Conan the Indomitable

Plot

Conan and his companion Elashi stumble on a stranger underground realm inhabited by blind apes, one-eyed monsters and giant worms in thrall to a witch and warlock. Their coming upsets the local balance of power. Various complications ensue, including a revolt of the enslaved creatures and the necessity of slaying their masters, before Conan can win his way back to the surface world. One of the cyclops and worms are featured sympathetically in a subplot.

Chronology

Internal evidence indicates that Perry's earlier Conan work Conan the Defiant directly precedes this novel, though in the comprehensive Conan chronology of William Galen Gray, Sean A. Moore's Conan the Hunter is placed between the two books.

Reception

Writing on one of Perry's other novels, reviewer Ryan Harvey assessed the author's Conan corpus as "goofy", noting that he "has a reputation among Conan fandom for overkill and general silliness."

Reviewer Lagomorph Rex finds the novel "bad, really bad ... one of the worst books I have ever read ... I can't even rate this one with a star and be honest." He notes that "[t]he whole book is filled with bizarre stuff, beyond the Fishboat.. the[re']s the Harskeel, and Lalo the cursed, Sexual Plants, talking worms, spiders and bats.. a cavern society of Cyclopses... all of this makes the much maligned Satyrs in Conan the Liberator seem downright normal." "Perry has introduced a huge number of Sapient species into the Conan Mythos which REH never even hinted at, and with the rate that all these various animals can talk it is beginning to feel a lot like a Disney movie." In a somewhat more favorable review of its sequel, Conan the Free Lance, the reviewer writes that this book's "only purpose was to clutter up Conan's route to Zamora, and roughly provide a way to mostly get through the mountains."