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tanith leeposting
Apr. 10th, 2025 10:51 pmI've been sporadically reading Tanith Lee over the past year or so. She's one of those SFF greats whose name I'd heard tossed around for the couple of decades I've been reading the genre, but never had a clear sense of what she wrote; actually, the first person who mentioned to her to me, when I was like, 12 or 13, had her mixed up with Peter S. Beagle and thought she'd written The Last Unicorn.
--This became really funny when I started reading her last year--I like The Last Unicorn and I like Beagle, and I'd still describe his style overall as sort of precious and nostalgic and sentimental. Lee's is... not that. Beagle rarely writes something that would be rated over PG in movie form. Lee is a hard R on most days with the frequent NC-17. But I also kind of understand the subconscious associative chain of association, even though the comparison is, still, really funny; they're both very fairytaley, imagistic, ornate writers who have a bigger eclectic body of work they've built up over time than a single masterwork per se, although I guess The Last Unicorn is more famous than any one Lee work, partly thanks to Rankin-Bass and one weird (charming, very 80s) animated film. But that's what's fun about backreading Lee: there's so much to backread, and because she was so prolific and eclectic, it's more about getting to know her sensibility than following one continuity.
Anyway, enough about what Tanith Lee isn't. Here are a few works of hers I've read semi-recently -
Night's Master & Death's Master: these are the first two books in her Tales from the Flat Earth series, which is unrelated to any unfortunate persistent conspiracy theories about our actual world's shape. They're more like a folktale or myth cycle than a conventional novel series per se, following the gods and monsters and dynasties of an imaginary world which is, indeed, flat, but more in the sense of a layered, Yggdrasil-esque creation than anything else.
They were fun and weird; I recently saw someone recommending her as some sort of unproblematic, untarnished alternative to Neil Gaiman and The Sandman in light of the truly horrific stuff that's come to light about him as a person, which drove me a little insane for multiple reasons, mainly because a. they are very much their own thing and b. nothing Tanith Lee writes is going to satisfy anyone looking for an unproblematic alternative to something! Her stuff is extremely gothic and laced through with violence, incest, and taboo and exploitation of many kinds, and it's very often eroticized--and not in the kind of careful, "the author is making sure you understand their moral compass Very Clearly even if The People Contained Within Do not Follow It" fashion that is common in 21st-century horror / stuff published through Tordotcom. I just don't think this is a good recommendation angle.
... But I also understand their point. There's some of the same satisfaction, and remove, of following a semi-unrelated series of tales through centuries and ages, and watching the gods' effect on mortals; oftentimes there's this shaggy dog appeal of wondering how it will all come together structurally. I think Sandman is a little more on-the-ground and also has more deliberate pretensions (good or bad) to metanarrative and commentary about Belief and Story and all that; that's not really Tanith Lee's style, which is something I enjoy about her - she writes in a pretty immersed and immersive way about whatever it is she's writing about, and doesn't do a lot of postmodern winking. It's not a story about gods because gods signify something obvious and great about the human experience; it's a story about gods, take it or leave it. That being said, I have only read two of these, though I intend to go through the rest.
Tanith Lee A to Z: This, as the title suggests, is an anthologized collection of her work themed after titles of stories. The fact this could work at all suggests how prolific she was! And also, I love this book - it has great pieces, it has okay pieces, it has WTF pieces, and it really does show her range. I own it now in case it goes out of print (a big reason for me buying a particular book now, alas) and also because there's a story, "God and the Pig," I hope to make some kind of comic adaptation of sooner or later. Don't @ me. Anyway, off the top of my head, a few pieces of hers I enjoyed -
"Crying in the Rain": I'm listing this short story separately because I didn't read it in a Tanith Lee collection, but in another anthology (The Big Book of Science Fiction) for a class I was taking for fun. It's good, it's sad, it's dark, it didn't leave as much of an impression on me as some of her other stuff, but it did get me to thinking about hallmarks of hers - a certain frankness about horror and the body and vulnerability and rot that is sometimes exploitative, often compassionate, often at the same time. Bodies get destroyed a lot in Tanith Lee stories, not in a symbolic Hannibal or True Detective crime drama or New Weird kind of way, but often while you're living in them: in this case, through radiation poisoning and cancer. There's always something sensual about it, but it's an inside-out kind of sensual, rather than an outside-in. Also, mothers. Your mother tends to fuck you up; Lee is probably 200% more interested in the mother as a gothic figure than the father, which I enjoy.
More on her overall sensibility - Tanith Lee's writing is very gothic, often pretty extravagant (but at other times more restrained and introspective: she's also got a secondary bittersweet religious-doubt sensibility I honestly tend to like even more), and eroticized-and-also-problematized violence plays a big part: it doesn't always have a feminist message, but it has a very consistent feminist sensibility in an Angela Carter kind of way. Her worldview is queer, consistently and generally so, and specifically pretty bisexual: I don't know a ton about her biographically, but I could probably surmise. I've got a few other things of hers on the shelf from a used bookstore, I will continue my readthrough and not just cryptically referencing her here and there! Gotta love a crazy, hard-to-track-down oeuvre. (Specifically I've learned that "Rherlotte" wasn't just one French lesbian gothic, but one story from a whole dedicated pseudonym & collection of French lesbian gothics she wrote? This is so extra and I have to find it.)
--This became really funny when I started reading her last year--I like The Last Unicorn and I like Beagle, and I'd still describe his style overall as sort of precious and nostalgic and sentimental. Lee's is... not that. Beagle rarely writes something that would be rated over PG in movie form. Lee is a hard R on most days with the frequent NC-17. But I also kind of understand the subconscious associative chain of association, even though the comparison is, still, really funny; they're both very fairytaley, imagistic, ornate writers who have a bigger eclectic body of work they've built up over time than a single masterwork per se, although I guess The Last Unicorn is more famous than any one Lee work, partly thanks to Rankin-Bass and one weird (charming, very 80s) animated film. But that's what's fun about backreading Lee: there's so much to backread, and because she was so prolific and eclectic, it's more about getting to know her sensibility than following one continuity.
Anyway, enough about what Tanith Lee isn't. Here are a few works of hers I've read semi-recently -
Night's Master & Death's Master: these are the first two books in her Tales from the Flat Earth series, which is unrelated to any unfortunate persistent conspiracy theories about our actual world's shape. They're more like a folktale or myth cycle than a conventional novel series per se, following the gods and monsters and dynasties of an imaginary world which is, indeed, flat, but more in the sense of a layered, Yggdrasil-esque creation than anything else.
They were fun and weird; I recently saw someone recommending her as some sort of unproblematic, untarnished alternative to Neil Gaiman and The Sandman in light of the truly horrific stuff that's come to light about him as a person, which drove me a little insane for multiple reasons, mainly because a. they are very much their own thing and b. nothing Tanith Lee writes is going to satisfy anyone looking for an unproblematic alternative to something! Her stuff is extremely gothic and laced through with violence, incest, and taboo and exploitation of many kinds, and it's very often eroticized--and not in the kind of careful, "the author is making sure you understand their moral compass Very Clearly even if The People Contained Within Do not Follow It" fashion that is common in 21st-century horror / stuff published through Tordotcom. I just don't think this is a good recommendation angle.
... But I also understand their point. There's some of the same satisfaction, and remove, of following a semi-unrelated series of tales through centuries and ages, and watching the gods' effect on mortals; oftentimes there's this shaggy dog appeal of wondering how it will all come together structurally. I think Sandman is a little more on-the-ground and also has more deliberate pretensions (good or bad) to metanarrative and commentary about Belief and Story and all that; that's not really Tanith Lee's style, which is something I enjoy about her - she writes in a pretty immersed and immersive way about whatever it is she's writing about, and doesn't do a lot of postmodern winking. It's not a story about gods because gods signify something obvious and great about the human experience; it's a story about gods, take it or leave it. That being said, I have only read two of these, though I intend to go through the rest.
Tanith Lee A to Z: This, as the title suggests, is an anthologized collection of her work themed after titles of stories. The fact this could work at all suggests how prolific she was! And also, I love this book - it has great pieces, it has okay pieces, it has WTF pieces, and it really does show her range. I own it now in case it goes out of print (a big reason for me buying a particular book now, alas) and also because there's a story, "God and the Pig," I hope to make some kind of comic adaptation of sooner or later. Don't @ me. Anyway, off the top of my head, a few pieces of hers I enjoyed -
- "All the Birds of Hell" - short post-apocalyptic nuclear winter vignette with a weird dreamlike sequence with a nuclear sub breaking out of the ice
- "God and the Pig" - involves a dialogue between God and a pig. Five stars
- "The Hill" - strange, shaggy-dog, Sherlock Holmes-like Victorianish piece with a fun and earnest and incredibly weird humanist thesis
- "Jedella Ghost" - bittersweet historical fantasy, hard not to spoil otherwise
- "A Madonna of the Machine" - Matrix-y cubiclefarm dystopia + hallucinatory numinous experience
- "Rherlotte" - full-on, luxury-dripping, ornate, novella-length French lesbian revenge gothic, is what it is 100%
- "Xoanon" - strange hopeful little numinous tale about an island and a divine phenomenon
"Crying in the Rain": I'm listing this short story separately because I didn't read it in a Tanith Lee collection, but in another anthology (The Big Book of Science Fiction) for a class I was taking for fun. It's good, it's sad, it's dark, it didn't leave as much of an impression on me as some of her other stuff, but it did get me to thinking about hallmarks of hers - a certain frankness about horror and the body and vulnerability and rot that is sometimes exploitative, often compassionate, often at the same time. Bodies get destroyed a lot in Tanith Lee stories, not in a symbolic Hannibal or True Detective crime drama or New Weird kind of way, but often while you're living in them: in this case, through radiation poisoning and cancer. There's always something sensual about it, but it's an inside-out kind of sensual, rather than an outside-in. Also, mothers. Your mother tends to fuck you up; Lee is probably 200% more interested in the mother as a gothic figure than the father, which I enjoy.
More on her overall sensibility - Tanith Lee's writing is very gothic, often pretty extravagant (but at other times more restrained and introspective: she's also got a secondary bittersweet religious-doubt sensibility I honestly tend to like even more), and eroticized-and-also-problematized violence plays a big part: it doesn't always have a feminist message, but it has a very consistent feminist sensibility in an Angela Carter kind of way. Her worldview is queer, consistently and generally so, and specifically pretty bisexual: I don't know a ton about her biographically, but I could probably surmise. I've got a few other things of hers on the shelf from a used bookstore, I will continue my readthrough and not just cryptically referencing her here and there! Gotta love a crazy, hard-to-track-down oeuvre. (Specifically I've learned that "Rherlotte" wasn't just one French lesbian gothic, but one story from a whole dedicated pseudonym & collection of French lesbian gothics she wrote? This is so extra and I have to find it.)
