The Storm Lord

by Tanith Lee

Book Overview

A recognized master fantasist, Tanith Lee has won multiple awards for her craft, including the British Fantasy Award, the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and the Bram Stoker Award for... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0756411173
• ISBN13: 9780756411176
• Release Date: July 2017
• Publisher: Daw Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 4.3" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Enjoyable but feels more like a Howard imitation than a Tanith Lee book

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.

First book in the Novels of Vis-- three-and-a-half stars

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.

A superior sword-and-sorcery novel

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.