Examining the weird/gothic landscape through eyes firmly embedded with set of rainbow lenses, Tanith Lee erected severely Weird Gothic Towers and Spires throughout the map, starting with her debut novel, The Dragon Hoard in 1971. Her edifices are constructed using the building blocks of fairy tales, myths, standard fantasy, vampires, and just plain strangeness, and are adorned in proper Gothic tradition with themes of loneliness, fear, and isolation; embellished with Weird elements of journeying from comfort to discomfort, from reality to the surreal.
Born in 1947, deceased 2015, Tanith Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel (1979, Death’s Master), and wrote over 90 novels and somewhere around 300 short stories, in three main categories.
Fairy Tales and Myths
Tanith Lee frequently visited the rich world of fairy tales, and like the “White Witch” (Angela Carter), re-interpreted from a feminist/queer perspective. Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer, is one of her most popular short story collections, covering classics by not only the Brothers Grimm, but Charles Perrault and the Countess Villeneuve.
The quartet of books comprising The Secret Books of Paradys unite an invented mythology through use of colors, styles, and gender chromatics. Set in an alternate world version of Paris, Paradys, the sequence is disjointed, unsettling, and beautifully written. Reading them means you must be willing to venture into weird gothic territory, to feel disjointed, and to emerge from chaos bewildered, but with fantastic dreams. Dark magic, murder, and gender identities are recreated in new mythologies, elaborate and detailed. The Paradys series is comprised of The Book of the Damned, The Book of the Beast, The Book of the Mad, and The Book of the Dead.
Fantasy and Science Fiction (Featuring Vampires!)
The Dragon Hoard, 1971, was Tanith’s first novel and is a delightful send-up of a typical fantasy with all the usual elements (always twisted) – the baptismal curse, a quest for treasure, and of course, a fairy-tale “happily ever after” ending.
When Tanith Lee turned her attention to vampires, she faced the question – how to avoid the cliches that vampire writers struggle (or should) with. Her solution? A “science fiction vampire novel” – Sabella (1980), featuring a “vegan” vampire struggling to exist on Mars (she feeds on the deer), until she gives in to her baser nature and feasts on a young stranger, Sand, whose even sexier brother, Jace comes after her for revenge.
AND SOME THAT ARE JUST TOTALLY, DELIGHTFULLY, beyond description, but definitely…
WEIRD
Death’s Master, the second book in the Tales from the Flat Earth series, was the one that won her the British Fantasy Award for best novel of 1979, making Tanith Lee the first woman to win the award that started in 1972. In it, the lesbian queen Narasen, is under a curse to become pregnant in order to save her city. After many, futile, attempts at sex with live men, she decides to try copulation with a dead man and makes a pact with the Lord of Death, ultimately bearing a hermaphrodite child, Simmu. And then the book, and the rest of the series, gets even freakier weirder.
But no matter which metaphorical stones Tanith was using to build her various towers, all are imbued with themes of feminism, sexuality, with traditional elements of the Gothic – loneliness, fear, and isolation, and the Weird sense of extreme discomfort.
Hell, she even used a favorite tool of the Gothic to inspire imagination – automatic or spirit writing.
She wrote her fiction (all 90 novels and 300 short stories and novellas) longhand in a kind of trance, similar to the method Horace Walpole (who is generally regarded as the creator of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, 1764) used.
”I have to write longhand, and no one can read my writing, I have to type my own manuscripts, because I’m going almost in a zigzag, across and then down. (I don’t write backwards, I’ve never been able to do that!) Fortunately, it’s not like a circus trick where, when they try to work out how they did it, they’re unable to do it. If I can’t see something enough, I shut my eyes and look at it, and I don’t feel I am writing – I’m there.” Tanith Lee – Locus Magazine Interview of 1998
Should you care to try this traditional Gothic writing technic also referred to as “spirit” or “automatic” writing, try sitting down with pen and paper, putting yourself in a “receptive” frame of mind, and write. No editing, no worry about logic or sense, spelling or punctuation.
Be in the present, writing without care for the past or the future – and see, if like Tanith Lee, you find yourself creating your own Weird Gothic Towers to stand firmly on the Map of Speculative Fiction.
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