Tag: books

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Happy Book Birthday to “Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology”

Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology, which I co-edited with Julie C Day (publisher and main editor), Carina Bissett, and Julia DeRidder (who did lots of editorial work even though she’s not on the cover) released this week. It features work by Martha Wells, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Andy Duncan, and Nisi Shawl among other authors. It’s a diverse group in several ways. Science fiction, horror, fantasy (contemporary, humorous and dark)  stories are in the book, as well as authors from a variety of genders, ethnic/racial backgrounds and geographical locations. Rather than speak about the stories, which are uniformly excellent and award-worthy) I will focus why Tanith Lee was so important to me.

I first became aware of Lee’s work when the Washington Post Book World section did an article on her mid-career retrospective Dreams of Dark and Light. The critic, author Michael Swanwick, spoke of “the marvelous joinery of her sentences” and described her Neo-decadence themes of Death and Sex that wove through her work like veins of silver. I couldn’t find that book, so I picked up Delirium’s Mistress instead. The lush fairytale language and blatant homoeroticism stunned me. Then, my obsession with finding everything she published began. I still haven’t finished reading all of her enormous oeuvre. 

Tanith ignored the dictates of the market, and wrote things that defied easy categorization—often creating new genres. Her 1990 novel A Heroine of the World, for instance, is Romantasy, written years before the portmanteau term was coined. Her secondary world vampire novels, Vivia and The Blood of Roses, would probably be marketed as grim-dark today. Much of her short fiction fits in the Weird tale microgenre; she published many pieces in Weird Tales Magazine in the 90s. As a result, Tanith became a touchstone author for many authors of genre fiction. She even wrote a historical novel (The Gods are Thirsty is about the French Revolution), mystery (Death of the Day) and a zombie novella (Zircons May Be Mistaken).

Tanith wrote books that publishers determined were difficult to sell. Her sequence of epic fantasy called Tales of the Flat Earth was one of the first to feature queer characters in the late 70s. (In fact, many mall chainstores refused to carry the titles for their frank sexual themes. The Flat Earth sequence took its cues from Eastern mythology, a change from the Tolkein-derived medieval fantasy that dominated the fantasy boom). The novels and stories in the sequence are part Arabian Nights, part Anais Nin with a dash of Oscar Wilde. The Village Voice dubbed her as “the goddess empress of the hot read.” As a result, she became a bit of a cult author—though one with impressive sales records here and there. 

My friendship with Tanith Lee began when she released her book of channeled lesbian fiction, written under the name Esther Garber. It was a small press book, and the publisher sent a copy of the book to me because I suppose because I was a Superfan. Fatal Women is the title of the book, and it collected the novellas written by French Jewish woman Tanith sent to her via spiritual means. Tanith was adamant that this channeling was real, but she had sense of humor about it, understanding that there were skeptics. The fiction was Gothic with a capital G, often historical with some surreal aspects. Imagine the work of Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet) crossed with the fiction of surreal artist Leonora Carrington. Lush, bizarre, erotic, and beautiful. 

I met her in person in 2008 at Eastercon in London, where she was guest of honor (along with Charlie Stross, China Mieville and Neil Gaiman). She told me the plots of stories and novels that were percolating in her head—novels and stories that she never got around to writing. She told me that the world of publishing had changed, became more market-driven, which frustrated her. Our friendship lasted until her passing in 2015, mostly in epistolary form though there was one international phone call (I remember my cat interrupted the conversation by demanding attention, and I tried to express that it was Tanith Lee on the phone but he didn’t care).  She sent me her small press books — she eventually began to be published by the late Storm Constantine’s Immanion Press and I received many Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) of the books, which included her thematically-connected Colouring Book series. I even wrote an introduction for a collection of her dragon stories, entitled Love In A Time of Dragons. At one point, she even sent me a package of books when I was recovering from a minor surgery. I ended up acquiring a second Esther Garber manuscript called Disturbed By Her Song, which featured work from Garber’s queer brother, Judas for Lethe Press. Judas’ work is even more magical realist, focusing on gay male desire. She blurbed two of my own books, and once sent me a care package when I was recovering from minor surgery. Her husband John sent me an unpublished story by Judas Garber, a lovely vignette of queer desire set in 1920s Paris, when she was seriously ill.  

Tanith won the World Fantasy Award twice, was nominated for a Nebula, and Lambda Literary Award. She was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award. She also won life time achievement awards—the Bram Stoker and the posthumous Infinity Award from SFWA. It is my hope that Storyteller will introduce and reignite interest in Tanith’s work. She was a groundbreaker in many ways, and it is my belief that she is one of the finest stylists ever to work in genre fiction.

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BOOK REVIEW: A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

All of the reviews I’ve read about A Stranger In Olondria talk about it being about bibliophilia, that is, the love of books. The love of books certainly does run through the novel, but I actually think it’s more about spirituality—with the written word being the locus through which transcendence is achieved.

stranger in olondria cover

The form the novel takes is the bildungsroman: a novel about the initiation of a youth into the wider world. Jevick is the son of a prosperous pepper merchant, a tyrant of a man who has two wives and controls a plantation on a tropical island. When it becomes clear that Jevick’s older brother is unfit for inheritance, Jevick is trained to be his father’s successor. A tutor from the distant, northern land of Olondria is hired, ostensibly to teach young Jevick the language and customs of that land in order to be a competent trader. But the tutor instills in the boy a love of the written word and an obsession with the exotic land.  Jevick eventually travels to Olondria on his first routine trade trip, and—very much against his will—becomes literally haunted by the ghost of Jissavet, a young woman and fellow islander he met on the voyage from the Tea Islands. Ghosts, in a heretical Olondrian religion, are considered angels, and those who communicate with them are living saints. When Jevick’s haunting becomes public knowledge, he is placed under arrest and becomes the unwilling pawn between two religious factions.

In spite of this fairly complex set up, the novel isn’t about politics. The narrative form is that of the memoir, or its even more antiquated cousin, the philosophical romance. Jevick’s narrative meanders, often interrupting the narrative flow to quote poetry or bits of Olondrian philosophy. It’s slow, and richly descriptive—a marked difference  the often breakneck pace of other fantasy novels. At times, the book becomes a travelogue—kind of like the books written by John Berendt (e.g., Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). Because of this solemn quality, the magic and the world-building is organic and believable. Other times, it has the elegiac melancholy of Hermann Hesse’s novels (particularly Steppenwolf and Siddhartha). The land of Olondria is a character. The country has a Mediterranean feel, in its fauna and cultures. The imaginary religion borrows from Hinduism and Egyptian mythology with a dash of decadence, resonant of the Greek mysteries.

The novel’s ending is ambiguous; no magic ring is recovered or kingdom conquered. Rather, Jevick, and Olondria itself, are spiritually changed. A Stranger in Olondria is a richly rewarding experience for those who love prose poetry and non-traditional narratives. Sofia Samatar’s debut novel is a fine exemplar of bibliomancy.

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Favorite Spooky Reads: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved may be the only horror novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. And it is a horror novel, in my opinion. It makes use of the tropes supernatural gothic fiction (in this case, a vengeful ghost) to examine the dehumanizing effects of America’s great sin, the Peculiar Institution of slavery. Beloved is, of course, also a historical novel that takes as its jumping off point a historical footnote about an escaped female slave who murdered her own child rather than have her be raised in slavery. But Beloved, the spirit of the murdered infant come back as a young woman forms the bulk of the novel.

 

Sethe (perhaps her name alludes to Lethe, the Greek river of forgetting) has escaped with her four children from Sweet Home, a hellish plantation where slaves are routinely tortured. When the foreman, the sinisterly named Schoolteacher, finds her in Ohio (a slave-free state), he witnesses her slitting the throat of her unnamed infant daughter. He declares her a wild animal and not fit for slave service. The murdered child becomes a poltergeist, driving away both her sons after a few years with her wild antics. When a fellow escaped slave, Paul D, arrives at Sethe’s house, the ghost child is temporary banished.

Beloved comes back in corporeal form, as a young woman. Forget Samara (the video ghost girl of the Ringu trilogy) or the possessed Regan McNeil (The Exorcist) or even telekinetic terror Carrie White. Beloved could have them for a light lunch. Because Beloved is a cipher, and her agenda is never clear. She is endlessly hungry, for Sethe, for love, for experience, for sweets. Does she want to possess Sethe—both figuratively and literarly? Or does she want to destroy her? Beloved is every wrong thing about slavery and racism given form, and she will do anything—to fill her endless, aching and damaged need. Beloved is beautiful, seductive, perverse and brutal.

Morrison’s Faulkner language quivers and fractures in her attempt to capture the essence of this spirit. The imagery she uses is violent and disturbing—light, blood, sugar are invoked. Because Beloved has a strong historical subtext, its horror is even more powerful.