The Storm Lord by Tanith Lee (DAW 1976)

A few years ago, someone donated their entire fantasy and science fiction collection to the YMCA charity stall in Kingston.  Sadly the charity stall is gone now--the land sold off to developers--but while it remained I bought a few bags of books, including this:

Here we see a short, shaggy barbarian clutching an immaculately coiffed and made up (slave?) girl.  Between her blue eyeshadow and the generally murky brown colour scheme of the cover, it's easy to see that this was published in the 1970s.

THE STORM LORD is a big novel of an unknown planet and of the conflict of empires and peoples on that world.  It is the story of a priestess raped and slain, of a baby born of a king and hidden among strangers, and of how that child, grown to manhood, sought his true heritage.

It is a novel of alien gods and lost goddesses, of warriors and wanderers, and of vengeance long delayed.

It is an epic in every sense of the word.

The "priestess" in the back cover blurb isn't the only person in the book who is raped and/or slain--the victims pile up, chapter by chapter.  I don't think I've encountered this much rapine and slaughter in a fantasy novel since I read Game of Thrones several years ago.

The dragons had brought only women to their feast, planning to use them, when the festivities were at their height, in the orgiastic manner of the ancient feasts of Rarnammon.  And these women had struck simultaneously, with daggers, with knives from the table, with heavy stone drinking cups.  Thick blood ran on the flags and smeared the walls.

(Page 277)

 So the question I find myself asking, is: Which world would be worse to live in--Tanith Lee's Vis or George R.R. Martin's Westeros?