Customer Reviews

The Storm Lord

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

The only reason I was able to finish this book was because it had great descriptions of the world the characters resided in. This was what enthralled me with the book. But otherwise the story was flat.

MK you are absolutely right! This story was flat and unengaging. I cared nothing for the principals and it didn't help that Lee kept shifting her viewpoint characters. As an unpublished writer even I know that it is bad form to constantly shift viewpoints. Yannul was a good minor character, but when Lee shifted to Orvan and Xaros she went too far in my opinion. Then there was the problem with Raldnor. When he wasn't sexually assaulting women he was alone brooding by himself or seducing women until the very end of the novel where he practically disappears for the last 20% of the book only then to be described via third person! What is going on? Thus the tenuous bond I'd gained with the protagonist from the beginning of the novel is fractured.

MK you are right about the dearth of personality exhibited by the characters. The rape scenes seemed to have no real purpose in the novel and did not drive the plot. Frankly, I was quite surprised to be reading this from a female writer. Even John Norman in his Gor series was not as explicit concerning language and description of sexual violence. Yes, the women are all damsels in distress and seem to be helpless and subservient to men. That in itself is no real big deal, and is a staple of the genre (See/Read GRR Martin's Award Winning A Song Of Ice & Fire). Nevertheless, unlike Martin and others, Lee does not succesfully convey the emotions of the characters. As a result, we as readers don't care about them.

MK you are right again about the lack of entertainment this book provides. In fact, I had been prepared to give it a three star review until the last 25 pages of the novel. The third person descriptions of battles, character motivations and all around actions dropped the quality of the novel another notch for me.

I give the book two stars (Instead Of One) because of the world Tanith Lee created. Things were so interesting! Lowlanders vs Highlanders of Koramvis- Highlanders vs Thanddorians, etc. The Zakorian Pirates were also of great interest to me as was their city Hanassor, a highly original abode I've only seen in one or two other fantasy settings. It's a pity she did not build more on these ideas.

I will say this, however: I like Sword & Sorcery novels and the Sword & Planet genres too. The idea of a muscle-bound hero carrying off the damsel in distress interests me much. I just don't like to see the hero commit violence against the lady. Call me macho, but I feel the man/men should protect the women, not oppress them. Unfortunately this book is not interesting even for what it is. This is a shame, because there is so much more that Tanith Lee could have done with the book and I feel it languished as a result of either her inexperience at the time or her inattention to details. Maybe the later books in the series improve. I'll get back to you when and if I read them.

A. Nathaniel Wallace, Jr

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.

Tanith Lee is my favorite writer, but every once in a while she publishes some monstrously tedious book like this one. This book is really The Birthgrave with a male for the main character, chronicling the adventures of an angry foundling of mixed descent who discovers he is really the rightful king o' the land. I just hate it when she redoes the same old story again.

This book begins like a Tanith Lee book, with many mysterious characters stabbing each other in the back. It even gets better once Rehgor grows up and starts serving his half-brother (unknowing) who wants to destroy Rehgor's people, but somewhere in the middle it begins to fade into a standard sword and sorcery fantasy. And while those are fun, there's only one Robert Howard.

However there are enough Lee elements to this book to keep her diehard readers entertained. It's just a little too derivative to recommend wholeheartedly.

Usually I love Tanith Lee books. So when this book started out with a rape scene, I kept reading, thinking it would get better. But not long after that was another rape scene, and then another, with different characters. Rape is the worst thing you can do to a human being, and while I think it is permissable to have it occur in a story, it is not at all okay to use it as sex scenes and glorify it. I became so furious with the book that I ripped it to shreds.

I'm really appalled that Tanith would write such a disgusting and perverted book -- but she has written other books that are amazingly wonderful, so don't let this review turn you off of her writing completely.