Almost any fantasy focusing on a quest borrows from Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485), which recounts the Knights of the Round Table's quest for the Holy Grail. Major elements are travels through strange lands, deceptions by sorcerers and witches, heroic combat, political intrigue, sexual infidelity, and the search for a noble ideal. L. Sprague de Camp includes these elements in The Goblin Tower, although as a twentieth-century author he takes a more cynical view of them. For instance, the combat is rough, cruel, and crude, lacking highminded knight errantry and outsized heroism.

De Camp's sword-and-sorcery tales owe much to Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories. Howard's work has a fevered intensity, with sex imbuing nearly every scene with emotional power. Sex is seldom far from Jorian, but the style of The Goblin Tower is more refined than that of Howard's Conan tales. De Camp's work is the...