Dipping once again into the well of Xanth. After reading Piers Anthony’s first Xanth novel, A Spell for Chameleon(my review), I decided to gamble on my memory of the second book being decent and read The Source of Magic as well. While it wasn’t bad (although had some sexism issues which I’ll discuss below), it wasn’t good enough for me to consider reading more in the series. Also this is the last book with the first generation of Xanth residents. Going forward, the book starts focusing on the younger generation and having progressively more puns. So, let’s see what happens.

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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.

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A Spell for Chameleon is the first of the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony. Nowadays Xanth is a bit of a joke (actually 20 years ago Xanth was a joke), but the first 3 novels were very well done. Anthony was a very good writer until he started writing and publishing 2-3 books a year and overdoing his series (Xanth has 34 books with a couple more scheduled). But his early books were worth reading. So what makes the first Xanth book special?

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