I have previously enjoyed books by this author but sadly this wasn't one of them. The story starts off with a situation which, although it eventually provides the driving point of the novel (as it shows us how the book's anti-hero is conceived and preserved to fulfil his destiny) succeeds in killing off, or driving off stage for most of the story, almost every character featured in the first few chapters. The style of the story features constant head-hopping between characters within a scene and so there are multiple viewpoints, but as soon as the reader becomes used to a character they are rapidly killed off.

The story is set on a planet where at least some of the inhabitants are subjected to irrestible sexual urges during the appearance of a certain star - cue several instances in the story of rape, which is usually "enjoyed" by the victims. The first, however, is not - the tyrannical Storm Lord, on progress through the Lowlands where the downtrodden white skinned race live, has a woman brought to his tent to fulfil his urges during the star's rising. She supposedly kills him through some strange sex magic (when really he has been poisoned by his councillor at the behest of his nasty wife the Queen). The woman is taken back to the city as the odd inheritance laws mean that the last child conceived during the star's rising becomes the Storm Lord's heir so if the Lowland woman is pregnant with a son, the child would supplant the Queen's own unborn child.

The Queen of course arranges for slow poison to be fed to her "rival" which will cause premature labour, and demands from her lady in waiting that she murder the child and bring her its little finger as proof. The unwilling lady learns that the Lowlander - whose people have a kind of telepathy - is aware of everything. The child's mother then cuts off her son's finger to be taken as proof. She then asks the lady in waiting to get him to safety while knowing she faces death.

A sequence follows where various people are killed off, including the lady in waiting, and the baby is taken in and raised by Lowlanders. Because he was found with the body of a woman of the ruling Vis race, it is assumed - given his Lowlander physical traits such as light hair and eyes - that he is of mixed race, but that his mother was Vis and his father a Lowlander not the true reversal of that. He eventually becomes a soldier and gravitates to the service of the Storm Lord, the Queen's grown son, and the story follows his career and his eventual raising of a force to rebel against the Storm Lord's growing tyranny and active genocide of the Lowlander peoples.

I found this rather a hard slog. The head-hopping didn't help but I didn't like many of the characters. There are a few minor ones who seem to be sympathetic - people the hero meets during a sojourn in a ruined city of the Lowlanders, for example - but they are soon killed off or leave the stage rapidly in other ways. Many characters have similar names and it is hard to keep track: much later in the story, a friend of the hero's meets a slave called Rem. It took ages for me to remember that he was the young man in the ruined city who loves a frail young girl who - during a rising of the star - the hero rapes and who soon afterward meets her death. He blames the hero and later conspires against him. But the hero's success is preordained and it becomes even less interesting when he has an encounter with a mystic priesthood and awakens godlike qualities in himself, involving mass telepathy, which soon have the Lowlanders raised from their apathy into a murderous cold rage against their former oppressors.

I can see that the reversal of having the people in charge as dark-skinned races, and the oppressed as white, was a reversal many decades before the 'Noughts and Crosses' series, but in this case it comes across as rather dodgily stereotypical, especially given the susceptibility of the Vis to the star's influence to which the Lowlanders, who have a low sex drive, are immune. Just about every woman in the story is portrayed either as a whore/sex slave or a victim, with the only exception, the Queen, being a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Very few of the characters are really characters at all: they are one dimensional cutouts. There are some lush descriptive passages so I have awarded this a 2 star rating when it is rather more of a 1.5 stars.

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This review and others posted over at my blog.

I don’t even know how to blurb this book because my eyes were so glazed over by the end that I had no clue what was going on. I was interested, at first, in the world building and the plot. However, the bland characters and convoluted political and religious intrigues lost me by the end.

Raldnor, the lead character, is totally unlikable. But not in the anti-hero way; he’s just an entitled prick. All the women in this book are either evil, sexual objects, or a mix of both. This was surprising coming from Tanith! I’ve encountered this often in vintage sci-fi, but usually from men. It was disappointing to find the stereotypes hold true from a female writer. There are three main love interests for Raldnor, plus a wicked queen type and they’re all basically just sex toys for the men in their lives. There’s rape early on, which seemed like it was there solely for shock-value. The main love interest for Raldnor, Astaris, is literally just beautiful. She has no personality and I’m not sure how they fell in love. In the end (minor spoiler alert!) she actually turns into a statue and there’s no difference between that and when she was alive.

Something compelled me to keep reading, but I’m not sure what. Raldnor succeeds in everything he does and has no likable traits. There’s a really long sea journey and battle and political coup that did nothing for me and I think could have been cut. There’s a weird star that comes around every so often (Zastis, or something) and it makes some of the people of the world really horny? I didn’t see the point of that either. Oh and also the “repressed” and downtrodden race were a people with light skin and bleach blonde hair (despite living in what seemed like a desert or grasslands, so I’d think they’d be tanned) and those in power were “dark skinned” with black hair. I assume Tanith was trying to switch things on their head but it didn’t feel progressive or empowering – especially because the white race takes control of the land in the end.

I kept thinking things would get better or Raldnor would develop some personality traits other than “strong, sexy man” and “chosen one.” I mean, his mother worshipped a snake goddess (who I thought was going to actually appear as a living being in the story and sadly didn’t) and killed his father with some sort of secret sex trick. I expected something cool or intriguing, but the book didn’t deliver. ( )

I vastly enjoy this fantasy. It is the apogee of Tanith Lee, in my opinion, and is the perfect blend of romance and intrigue with adequate violence thrown in. The world creation is a little weak, but it takes a reread before this reader recognized that was so sketchy. So it's a marvellous entertainment, and I regret the book is apparently little known. ( )

This sword-and-sorcery novel from early in Tanith Lee's oeuvre is epic in every sense of the word, occupying a sort of strange space between classical tragedy and fairy tale, but closer to the former than the latter. It has far more in common with Robert E. Howard's Hyborian tales than with The Lord of the Rings or Dunsany's fantasies. The characters are all human (although with powers sometimes surpassing the humans of our disenchanted world), and the trivially exotic nature of the fauna (equestrians ride "zeebas") may be a function of an extraterrestrial setting: "The city lay on the foothills ... her ancestry a charred place where the Storm gods had come out of heaven, riding in the bellies of pale dragons" (21).

There are numerous human races, of which the most important to the story are the Vis -- the dominating race of the empire ruled by the Storm Lord who supplies the book with its title -- and the "lowlanders." These latter are serfs, hereditary worshipers of a serpent goddess, telepathic, and pale where the Vis are dark. The Storm Lord holds his office by birthright under a rule of ultimogeniture, which succession gives the book its initial layer of plot, but there are many others besides.

There is, in fact, a particular Howard story that I think merits comparison to The Storm Lord. It is the excellent "A Witch Shall Be Born," with its royal intrigue, biblical resonances, and the way that it elegantly telescopes what could be the plot of a hefty novel into twenty-odd pages. Just so, The Storm Lord has enough plot for four or five novels, but it doesn't feel rushed, just very full. Lee wrote two more books in "The Wars of Vis" to further detail the history of this particular world, and they must be worth reading, if they are half as good as this one.

If the cover didn't tip me off, the first part of the book sealed the deal: this is not a feminist tome. :) A priestess is abducted, raped, and killed soon after she gives birth to the king's son. The queen demands that the son be killed to secure her new baby's ascenscion to the throne, but the priestess manages to convince a maid to steal away with the baby, after cutting off his little finger to give to the queen. There's a lot of racism in the world, with the priestess's blonde pale people subjugated by the royal house of dark haired and skinned people. The son in hiding has light hair and dark skin and can't do the mind to mind speaking of his peers in the enslaved race, and he has to disguise himself to advance, and eventually confront the machinations of the royal house. Murder, backstabbing, treason, and women passed around as baby making machines all make this a grim read. But it's well written and epic and only relies on coincidence a few times. ( )