I somehow missed the news of Tanith Lee’s passing for several months. Ms. Lee’s career as an author started with her novel The Birthgrave back in 1975, and on through ninety-three books that included fantasy, horror, gothic romance, science-fiction, and works that felt like a mix of a few different genres (Biting the Sun, anyone?)
Tanith was also one of my favorite authors; her collection of re-told fairytales Red As Blood is one of those books that I keep nearby for comfort-food reading, as is her gloriously decadent, vampiric (sort of) book of the Scarabae, Personal Darkness. (Damn. I just realized that the rumored fourth novel in the Blood Opera Sequence will never happen now. One more volume for the Sandman’s Library of Lost Books, I suppose.)
She kept on writing up until the very end, and she had plans in place for several themed short story collections. Lengenda Maris is the first of those: eleven tales of the ocean featuring monsters, mysteries, and hapless people caught up in the places where the land meets the sea.
The sky appeared to thread itself between sail and mast like sapphire cotton through a needle.
Tanith Lee’s writing is a combination of dreamlike prose mixed with an almost folk-tale simplicity. Dialog is usually short, often only one or two-word sentences, and then the descriptions of everyone’s surroundings will flow and curl like smoke. It’s not quite as Gothic as some of her earlier works (The Secret Books of Paradys had paragraphs that could take two or three tries to get through), but Lee still speaks in metaphors more often than not, and you have to be prepared for a few meandering sentences while the characters take a moment to reflect on how the color of a sunset matches their emotional state.
Weather and inanimate objects take on their own life in these stories. An ocean storm kicks things out of the way and targets ships because it’s in a bad mood and wants to break something. The wind plays reeds in a lake like harp strings. An island on a summer’s day isn’t just hot, it’s drugged and roasted and left half conscious on the shore. A lady’s ruby jewels burn on her hands, while strings of pearls weep.
Some of the stories in the book involve obscure obsessions. A clerk at a lingerie shop in “Magritte’s Secret Agent” doesn’t know why she can’t get the image of a customer’s wheelchair-bound young teenage son out of her mind. She also doesn’t know why it bothers her so much that the young man’s mother has gone to such steps to keep him from seeing the ocean, like boarding up windows. Or having a house-sized wall built between their home and the shore. And two shipmates in the story “Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave Breaker, Priest” form an instant, obsessive bond with each other: mutual hatred. At first sight. For no discernible reason. The ending to that one was a little formulaic, but I still liked it.
Other stories deal with monsters of the deep. “Girls in Green Dresses” and its sequel “The Sea Was In Her Eyes” feature mermaids, ones that are just seductive as sirens and twice as dangerous; even the ones with a little compassion are cruel. The monster in “Because Our Skins Are Finer” is actually less monstrous than the main character; the story is something of a cautionary tale about living a small life with small desires.
The collection started out strong, but it’s the stories in the second half that really appealed to me. “Under Fog” is an old fashioned yarn of a small town with a dangerous secret. It tells a first-person account of what it’s like to grow up in a city that makes its living off of shipwrecks, and of the day that their little endeavor came to an end.
“Where Does The Town Go At Night” would have been my favorite in the collection if the ending had been a little different. It’s not a bad ending, just not a happy one, especially for a story that had sections with an almost Neil Gaiman-like quality, about a town that wanders in the wee hours of the morning, and what it’s like for those few people who are actually awake to see where it goes.
“Xoanon” ended up being my favorite in the collection. It’s just so…quiet. It’s a story about traveling to a tiny remote seafaring village and hearing a story about a silent church, and a series of woodcarvings that tell their own story, and the lovely image of a fishing boat gently settling into place on a hillside.
Many of the stories feel a lot more poignant knowing that Tanith Lee is gone. Especially the final story “Land’s End, The Edge of the Sea” one of the only ones that’s original to this collection; in fact it’s one of the last ones Tanith ever wrote. Like a lot of her stories, it’s hard to put into words what it’s actually about. It’s sort of a fantasy, but mostly a reflection on the place that’s made where the land ends and the ocean begins. It’s about how the two are defined by the places where they come together, just like night and day, space and air, and maybe (though she doesn’t come right out and say it) life and death.
It’s almost like she wrote a eulogy for herself. It’s comforting to think that, and also to imagine Tanith Lee, imagining herself, stepping out of this world and onto a piece of land that’s set off across the sea, and that she’ll be awake to see wherever it is that it wanders to.
Cover art by Tanith Lee. Because of course it is.