Piers Anthony has, justifiably, taken a lot of grief over Xanth, his teen sex series. But, as I reviewed the first book, A Spell for Chameleon (my review), it was obvious that it wasn’t meant to start out that way.  I decided to go back to another series of Anthony’s that I kind of liked when it came out (and I was much younger). On a Pale Horse is the first book in the Incarnations of Immortality. The series follows (one book at a time) the human incarnations of immortal beings Death, Fate, Nature, War, Time as well as God and Satan. I should note that the first book, which follows the incarnation of Death, appeared 3 full years before Neil Gaiman started his Sandman series with the anthropomorphized endless, which are similar (at times) to what Anthony has done. So, let’s check out the story.

Zane is…well, Zane is an idiot. Zane is out a lot of money, been fired for stealing from his last job and needs funds to continue his dream job of taking aura photographs. Before you start laughing about auras, in this world magic and science co-exist. So our idiot Zane makes a deal with a gem seller. The gem seller cannot use the gems he has for personal gain (not out of any kind of honor, but because they won’t work for him), but he makes a deal with Zane in exchange for a gem that will help Zane find money. The deal is that Zane will wear a Love stone until he finds his true love (which should happen within an hour) and then the gem dealer will swoop in and take her. Desperate Zane takes the deal and the gem dealer finds a new girlfriend, who happens to not only be gorgeous, but is from an extremely wealthy family. Zane, finally realizing the depths of his idiocy, decides to commit suicide. But, when the incarnation of Death shows up to harvest his soul, Zane freaks out and shoots Death. Turns out that if you break it, you bought it. Since Zane killed Death, he now is death.

And so our story begins, Zane eventually meet all the other incarnations (except God, who is famously hands off) and learns about Death’s role in the universe. He also makes a deal with a powerful magician. The magician is dying and needs Death. Not to save him, but because he has found a plot that affects his daughter Luna and wants Death to save her. The majority of the story follows Death getting to know (and fall in love with) Luna and then realizing that he will need to fight Satan himself to save Luna. The slick, fast-talking Satan wants to stop Luna from saving the world in the future by having her killed now. But Death will need to use all his knowledge, powers and empathy to save the world and the love of his life.

Overall, the book is a fun, silly story that is so very obviously a beginning of a series. Anthony spends a lot of time making sure we get to know not only Zane (Death), but all the other incarnations who will make up the rest of the series. The story itself is silly and bland with Anthony’s touches in magic and sex popping up occasionally. This book would be classified as a YA series nowadays. It’s silly in a decent way, the writing doesn’t get in the way of the story and the characters are mostly flat with very little shading. Anthony tries to show some morality issues (atheism, euthanasia), but the author’s views on the subject overwhelm the story and make the good characters good, no matter what bad things they do. It’s not a bad book, but I wouldn’t run out to read the rest of the series. Mildly recommended.