Dave Langford reviewed
The Hounds of the Morrigan for
White Dwarf #93, calling it "A little kitchen-sinkish in its determined ransacking of Irish myth, but fun for young and old alike." ‘’The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books’’ at the
University of Chicago said that "The prose is rather relentlessly ornamented, but the images are always concrete and, like the narrative, have vigorous strength." Imogen Russell Williams, writing in
The Guardian nearly 30 years after the book's publication, described it as "a bravura feat of writing ... Its impossibly delicate balance of surreal humour and evoked beauty, knowledge, fearfulness, joy, and courage have never been bettered". Joanne Hall, in
Fantasy Faction, identified "a level of darkness in the book that would be surprising in a contemporary children’s novel ... one of the most unsettling sequences in the book occurs when the fleeing children are trapped inside the Morrigan’s giant thumbprint, a maze lined with nauseating blisters of sweat where nothing can live". ==Influence on other writers==