"Viper's Kiss," House of Serpents - Book II: The Trilogy's Darkest Moments
"Viper's Kiss," book 2 in Lisa Smedman's "House of Serpents" trilogy, provides a new setting, new characters, and new challenges for Arvin to maneuver his way through.
In my last book review, I looked back on a novel that was released while I was in high school titled Venom’s Taste, written by Lisa Smedman. I discussed at length how it was I discovered that book and why it hooked me so thoroughly in my senior year. I also discussed how, in May of last year, my wife and I had the pleasure of taking the six hour drive up to Las Vegas to attend the Sick New World music festival. (In reality, the drive up took considerably longer thanks to road work, accidents, and the like.) A good road trip, hell a good drive is something she and I tend to enjoy, (woe betide us when we do thanks to current gas prices) and the shared experience of listening to things like performative podcasts, comedically angled movie breakdowns, and audiobooks is partly why.
Being able to share the first book of the trilogy with her on that trip was something of a chance experience. All three books of the trilogy sit on a small shelf in my office, right next to Richard Lee Byers’ “Red Wizards of Thay” trilogy - another Forgotten Realms trilogy which I’d like to revisit - and the much older and, personally, less impressive “Shandril’s Saga” trilogy by Ed Greenwood, the man who came up with the Forgotten Realms.
Full admission, I found all three “Shandril’s” books - Spellfire, Crown of Fire, and Hand of Fire - in a local Goodwill for 75¢ each back in 2019. My first, and thus far only attempt to read any of them came across four or five sittings with the first book. It was a difficult experience, to say the least, and I only made it through a quarter of the book before I put it down and never went back. In that brief time, we’re thrust into a story that begins by facing threats that would mark the climax of most epic fantasies, complete with a cast of generic adventurers facing off against a dragon lich; (called a dracolich in the book and tabletop game) a main character who gets gifted her magical abilities by forces unknown despite being a 16 year old tavern maid who had no business being anywhere near the action; and at least one instance of the setting’s most renown wizard, Elminster, (folks who’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 will now recognize that name) showing up quite literally out of the blue with no prior warning to destroy this powerful undead dragon with a single spell, only to fuck right off through another blue portal once he’s done so.
I know of people who complained about Gandalf’s deus ex machina moment with the trolls in The Hobbit, but that was always meant as a children’s book which throws back to old legends and myth and generally reads as such. This reads as a Dungeon Master desperate to show off his super cool Original Character (do not steal [yes, I just aped the
]) to save his players from a situation he knew they couldn’t win. Considering one of my complaints about Venom’s Taste was a moment in the latter half of the book that felt too much like we were being fed info from the tabletop game, it’s little wonder that a book that reads like a poorly written direct translation of one of Greenwood’s campaigns didn’t appeal to me. I’d also like to note that while Smedman did have that single gamification stumble in the first book, the quality of the writing was still superior to what the opening chapters of “Shandril’s Saga” provided.But back to the topic at hand. As mentioned, this opportunity to share the first House of Serpents book with my wife was a chance experience. After having listened Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and following that up with The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane and Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian, two collections which compiled all of Robert E. Howard’s published work with those characters, I was in the mood to listen to something familiar. Seeing Smedman’s trilogy on my shelf, I felt the urge to go back to it, just as I had many times throughout my final year in high school and my first few years in college. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult for me to find the time to sit down and actively read a book. I usually find myself in a situation where sitting down to read will inevitably see me interrupted and losing my place and pace, or it’ll come at a time where it’s so late that the low energy act of sitting down to read starts to shut me down, thus causing me to fall asleep and, again, lose my place. So I turned to Audible, just to see if it happened to be there, and wouldn’t you know it? There it was.
Well, after returning to the first book and listening to it in its entirety on that little road trip of ours, I knew I couldn’t leave it at that. The urge to revisit one of my favorite adventures burned too strong, so I snatched up the second and third books as well, then set to listening to them a few weeks later. As one last aside, my wife’s been working her way through the second book for some time now, reading at least a few pages every couple nights before she goes to bed. I’m happy to say she’s been having fun reading “the snake books,” as she likes to call them. So now that the preamble is good and done, let’s take a look at Viper’s Kiss and see if it still holds up.
Picking up a few months after the end of Venom’s Taste, the second book in our series sees thief-turned-mind-mage Arvin finally getting out of Hlondeth, the yuan-ti city where he’s lived as a second class citizen for most of his life. Having trained under an older mind mage named Tanju, himself an agent of Hlondeth’s ruling family, House Extaminos, Arvin finds himself set on a mission that might finally see him free of both Hlondeth’s borders and the Thieves’ Guild which has ruled him for over half his life. His destination is the barony of Sespech to the north, a place that’s one of the rare colder climates in the Vilhon Reach, and one of the few that’s human ruled. Of course, as a man entrenched in the guild, this raises the question of why he’s permitted to go at all. Well, because he’s been tasked by his master Tanju to act as an agent of House Extaminos in his stead. His mission? Aid Sespech’s leader and erstwhile ally of the House, Baron Foesmasher, in finding his missing daughter.
Right out of the gate, Smedman manages numerous achievements with Viper’s Kiss that help to set it apart from the adventure Arvin undertook in Venom’s Taste. In the opening chapter of the book we’re made privy not only to the marked difference in climate between Sespech and Hlondeth, but also how the structures of political power, religious faith, and day to day life differ in the Barony. While still influential, the serpent-like yuan-ti aren’t the ones in power here. For a man like Arvin, who spent his entire life in or around a city where humans are at best second class citizens, the type of place where even a free man could be killed by a yuan-ti for a perceived slight and that wouldn’t ever be questioned, this difference is initially difficult for him to wrap his head around.
The first time the difference between Sespech and Hlondeth starts to sink in is when Arvin spies a bejeweled fountain. The statuary that decorates the fountain is carved in the form of a gauntleted hand decorated with the symbol of an eye and large sapphires adorning it. Given that he’s a member of Hlondeth’s Thieves’ Guild, he’s completely taken aback by the fact that this fountain appears to be wholly untouched. Back home, something this opulent would at least be missing a few jewels. The reason for this becomes clear a bit later, when he sees something that’s completely unthinkable to him. One of the other passengers on the riverboat Arvin took to get into the Barony is a yuan-ti slaver. As a man of Hlondeth, Arvin’s usual manner of interacting with such an individual would be to visibly avoid eye contact and speak only when spoken to. Thus, you can imagine his shock when, after the slaver attacks tries to kill a young human boy on the docks for supposedly trying to pickpocket him, local authorities restrain the slaver and the boy alike, and they use the statue to do so.
As it turns out, the gauntlet statue is a holy icon to the god Helm, also known as the Vigilant Watcher. Similar statues are scattered across major settlements in the Barony, and they act not only as open reminders to the primary god the people of Sespech pay homage to, but are also blessed so as to aid the local guards in finding and detaining criminals. In this case, the guards which come to halt the slaver’s pursuit do so by using a spell which forces him to place his hands on the statue until they command otherwise, stopping the incensed yuan-ti dead in his tracks. These differences, viewed through Arvin’s eyes, only become more stark as the story continues. We trade out the arid hills and plains surrounding Hlondeth for snowy mountains and evergreen forests. The City of Serpents itself, unique for its many domed and circular buildings and the winding streets and footbridges which are reminiscent of snakes coiling over themselves, are replaced with a city that’s more traditional to human sensibilities - streets set up in grid patterns, circular buildings of sturdy masonry and wood, and so on. All of this serves to help Sespech feel very different from what Arvin is familiar with, which in turn feeds into his initial hopes for freedom once his job is done, and then later into his fears as he realizes the two societies aren’t so different as his first impressions made him believe.
In the previous book, the stakes largely came from the twin prongs of Arvin needing to discover the plans being hatched by the doomsday cult he stumbled across within the short timeframe of seven days. If he can’t, his free will and sense of self will be destroyed by the mental tendrils of the insidious mind seed planted in his head by the main supporting character, the devious yuan-ti woman, Zelia. This time around, the stakes come from a similar place of urgency, but the cost for Arvin would be his chance for freedom and a new life. Arvin needs to find the missing daughter of Baron Foesmasher, who’s been struggling for some time to discover her whereabouts after her disappearance a couple weeks before Arvin’s arrival. The gaze of Foesmasher’s suspicion falls upon the member of House Extaminos meant to act as the family’s ambassador to Sespech, the arrogant son of their matron, Dmetrio.
On their initial meeting, the baron seems like an honorable and fairly reasonable man. He suspects Dmetrio because he discovered that his daughter had an affair with the yuan-ti. However, upon this revelation it rapidly becomes clear that Foehammer has a furious temper that he often loses control of. It doesn’t take long for Arvin to realize that this means his situation isn’t much safer than when he was dealing with Zelia and the mind seed in the first book, a particular problem that he also learns isn’t fully solved when he discovers that Zelia herself is also making her way to Sespech! Those of you who’ve read the previous book know why it would spell disaster for Arvin if she finds him.
Capping this all off is the inclusion of another new character, an attractive young woman named Karrell, who hails from the jungles of Chult and is seeking an audience with Dmetrio Extaminos for her own reasons. Her meeting with Arvin occurs on his journey into the Barony, where she learns of his potential to gain access to the vain and hedonistic son of House Extaminos via Arvin’s false identity as a highly regarded young architect. Now she seeks to use him to gain audience for herself, further complicating his own mission along the way.
Everything that I’ve described here takes place within the book’s first act. For those of you who’ve never read the book before, I fully understand if reading all of this sets your head to spinning a little bit. It’s a sizable hunk of information, after all. Fortunately, this doesn’t reflect how it feels to have this information presented in the book itself. Just as with Venom’s Taste before it, Smedman has expertly paced the events of Viper’s Kiss. In fact, I’d say the pacing is noticably improved over the first book. While it’s true that the cast, the intrigue, and the action mostly involve a relatively expansive list of new characters and problems that need to be introduced, at no point does it feel like Smedman is feeding us too much too quickly or too little over too long. Instead, she hits a fantastic middle point where we’re given enough to keep us hooked and wanting to turn the page.
A big part of this new hook comes from the entirely new cast of characters that Arvin interacts with. While I did mention Zelia earlier, she serves as a background force in this story which Arvin is actively trying to avoid. Arvin’s interactions this time are primarily spent with Baron Foesmasher and his trusted confidants, with Karrell, and occasionally with Dmetrio Extaminos. It’s through these interactions that we piece together the puzzle for the story’s central mysteries: where is Foesmasher’s daughter, what does Dmetrio have that Karrell is after, and how does this all tie back to the events of the first book? I will not spoil the answer to these here, but I will say that the way these threads are woven together by the end are a key reason why this book is my personal favorite in the trilogy, and the most highly rated of the three books in the series. I will also say that while none of the characters reaches the same level of delightful cunning displayed by Zelia in the previous book, each of them is strong and engaging in their own way, with characterizations that further the somewhat darker, more dour, and still very urgent tone held by this book.
That being said, as with any book, the story isn’t perfect. There aren’t any especially jarring moments like the scene in the first book where Smedman clearly had some struggles with integrating particular aspects from the then-current 3.5 edition of D&D into the story, but there are points in the second and third acts of the story where the pacing slows down just a bit too much. Additionally, there’s an instance earlier in the book involving Arvin and Karrell that toes the line of feeling a little too close to the experience of a random monster encounter from the tabletop game. Fortunately, this instance is much better written than the similar case from the first book. It also serves a valuable narrative purpose by both developing the relationship between Arvin and Karrell, and giving us an opportunity to see a little bit of what Karrell is capable of.
In the end, revisiting Viper’s Kiss was a fantastic reminder of why this book ended up my favorite in the trilogy. It may lack the sensual deviousness of Zelia that was so enjoyable in the first book, but it makes up for that in spades with the elements that do work. The new cast is stronger as a whole than before, the threads of the plot tie together more neatly, and by the end the stakes of this new mission are raised even higher than in the previous book, especially the personal stakes for Arvin. All of this is to say, it’s not hard to see why this book was the best received of the trilogy.
My recommendation for this book is:
Avoid It | Discount Bin | Tough Sell | Flawed Fun | Great Read | Must Own
I read Smedman's book in The War of the Spider Queen series. When I found out that she did a spinoff series following the character of Halisstra, I wanted to read it, because I'm a sucker for Drow. The Lady Penitent series is sitting on my bookshelf, but I've yet to tackle it (I only finished reading The War of the Spider Queen a couple of years ago). I don't blame you for your distaste for the books Greenwood wrote. I could never finish the few books of his I've tried to read. I love the man for creating The Forgotten Realms, but I think as a writer he leaves a lot to be desired (just my opinion!). Maybe one day I'll get to read the "Snake Books" by Smedman.
Just so you're aware, you owe me royalties for using my Original the Line (that no one has ever used before me). No one apes the Ape for free.