McIntyre's writing was highlighted by several reviewers. The "Santa Cruz Sentinel" described the book as a "truly mesmerizing story", while Sally Estes of the American Library Association called it "gripping", and the "Cincinnati Enquirer" described it as among the year's "most sensitively-written and poetic novels". Le Guin praised "Dreamsnake", describing it as "a book like a mountain stream—fast, clean, clear, exciting, beautiful". Writing in 2011, she elaborated: ""Dreamsnake" is written in a clear, quick-moving prose, with brief, lyrically intense landscape passages that take the reader straight into its half-familiar, half-strange desert world, and fine descriptions of the characters’ emotional states and moods and changes." In 1981 science fiction scholar Marshall Tymn commented that it was the "poetically negotiable authenticity" of Snake's adventure that made the book successful, and that it was an enduring work among those that had won Hugo and Nebula awards. A 2012 review in "The Guardian" called it a "challenging, unsettling book", and said that McIntyre's fictional world was "expertly drawn".