The Book of the Dead

Seller sent the wrong book.

Imagine Anne Rice in her prime writing the best dark fantasy ever done, and you might get some idea of what Tanith Lee accomplished in these two books that take place in her mythical French city of Paradys. Short stories and two novellas set over the course of many centuries in the same darkly dangerous and strange French city, Paradys, take one along on a ride that begins where the Twilight Zone ends and proceeds straight out the other side of disbelief and non-reality.

This was the first book of Tanith Lee I read. Immediately, I was striken by the magic of the language and the plot. The eight stories in this volume are excellent examples of Tanith Lee's talent. All the stories are situated in a forgotten French city somewhere in the 17th-century. Led by a mysterious guide, an anonymous I-person visits the ancient graveyard of Paradys. The guide points out eight graves and tells the story that goes with them. The result is a collection of thrilling stories about a vagina with teeth; a quest for a secret valley; a voodoo-dripping horror story; a typical Lee vampire; a plague-woman; the real dream of a girl; a woman called Morcara; and a female artist who posesses a glass dagger. Although the erotic element in these stories is nihil, they each have that undefinable taste of the unreal that Tanith Lee can summon so well. As always, she manages to make me shiver, just by describing the city. There are, however, things I really miss. The extra dimension behind the thrill, for example. After I had read more of her novels, I re-read 'The Book of the Dead' and I was expecting that extra dimension, but was a bit disappointed. This is not Tanith Lee at her best, but it is a very good try.

True to the color motifs of the Paradys Tetralogy, "The Book of the Dead" (third in the series, although I read it last) is subtitled "Le Livre Blanc et Noir" and takes place, for the most part, in the possessed, twilight city of Paradys, the Paris of a darkened alternate world. Other than the common setting and a few literary twists here and there, there is not much to link "The Book of the Dead" to its fellows. (Although I did like the hint that Leocadia, protagonist of "The Book of the Mad," was the author of this volume...) With two exceptions, "The Nightmare's Tale" and "The Moon Is A Mask," the eight stories collected in this book are weird and ghoulish, but hardly up to the dark and fascinating standards of the rest of the Tetralogy. For the sake of the two aforementioned exceptions, I will recommend "The Book of the Dead." These were stories that remained with me after the pages had closed; they had some of that blend of fascination and repulsion, darkness, tragedy, and resolution that so characterizes Paradys. "The Nightmare's Tale" takes place perhaps twenty years after the Paradys equivalent of the French Revolution, when young Jean de St. Jean (possibly a sideways relative of Andre St. Jean, the poet of "The Book of the Damned") learns that the man who sent his parents to the guillotine is still alive and living on the Caribbean island of Black Haissa. Sailing across the ocean in search of revenge, Jean de St. Jean discovers that there is much more to the business of vengeance than he expected, especially when it comes to the price. Though the atmosphere is not the city setting of Paradys, the mystery shrouding Haissa is expertly evoked, Jean de St. Jean made sympathetic even as he gambles his life on an obsessive revenge, and a real sense of the night rises up from the pages. In "The Moon Is A Mask" the storyline returns to Paradys, perhaps around the turn of the century, where an impoverished girl named Elsa Garba comes into possession of a mask of black feathers. By night, the mask allows her to transform into a vampyric owl-harpy, in which form she ranges over the City until dawn; in time a mender named Alain becomes her lover, but their relationship can only end in death. Here Lee's talent is in full force, describing the almost suicidal pleasure that Alain and Elsa derive from each other, Elsa's night flights over the roofs and towers of Paradys, detail and imagery building allusively onto each other until the final, unsettling ending. The rest of the stories are, if not conventional, hardly as good as anything set in Paradys deserves; their sole saving grace, averting the dreadful condemnation of "mediocre," is Tanith Lee's detailed and evocative writing. Only (and you must remember that this is my opnion, not certain fact; please feel free to read the book!) "The Nightmare's Tale" and "The Moon Is A Mask" hold any real atmosphere or depth. Two stories out of eight, a figure that reduces