A novella, it was originally serialized in Weird Tales magazine from July to October 1936. It is set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and concerns Conan encountering a lost city in which the degenerate inhabitants are proactively resigned to their own destruction.

One of the strangest stories ever written -- the tale of a barbarian adventurer, a woman pirate and a weird roofed city inhabited by the most peculiar race of men ever spawned! That was the Weird Tales editor's original terse blurb for this story's magazine publication. (There was another, longer less coherent, but it wouldn't fit here on the back cover.) Death! Decay! Red Nails really is something special. It's classic Conan! Conan lovers consider Red Nails to be one of the best, and you know, they make a point.