Reception
Publishers Weekly briefly noted the appearance of the Tor hardcover, commenting that it offered "more dramatic adventures of Robert E. Howard's blue-eyed, broad-shoulder, sword-wielding hero" with "an epic battle" ensuing in the spider-god's temple.
Ryan Harvey, in a more in-depth review, considers de Camp "a fine writer, but ... not adept at sword and sorcery." He takes issue with "de Camp's ... rationalized approach to Conan's barbarism," in which "Conan spends a great deal of time thinking and reasoning through problems and speculating on choices," which "deprives the character of his primal instinctiveness and makes him seem inordinately civilized." He also feels that "the action stalls when Conan arrives in the city of Yezud and stays there," after which "the story turns into an unconnected array of scenes of characters milling about in taverns and arguing. Conan has murky motivations, and therefore the plot never moves along a direct or interesting line of action." Harvey also scores de Camp for his use of "plot tokens" and "overtaxed faux archaic prose." On the plus side, he notes that "he long-foreshadowed encounter with the super spider does have a feverish intensity" but "it fails to build to the proper conclusion," and "he finale of the novel whimpers to a close."
Reviewer Lagomorph Rex finds the novel "pretty bad ... not Steve Perry bad, but ... not really even up to DeCamp's normal standards." He feels "Conan acts nearly completely out of character during this entire book" and considers it ike most of DeCamp's pastiches ... really ... just ... very mediocre." Elsewhere he calls it "one of the more atrocious of the novels I've ... read."
Read more about this topic: Conan And The Spider God
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