Jordan's novel is an adequate entertainment grounded in the Conan property. A youngish Conan goes to Vendhya (the Hyborian Age version of East India) in search of revenge and a cure for a poison he's been afflicted with. Savagery, seductresses, and sorcery ensue.

More curious is the appendix "Conan the Indestructible" by L. Sprague de Camp, which is a thirty-page attempt to construct an integral Conan biography or comprehensive narrative continuity that embraces all of the original Howard stories, the early Carter and de Camp pastiches, the Bantam Conan novels (Offutt, Wagner, de Camp, and Anderson), the Tor Conan books (Jordan, to that point) and even the movie novelizations. It has a few hilarious little passages of mock-scholarship, as it adheres throughout to the conceit that these are genuine legends of pre-antiquity, attested through ancient texts.