This book was okay, it had a few problematic bits and some interesting ideas in it. However, it was long and seemed overwritten. Uninteresting characters had conversations that went on for pages where they could have been edited way down. The book (actually an omnibus of two novels) was very Tolkienesque.
The main character, Hiero Desteen, spent a lot of time wandering around the world. This too seemed to take too long and introduced in several places creatures and monsters that resulted in nothing. Another weakness was that the author kept introducing new types of mutants instead of trying to build on a few. I wanted to know more about the Howlers and especially the Gliths. The two Gliths, one in each novel, are summarily killed and the Howlers are essentially orcs.
There were good ideas in here though such as the House, a titanic skyscraper-sized psychic mutant fungus colony that had the drive to grow over the entire face of the world. The Unclean, a brotherhood of psychic mutants controlling the other mutant types, trying to seek this thing out and then getting lead back into this thing was a plot point that I thought was clever.
The problematic elements were, fortunately, few but still unwelcome. The first was the age of the heroin and love-interest who is described as a girl which does not stop the protagonist from bedding her. In the second novel, her age is specified as seventeen. Another troublesome incident occurs when the girl-love-interest essentially prostitutes Hiero out to a bird-woman-mutant (a people that seemed to be at least somewhat modeled after elves) for a necklace which is glossed over as he found her strangely attractive anyway. He had been drugged during the encounter. The last was simply a sexist crack at a "pretty" military officer on the eve of battle.
The problematic bits aside, the book was okay. The battles were sometimes good but not that exciting, I've read better. The two novels, especially the first, could stand to be shorter and more to the point as the plots are not that complex. My final complaint is that the second novel leaves a major revelation about the main character wide open. It seems these two novels were a part of a trilogy but the third book never materialized, at least here anyway.
Would I recommend this book? Not really unless you were really hurting for some far-flung post-apocalypse swords and psionics adventure fiction. Otherwise, I think the reader might get bogged down in endless world-building tangents and dull conversations. ( )