"Venom's Taste," House of Serpents - Book I: Sweet Nectar, or Bitter Poison?

The first book in Lisa Smedman's "House of Serpents" trilogy, "Venom's Taste" promises mystery, action, thievery, and intrigue, but how well does it deliver on these?

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Journey back with me for a moment. It’s March of 2004, my senior year in high school and nearly twenty years ago at the time of this writing. That time was the height of my tabletop gaming days. After school or on the weekends, if I wasn’t with my friends playing videogames or watching whatever the new flavor of anime was for us at the time, you best believe I was spending my hours planning, prepping, and playing Dungeons & Dragons.

I’d been introduced to the game in the late 90’s, and bear with me here because this lesson in my personal gaming history is relevant. I first sat down to play the game at my best friend’s house in middle school, somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve. The version in question was 3rd Edition. Through some good luck and an old friend of his, my best friend’s stepdad managed to get an early copy of the 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook and one of its earliest reprinted adventures, “The Sunless Citadel.” Needless to say, I was hooked, and those first few times playing the game quite literally changed my life.

Coming back to high school, I’d moved out of the touristy little mountain town my family had been living in from 1994-2000 and we made our way back to San Diego County. New city, new neighborhood, new school. I’m sure many of you know how that goes. Luckily, much like I did with my best friend way back in 4th grade, I managed to meet a couple guys who I hit it off with. They were gamers like I was. They enjoyed action shows and anime and heavy metal, and a couple of them played Magic: The Gathering, which I also played in middle school. We bonded quickly, and it wasn’t long before I was teaching them the ins-and-outs of D&D.

Once we got started playing on the regular, they quickly started to notice things about what and how I liked to play and run my games. Among the first things they noticed was my love of enemies that were dangerous for either their brutal savagery or their crafty and underhanded methods. This wasn’t to say I played the latter particularly well, because back then, I really didn’t. However, it didn’t take long for them to catch on that my favorite of these crafty monsters were the yuan-ti, a race of wicked snake people with varying combinations of serpent and human features. (Unbeknownst to me at the time, they were the first influence of Robert E. Howard on my life, as the Yuan-ti are directly inspired by the snake men he created in his earlier stories.)

Chance, it seemed, played a favorable game with me in this particular March month of my high school life. The one other friend in my group who expressed explicit interest in learning to run the games had gone in hard on the novelizations written to accompany the 3rd and 3.5 editions of D&D. Namely, he found the works of R. A. Salvatore’s famed drow ranger, Drizzt Do’urden, a character that I was never particularly fond of. However, whilst at the book store, he spotted something interesting - a brand new Forgotten Realms book, the first in a new trilogy all about the yuan-ti. Without a second thought he bought it, and when we met up between classes he shoved it in my hands and said, “You finally got your yuan-ti book!”

That book, of course, was Venom’s Taste by Lisa Smedman, and while one would think from the preamble above that the book centering around the yuan-ti was what caught my friend’s eye, it was in fact the name of the author. As it happened, Lisa Smedman cut her teeth on R. A. Salvatore’s stories of Drizzt and the drow, as she was the author of the fourth book in his “War of the Spider Queen” series, the much praised Extinction.

I set to reading Venom’s Taste that afternoon, almost from the exact moment I got home. I didn’t come out of my room until late that night, when I was finally so hungry that I forced myself to stop reading to finally grab some dinner. Needless to say, the book absolutely hooked me, and I read the entire thing in two sittings, then reread it again a couple weeks later. In all, I probably read that book about seven or eight times before the second in the series was released. To say that I thoroughly enjoyed it would be a gross understatement.

Well, as it so happened, I revisited the book again in May of last year, while my wife and I were on vacation in Vegas for the Sick New World music festival. I happened to run across it on Audible that morning and asked my wife if she’d like to listen to it on the drives up and back, since each drive would effectively cover half the book’s run-time. She agreed, and I once again found myself visiting the familiar streets of Hlondeth.

So, did the story hold up? Before I get to that, allow me to give a brief summary of what Venom’s Taste is about.

The story takes place in the sweltering subtropical city of Hlondeth, a metropolis known for its domed and circular buildings, its coiling cobblestone streets, and the serpentine Yuan-ti who are the city’s unquestioned masters. Our main character doesn’t count himself among their kind, though. His name is Arvin, and he is two things that garner little respect in the city: a thief, and a human. If you’ve read a fantasy story, then you know Arvin’s type: he was orphaned when his mother passed away from plague and was placed in a harsh orphanage, where he ended up learning the skills that would eventually see him forcefully recruited into the local Rogues Guild. However, this is where Lisa mixes up the formula, because it wasn’t the skills of a street skulker or purse pincher that got Arvin noticed. Rather, it was his skill in rope making and net weaving, talents that were forcefully drilled into him by his taskmasters at the orphanage. Now grown, he plies his trade for the Guild by making magical ropes and nets for their clients.

Lisa takes great care throughout the story to make it quite clear that Arvin is very much an unassuming lead. He’s frequently described as an everyman and there’s multiple occasions in which he’s mistaken for other people, which ends up putting him in a uniquely beneficial position for the story’s main supporting character, but we’ll get to her soon enough.

Arvin’s story begins in earnest when he meets at a dockside watering hole with the one childhood friend he made at the orphanage, an ugly fellow thief named Naulg. As they discuss guild projects and their own plans to break away from the organization, all whilst a doxie desperate for his coin teases Naulg and writhes in his lap, suspicion starts to play in Arvin’s mind. Something about the situation is wrong, and so he decides to secretively follow Naulg after he and his lady-of-the-night depart.

What unravels from here is a story of mystery, intrigue, and mass murder, as Arvin quickly discovers that the doxie Naulg had on his arms wasn’t anything like the young woman she appeared as. After restraining and kidnapping Naulg with the help of secret companions, Arvin sneaks after them to try and free his friend and find out what these people are after. Ultimately he finds himself at the center of a conspiracy that could see the whole of Hlondeth’s population, human and yuan-ti alike, wiped out.

Despite how the above synopsis might sound, Venom’s Taste presents a relatively simple story with many moving parts. After his encounter with the conspirators, Arvin finds himself placed in a situation where he has one week to unravel the mystery of what they’re doing, or he’s going to meet a fate worse than death at the hands of the story’s leading support character, the beautiful and deceitful yuan-ti woman, Zelia, who is aware of the conspirators and has her own reasons for uncovering their motives and plans. The story follows Arvin all across the city of Hlondeth and its immediate surroundings as he attempts to follow leads, call in favors, and avoid detection and capture not just by the conspirators themselves, but local guards and antagonistic elements of the Rogues Guild.

What this results in is a story that has many different elements coming together to form a unique blend of action heavy pulp fantasy, magic rich high fantasy, and layered mystery thriller. As Arvin makes his way through Hlondeth, picking up and following whatever leads he can, we get to join him in peeling back the layers not only of this conspiracy, but of Zelia’s true motives and ideals, and the truth behind his mother’s death and the special gift she left behind for him - a seemingly innocuous brown clay bead carved to look like an eye, which Arvin wears on a leather thong as a necklace.

On the whole, the story is well paced. The action elements are appropriately exciting, moments of danger feel tense, and the slow reveal of the truth behind the conspiracy - as well as the introduction to the greater mystery that spans the trilogy itself - are quite satisfying to partake in. This is due in no small part to the fact that we receive these revelations as Arvin does. Unlike many fantasy stories, and that includes a host of others written under the Forgotten Realms label, the Venom’s Taste takes place entirely from Arvin’s perspective. For the mystery elements of the story, there couldn’t have been a better choice. We know what he knows, and we learn new information right alongside him, which helps to keep the stakes feeling high throughout most of the story.

It’s also helpful that both Arvin and Zelia are very enjoyable characters in their own ways. Arvin does well at trying to remain cool and in control as best he can, and the fact he’s charismatic and affable only makes it that much easier for us to get invested in him. However, he’s far from unstoppable, and there’s more than a few times within the story that he gets in over his head. He makes plenty of mistakes throughout the story, mistakes that I’m happy to say he tends to learn from more often than not. A Gary Stu you will not find in Arvin.

Likewise, Zelia is delightful in how cunning she is. She simultaneously fills the roles of the wicked noble and the spymaster, and she does both of these things quite well. Through her we gain a direct glimpse at the vanities, excesses, and dangers in yuan-ti society. True to their form, the yuan-ti are snakes in every sense of the colloquialism - they’re crafty, underhanded, arrogant, vicious when pushed too far, and view themselves as the absolute pinnacle of being, and Zelia presents herself as no exception to this. However, the best part about Zelia’s depiction is how we’re presented it. I won’t give the exact details here, but suffice it to say that the particular situation Lisa puts Arvin into with this story allows us a far more intimate look at the dangerous yuan-ti woman than you’d expect, given that the story remains entirely in his point of view.

However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. For as entertaining a read as Venom’s Taste is, it does have its pitfalls. Chief among these is one that many Forgotten Realms books share due to being what they are, which is fiction written specifically to excite and entice people to play D&D and buy the rule books. Because of this many elements are lifted from the game itself, and while that’s not an issue in Lisa’s writing most of the time, there are moments where the story does end up feeling a bit gamefied. Usually these issues are brief and they tend to detract very little from the story at hand, but there are a couple instances where it’s painfully obvious that she struggled to convert an idea from the game into the story in a manner that feels natural.

Additionally, while the pacing tends to be quite strong throughout the majority of the story, that starts to slip as it nears the end. This isn’t simply a case of things being rushed along, either. We get the slip in both directions. One scene in particular that stands out to me is one in which Arvin joins up with an ally to explore an abandoned structure thought to be used by the conspirators. While it involves a good bit of tension and some close calls, the scene dragged in its setup for me, which really stood out as surprising given how strong the pacing up to that point had been. Worse still, an additional slip in the pacing happens not long after that scene, and this one directly ties to one of the aforementioned instances where Lisa struggled with smoothly implementing an idea from the game into her story.

All of this brings me back around to my earlier question: while I thoroughly enjoyed Venom’s Taste in high school and early college, does the book still hold up today?

Yes, it does. While it’s not life changing fiction by any means and it certainly won’t live on in anyone’s mind as the next great American novel, Venom’s Taste is a tense and thrilling tale in its own right. Its endearing characters and overall good pacing come together to create a mystery that’s exciting, engaging, and does a fantastic job of setting the stage for the greater story of the trilogy. Even with the foibles it makes, it was well worth returning to and an absolute joy to finally share with my wife.

My recommendation for this book is:

Avoid It | Discount Bin | Tough Sell | Flawed Fun | Great Read | Must Own

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