At this point complaining about the quality of Lin Carter’s fiction is beating a dead horse. Some of it is better than others. I happen to think his ersatz Dunsany is excellent. But in general, if you pick up a Carter book you know what you’re getting. Complaining about it is like going to Taco Bell and being disappointed with the food; you knew what you were going to get when you ordered it.
And I got exactly what I expected from The Wizard of Lemuria. Had I started reading with high expectations, I would not have enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. Carter dishes up a barbarian buffet taken straight from institutional-sized cans of generic grub. Northern barbarian with a black mane of hair? Check. Mercenary? Check. Heist in a tower? Check. Giant serpents? Check. Magic sword? Check. Beautiful princess? Check. Gladiatorial arena fight? Check. Carter gleefully cherry-picks all the good stuff, slots one item into each ten page chapter, ties it all together with a world-saving plot driven by a helpful wizard and a handy-dandy flying machine to zip the hero about the map to hack up the bad guys. There you go; we’ve got a tight-paced, fast read: a dollar-meal of a novel.
It worked for me. You can’t always sit down for a nice dinner; sometimes you have a craving to hit the drive through.
If any of this is making you hungry to read, why not pick up something of mine? The four books of the Semi-Autos and Sorcery series ought to tide you over for a while.