White Serpent, The

Rating:
Summary: Definitely not one of Lee's great works
Review: I had high hopes for this book before I read it, because I knew it was a sequel to Storm Lord and Anackire, two stand-alone fantasy novels that made me a Tanith Lee fan forever. Unfortunately it's nowhere near as good and I got the impression Lee wasn't sure herself where she was going with this one. All the previous characters are long dead. The new main character is a descendant of the Storm Lord's wicked half-brother, who goes through various traumas and disasters including his fatal fixation on a pale enigmatic woman who is apparently the white serpent of the title. The plot events seem disconnected from each other somehow and in the end the hero meets a depressing and puzzling fate. The viewpoint skips disconcertingly from character to character, but not in a way that enhances suspense, and the emotional and mythic intensity of Anackire is lacking. At no point did I really understand why any of the characters were doing what they did. Unlike some of Lee's stranger works, such as Book of the Damned, where the writing is clearly intended to be surreal as a vivid dream, White Serpent just comes off as vague and unfocused. Unless you're such a hardcore Tanith Lee fan that you want to own everything she's written for the sake of completeness, don't bother tracking this one down; it's not worth it.