Piers Anthony

This is not your average Piers Anthony book. Those who picked this up because they read the Xanth books or Apprentice Adept series might be confused and ultimately disappointed. I would liken this book more to Dean Koontz or Stephen King (the cover blurb even mentions the latter author, which was helpful for me knowing what I was getting into, but might not be present on other editions).
Recent widower Joshua Pinson inherits a house in rural Florida from an eccentric uncle. He moves his two show more children and various pets to this place for a change of pace and recovery from their mother’s death. However, almost immediately, very strange events begin to occur and it’s possible that there’s something sinister at work in the vicinity.
The cause of these events was pretty immediately obvious to this reader, so it was a bit frustrating that the characters were so obtuse about it. Joshua himself has no belief in anything that can’t be logically and scientifically explained, and even after he personally witnesses something for which Occam’s Razor would suggest the supernatural, he’s still trying to rationalize. Long-time residents of the area, even and especially ones who seem intelligent also fail to add up the obvious clues to the origins of the spectral happenings.
However, even with that criticism, I found I was unable to put the book down. Anthony creates such complex and relatable characters, even including brief paragraphs told from the minds of the pets (I was preoccupied for quite some time with the humans continual neglect of their fish, although I’m not sure it was intentional for me to be, it may be Anthony forgot to mention their being fed, or maybe we were supposed to assume..).
The writing was excellent for genre prose, with superlative vocabulary usage and sentence structure. The pacing was quite suspenseful and nothing unnecessary to moving the plot forward seemed to be included. I found that since I wasn’t much curious about the central “mystery” of the novel, I was more fascinated by guessing characters’ reactions, motivations, and ultimate fates. (I can tell you the eventual new romantic partner in Joshua’s life was not the one I expected!)
In other books I have read by this author, it seems Anthony displays a rather problematic view of women, and this is no different, but if one is aware of his particular failing, it can be overlooked for the enjoyment of the story.
Overall, a pretty worthwhile book to have read, but not one I would stridently recommend. show less

I only have a couple of the Incarnations of Immortality series, because it is a wildly uneven series as a whole (Anthony, predictably, can't write female protagonists worth a damn, and the one about Time is straight out of pulp space opera for no obvious reason) and this was #3 on my list of the three that I can stand.

It's kind of awful. But first, the good bits:

1. This book was totally the reason I bought a translation of The Book of Five Rings at age 12, and that is a profound and show more fascinating work that I still deeply value.

2. ...ummm. Apparently there is no 2.

As usual, the book opens with a lengthy analysis of how attractive the protagonist is to women of all kids. Verdict: irresistible. Nevertheless, he is only attracted to the pure and virginal woman, who promptly spreads her legs for him because he's so awesome. However, she turns out to be nothing more than a minor plot device and promptly disappears offscreen so she can be the longed-for Lost Love for a chapter or two, until...

Mym gets shipped off to the Honeymoon Castle at the behest of his father (who murders women callously to prove a point, namely, that women are worthless interchangeable tokens and the fact that Mym feels bad about this is Weak and Unmanly.) Now, the Honeymoon Castle is actually an interesting device - it's set up so that a) people residing there can hear each other's thoughts and b) they are forced to interact to eat, sleep, or bathe, presumably so proximity will make them fall in love. This of course leads to numerous descriptions of Mym's arranged bride's physical assets, and the various scary things that chase her into his arms whenever they try to rebel firmly establish that while she is intelligent, she is entirely spineless. This is held up as an ideal - in fact, it's why she's a better match than the Blessed Virgin in the opening sequence, because independence is a negative trait in a woman.

Look, it only goes downhill from there, and frankly I'm tired of responding to this appalling crap. On a Pale Horse at least had the redeeming aspect of some relatively serious thoughts about the nature of end-of-life care - this has some lukewarm apologia for War that it's clear the author himself doesn't even really believe. So there's no moral core, and the book is entirely about Mars finding a suitably tractable (and royal, don't forget for a second that he's a prince) mate AND concubine, because obviously his royal prerogative requires both. I'm not even going to get into the confusingly terrible characterization of modern-day India as Generic Fantasy Kingdom #248, Where Everyone Has Long Descriptors Instead of Names.

Skip it. Just... skip it. show less

Continuing my rereads of Piers Anthony novels that I now suspect I really don't want to own...

It's a thoughtful book in many ways. There are some compelling arguments for a right to a chosen death, and I suspect it shaped much of my thinking on legal euthanasia. And the near-future magic-and-science world he describes definitely has its charms. But these positives are now, for me, vastly outweighed by the negatives of the rampant sexism that I just can't overlook anymore.

On a Pale Horse show more opens, in finest Anthony tradition, with two men dickering using a woman as currency. She is literally just a bargaining chip - we never learn anything of her personality, only that she's pretty, rich, and will apparently fall for just anyone. This didn't appall me when I was ten, but it certainly does now. The main female character, Luna, is disposed of in exactly the same way - as a bargaining chip, with no real agency of her own. She's intelligent, which makes her scenes marginally less icky, but only marginally - she's introduced to the protagonist nude, offers to ensorcel herself so that she would find sleeping with him palatable, reveals that she "fornicated with a demon of hell" (which gives the protagonist some pause, because she's not "pure" anymore) and is generally described whenever she's on-scene as a particularly tasty morsel.

There's also constant and tedious gender stereotyping, culminating in a scene that startled and confused even me as a kid, where Anthony explains that an adult woman sleeping with a ten-year-old boy was only wrong because society made him feel guilty about it - otherwise, being male, he'd be totally willing and thrilled.

This is not a totally fair review. I really did like this book when I was a kid, and I can still see why. But there are things I can't stomach anymore, and this book is full of them. show less

I have no idea how to review this book. Let me start by recognizing how incredibly misogynistic it is. I want to praise certain things about the world, but I want the main takeaway of this review to be that the entirety of this book hates and devalues women. It is awful, sometimes shocking, and, honestly, it was a little depressing to realize that this was a childhood classic for a generation of people, at least based on the other reviews I glanced through before reading. The main character show more is detestable, instantly, on page two. At least I cannot say I wasn't aware of what I was getting into.

At many points I considered abandoning this book, but I kept on because it is short, because I already have the sequel, and because I was curious as to whether the main character would undergo some growth throughout the story. Well, to illustrate exactly how that did not happen, I have pulled a selection of quotes, equally spaced throughout the novel, presented below. I will leave this section of my review with the strongest recommendation that you do not give or recommend this book to anyone in your life, especially if they are children, especially if you remember loving it as a kid but haven't revisited it, and especially if you want that person to hold anything resembling a basic respect for women and girls.

Quotes:

"Other girls managed to enhance their appearance by cosmetics or padding or specialized spells, but beside Sabrina all other females looked somewhat artificial." - Bink's internal thoughts, page 2

"How could she avoid being seductive? She was a creature constructed for no other visible purpose than ra---than love." - I don't feel context is required for this one, page 57

"'It can all be yours,' she said. The alluring fourteen-year-old reappeared. 'No other woman can make this promise.'
Bink was suddenly, forcefully tempted." - Iris, shapeshifting to seduce Bink, who is 25, almost succeeds while in the form of a 14 year old, page 98

"It figured. She had said he wouldn't believe her reasons, and he had believed the first one, so she wouldn't tell him the other. Typically female logic." - Bink's internal thoughts on Fanchon, page 175, included mostly for this particular tone, which is pervasive in the book

"Bink was impressed again with her intelligence. Every time he caught her doing something stupid, it turned out to be the opposite." - Bink's internal thoughts, page 210

"Bink suspected Milly would turn out to be a rather pretty girl, and he wondered just how she had died. A liaison with a castle guest, then a stabbing by the jealous wife who discovered them?" - Bink's internal thoughts, concerning a ghost in a castle, who is steadily becoming more visible, page 259

"He obviously had no emotional attachment to the Sorceress, and shared a masculine appreciation for the insulting pause Bink had made. Iris had, just now, shown them all how ready she was to sell her illusion-enhanced body for power." - Bink's internal thoughts, following his insult calling Iris "sluttish", page 301

"'That's good,' Trent said gravely. 'Now put on your pretty face; we are entertaining company.'" - Trent telling Iris, who he holds complete control over through physical threat, to use illusion, page 343

Also, it turns out after that exercise of pulling quotes, where I'm afraid I did not even scratch the surface of what I found issue with within this book, I do not actually want to praise certain things about the world, as previously stated. I just want to move on to better books. show less