01 Storm Lord [Mass Market Paperback]

This is one of Lee's earlier works, less experimental than many of her later books but a great read. This is good old-fashioned storytelling at its finest, in which the goal of the writer is to keep readers glued to the page, and Storm Lord does. The hero Raldnor is born the rightful heir to the Storm Lord's throne. (In this novel the youngest, not the oldest, son is legal heir because of a belief that a son still in the womb at the time of the Storm Lord's death will be born with the reincarnated soul of the old Storm Lord.) But because his mother is a woman of a despised and subjugated race, she is put out of the way by the old Storm Lord's wife who wants her own infant son to ascend the throne. Raldnor is believed dead and grows up knowing only that he is a half-breed, with the dark skin and eyes of his father and his mother's tell-tale blonde hair. He dyes his hair black and takes service as one of the Storm Lord's soldiers. When he rises to become his half-brother's trusted right-hand man (and his only real friend), his identity is discovered and the rest of the book unfolds in a complex pattern of fate, treachery, passion, and revenge. Tanith Lee's sense of irony elevates Storm Lord well above the usual run of sword-and-sorcery; most of them don't contain anything like the emotional intensity found here. I wish this book hadn't gone out of print! But trust me, it's worth tracking down.

Tanith Lee is a very diverse writer, who has worked with a variety of styles and genres over the years. Pretty much the only thing that you can count on in her works is that the descriptions will be lush and that there will be a thread of darkness that runs throughout.

The Storm King is an early Lee novel (1976) that opens up a three book series called the Novels of Vis. It tells the story of a war between two human races that is fought through the agency of two half-brothers and their respective Gods.

If you are familiar with Lee as a writer, you might think of this book as a combination between the Flat Earth books and the stand alone novel A Heroine of the World. Lee combines much of the mythology and magic of Flat Earth with a strong focus on politics and characters.

This combination is not always hugely successful. While the first half of the novel is compelling, and moves swiftly, the second half is bogged down by a multitude of place names and characters. Unfortunately, a number of the characters have similar sounding names so that when they reappear, the reader is really forced back into the pages to check who it was again.

Fans of Lee should enjoy the book. It seems a promising start to the series and a nice variation on a theme. I would direct readers new to Lee toward the Flat Earth books as I still find them to be her strongest novels.

I will preface this by saying that Tanith Lee is my favorite author and I love her young adult literature (i.e. Unicorn Trilogy, East of Midnight, Claidi) as well as some of her adult science fiction offerings (i.e. Biting the Sun, Day by Night); these books are some of my all-time favorites. I was initially excited to learn that Lee has written over 80 novels and counting, but a couple years and numerous Lee novels later, I've found she's written easily half as much dross as real works of genius.

I picked up The Wars of Vis duology hoping it would be the latter, hyped up to read a good, thick royal intrigue ancient world fantasy. I'm beginning to think Tanith Lee can't write a decent ancient world fantasy, because I'm about 130 pages in and the story feels real flat to me. I don't know what it is. Is it the writing? No, can't be, Tanith Lee is capable of some powerful imagery. Is it the subject matter? No, I love mythology and fantasies set in ancient times.

Is it the fact that the women are (as per usual in ancient world fantasies) not strong enough to think for
themselves? Yes, there is that (the notable exception being the evil queen Val Mala, though there's not much depth beneath her cruelty.) Val Mala was quite frankly more interesting than our first heroine Ashne'e, who as usual for Tanith-Lee-at-her-worst did nothing but act like a mentally challenged puppet of those
who pushed her about.

Is it the fact that none of the characters show any real personality? Yes...YES! That's definitely it. A lot
of lush description, a lot of people, a lot of intrigue, and I don't know who I'm rooting for. The bad guys
are vile and the heroes even worse. There's a lot of royal corruption but no emotion to balance it out.
Narrated in such a stiff distant impersonal way that I don't really care about anyone. Not to mention the
main character (a sword-and-sworcery-with-a-royal-past-destined-to-become-a-hero male) is typical of the genre too. And don't get me started on the violence against women that seems to happen in every chapter without any authorial didactic purpose or repercussion--and our hero has a hand in some of the rape too...

In short, then, it's an unholy cross between Flat Earth and Conan the Barbarian. Don't laugh, it's not at all
funny when you're reading the thing. (Well, kind of.) I really had no idea what I was getting into. The Storm Lord was written very early in Tanith Lee's career (70's) when this kind of pulp fiction Sword and Sorcery fantasy was a heady genre all its own. I tend to scoff at fantasy authors who write a genre without at least trying to add anything new to it. Conan the
Barbarian? Fine. Make FUN of the convention or...something. Instead we get glorification of the stereotypical unrealistic muscle man, and hey why not, let him have his women too, that's all they're good for anyway, right?

I never knew why a lot of magazines' cliche lists have something alone the lines of: "We
don't want to see stories where there's a muscle-and-sword hero who is forced, by natural or supernatural
circumstances, to rape a woman, even though he really didn't want to, REALLY." Now I do. Please don't
tell me people READ this stuff as standard fantasy fare in the 70's? And that there are reviewers on Amazon
who say it's written in the good old style of fantasy back when fantasies were just diverting stories with no real psychology or intellect behind them. Umm...substance? Maybe college ruined me.

Author Robin McKinley writes on her webpage that she wrote her strong-heroine fantasies because she was sick of reading the standard fare in the genre where there were no strong females; I assumed she was talking about Lord of the Rings and the like. I didn't know why she always has this rant in her blog posts (and sometimes in her actual books by way of a joke) about the typical muscle-bound sword-wielding Hercules who carries off the woman whether she wants to or not.

I repeat: Now I do.

Okay okay...why am I telling you all this? Maybe to spare you so you don't waste your time on trash that really
isn't entertaining. The book is now out of print and reviews are few and far between. Read the positive ones by all means, read the negative ones, and decide whether you want to expend the time and money tracking this fossil down. Be forewarned, it adds nothing new either to the Sword and Sorcery Pulp Fiction subgenre or to the fantasy genre as a whole, and it is not written in an engaging style that makes you care for the characters.