaps in your listening library? Or a DM hunting for encounter inspiration? This is genuinely useful. The Atali encounter — mysterious supernatural woman luring a warrior across a frozen waste into an ambush by her giant father — is a ready-made session template. I'm absolutely stealing it for my next campaign. The whole structure maps onto a skill challenge so cleanly it's almost suspicious.
Also: if you just need something to fill a very specific 24-minute window in your life — waiting for food, cooling down after a run, avoiding your thesis for a precisely measured amount of time that you can technically justify — this fits that slot perfectly.
Twenty-Four Minutes I Can't Blame on Sanderson
Pure pulp sword-and-sorcery, no fat, no subplots, no filler. It's the fantasy equivalent of a shot of espresso — intense, gone fast, and you either want another or you're wondering what the fuss was about. At 24 minutes, even Dr. Patel can't hold this one against me. Probably.
