Search Results for: Tanith Lee

He called himself by the name of the father he had never known, Vazkor, king of a forgotten land. In his veins were mingled the blood of that regal warrior and that of his witch mother, the silver-masked, snowy-haired survivor of the hated Old Race. He had sworn that she would die at his hands in the name of his father and all that his world had become.

Across that barbaric and age-haunted planet his quest went relentlessly on. As he searched, so grew his own powers, his fearful heritage. Across wide seas, in conquered cities, and among haunted mountains, the hunt took him. And as he drew closer to his objective, the clearer became the way she must be slain, the more certain his ability to sunder all her witchcraft and ancient science to rid the world once and for all of his creator – the white witch from the volcano.

White-skinned, black-haired Sovaz is beautiful and wayward, yet seemingly soulless – as if vampirised by some unknown force. Wife of a very wealthy but older husband, she is the prize ornament of his treasure collection, yet she is toying with a naive young American lover. And while the faces of this doomed trio converge, somewhere outside the glowing casements a creature of darkness prepares to feed…

Here are a novel and twelve short stories encompassing all the richness and variety of Tanith Lee’s unique talent.

This fascinating and disturbing collection casts a new and chilling light on that ancient mythical creature, the mermaid… pinpoints the ultimate peril of mankind’s fascination with the domestic cat… sucks us into the pulsing horror of bricks and mortar with a life of their own… investigates the dark and marvellous legends of tree spirits, and the tantalising allure of other carnal obsessions.

The 20 short stories in this collection explore the forests of the imagination and the creatures that dwell there – the wolves and vampires; tigers and unicorns; dwarves, demons and enchanters.

Tanith Lee today is one of the most versatile and respected writers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and DREAMS OF DARK AND LIGHT represents a massive mid-career retrospective of her achievements over the previous decade.

Here are unforgettable tales of werewolves that prowl chateaux, an Earthwoman in exile on a distant planet, demons that inhabit bodies of the living dead, a race of vampiric creatures who prey upon a cursed castle, and many other works of exotic vision, mythic science fiction, and contemporary horror. Also included are two stories that have received the World Fantasy Award, “Elle est Trois, (La Mort)” and “The Gorgon,” making DREAMS OF DARK AND LIGHT a distinguished one volume library of myth-weaving at its most eloquent and evocative.

In this rich and varied collection of fantasy, science fiction and horror stories, Tanith Lee brings her power to bear on the nature of relationships between women and men. The witch, the femme fatale, the vengeful goddess, the Amazon – past, present and future – spring to live in these tales of mystery and imagination.

THE GORGON, a brilliant shocker that leads off this scintillating collection of Tanith Lee’s tales, was the winner of the World Fantasy Award for best short story of the year in 1983. It is appropriate that it gives its title to these tales ranging from horror and the supernatural to science fiction, from the writer who has been justly termed “Princess Royal of Heroic Fantasy.”

Here you will find unforgettable encounters of men and beasts – of dragons and unicorns, cats and seals, virgins and vampires. This is truly a feast of treasures for everyone whose taste runs to a gourmet imagination.

All the magic and mystery of fabled India is woven into these marvel tales of seven strange nights. For that vast land which many have conquered and none have subdued is the home of ten thousand gods and a hundred thousand demons – and the teeming races that dwell on its shrouded plains and marbled cities have kept their mystic secrets. Here are hidden gods and demonic possession, here are were-beasts and subterranean terrors, here are beings transformed and souls reborn, here is Terror and Wonder.

He came to the Honey Garden looking for Cyrion. He was a man in grave danger, convinced only one man alive could help him. A man he had heard about in song and story. A man practically everyone knew something about. A man he had never met.

CYRION

Some said he was the stolen son of a western king, raised by nomads in the desert. A freelance swordsman, a sorcerer, a master of disguise, some said he attracted bizarre, uncanny events as some persons attract misfortune.

He with hair like the sky of earnest sunrise, his fair complexion, his whiplash reactions and quicksilver elegance was like a being from another world. A legend. A myth.

But was he real?

And was he for hire?

The house… always growing, adding to itself, blooming, decaying, becoming reborn…

But Susan doesn’t live in the house of Catherine, her grandmother. Instead, she grows up in a one parent family, with her mother, the glamorous and determined Anne. And Catherine, old forbidding and unkind, is only a nuisance. When Catherine dies, no one mourns.

Why is it then that whenever some new problem swamps Susan’s far from calm existence, she is driven to revisit the house? As when her mother takes up with the worrying Wizz. Or years later, at the end of a deeply-felt and broken love-affair of Susan’s own.

The house is always changing. As if at last it must achieve some irresistible transformation.

Frankly, there is something uncanny about the house.

Isn’t there.

As she says of herself, Jay is a ‘chancer’. But she finds she is out of her depth when she meets the beautiful artist, Jilaine Best.

Jilaine has everything – looks, talent, and wealth – even so her life is imperfect. In adolescence she lost her mother in circumstances both mysterious and painfully unpleasant. Now, unable to conceive, Jilain’s one wish is for a baby – even if another woman gives birth to it.

Jay can’t resist this opportunity – she tells Jilaine that she, Jay, is pregnant. And so the great lie begins.

It seems easy enough – for there conveniently is the handsome young cab driver, only too willing to make love with her… But the spun web is already tangling. Can anything result from it but danger – and destruction?

I saw her, hanging in the sky like a flake of the moon. A woman, her face masked by a black shireen, her body by a black shift, but her white arms spread, and her white, white, bone-white hair blowing all around her like a flame composed of smoke. Recognition was immediate. It was my mother. I shouted at her. It was crystal clear to me, what he had meant for me, my father, Vazkor, what she had robbed me of. And I drew from my belt my hunting knife and threw it at her heart.

She woke from a sleep of countless years, reborn from the heart of a raging volcano. Her body was a masterpiece all men desired, her face a monstrosity that must go masked. Warrior, witch, goddess and slave, she was doomed to travel through a world of barbaric splendour, helped and betrayed by her lovers, searching for escape from the taint of her forgotten race, and the malice of the demon that haunted her.

Arpazia is the aging queen who paces the halls of a warlord’s palace. Cold as winter, she has only one passion-for the mysterious hunter who courts the outlawed old gods of the woodland. Coira is the princess raised in the shadow of her mother’s hatred. Avoided by both her parents and half forgotten by her father’s court, she grows into womanhood alone . . . until the mirror speaks, and blood is spilled, and the forest claims her.

The tragic myth of the goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, stolen by the king of the underworld, is woven together with the tale of Snow White to create a powerful story of mothers and daughters and the blood that binds them together, for good or ill. Black queen. White maid. Royal huntsman. Seven little folk who live in the forest. Come inside, sit by the fire, and listen to this fairy tale as you’ve never heard it told before.

Once upon a time there was a mirror, and a girl as white as snow. . .

Grace is green-eyed, beautiful, a psychic healer – and also a whore. She walks the streets of Black Church to make a living.

After years of horror and poverty as a brothel slave, Saul Anger was adopted into a life of ease, and now he has taken on the mantle of his dead uncle’s house, as well as the leadership of a secret society whose figurehead is Anubis, the jackal god of Egypt. Dedicated to justice and to retribution, this society will destroy those it deems evil. There must always be blood.

One midnight in the great clock-tower of the city, a man hangs himself – and secret desires are let loose. A demon now stalks the streets and alleys, slaying the wicked and the innocent alike. But can Saul locate the source of the destruction and tame it?

Or will beautiful Grace – who has fallen in love with him – be able to stem this tide of madness and primeval terror? For, aided by the goddess Pasht and by all the cats of the city, perhaps she alone can turn back the clock.

Hesta Web, with her hot red hair and her tough, guarded coldness, is trapped with a mother who hates her and a father who is mostly away earning money on an oil rig. When Hesta discovers that her mother and her mother’s lover have had rampant sex in Hesta’s bed, she absconds with her friend Janey to the seaside.

It is the last day of the season, sun bright and sea sparkling. The bars and shops are open, the funfair spins round with shrieks and shouts. As night falls, the illuminations go on. But when Janey catches the last train to London, Hesta stays behind. She falls in with the gothic-looking, unpleasantly attractive Skilt and his subject colony of junkies and beggars. In a rotting hotel on the front, among the broken marble balustrades, the mouse-eaten rooms and the bonfire in the ballroom, Hesta takes up her new life. She hears drugged legends told beside the fire, the rumours of ghosts and the strangeness of the sea.

For now the season has ended, the seaside is deserted, the illuminations are switched off, this place is very strange. Does Skilt know its secret? Should Hesta be wary of the blond man who watches her from the pier? And what happens when the lights go out?

It’s dark.

Vivia, a paragon of youth and beauty, daughter of Lord Vaddix, is alienated from his brutal campaign of violence and fear. Her only solace lies in the secret cave in the bowels of the castle, known only to her and the arcane god whose shrine she believes it is.

When plague enters the castle, bringing an orgy of death and destruction, Vivia seeks shelter in this seductive place. Drawn to her innocence and beauty, a presence – Zulgaris – is resurrected who claims her as his own. Wakened to the wonder of the undead, Vivia is granted the secret of eternal life, but she has been betrayed. Her immortality stretches before her like a damnation.

Handsome Zulgaris, dark prince, war-leader and alchemist. Is Vivia to be his lover, or his pet? Or, far worse, is she but one more thing to be used in this relentless quest for sorcerous power.

Today, tomorrow, always…the white-haired girl from the marsh is running for her life down a derelict highway
In a future world polluted to the point of dissolution, the trees are dead, the sky is yellow, and no birds sing. Everyone and everything is tinged with madness. For Eva Belmort there seems no role except to become some man’s plaything and drudge.
Then, one day, arrives the stranger with the gun – with blue eyes and hair as white as her own. Roaming the tortured landscape in his wagon, Steel is a seller of death…but for Eva he provides hope of escape from Foulmarsh.
Urged on by a power of love and hate impossible to fathom, Eva’s travels now take her to distant towns and villages full of danger and surprises – and arouse in her strong passions she cannot harness…

Sixteen-year-old Annie Ember lives in grinding poverty in the city…until one day in a mysterious shop she discovers a tiny and ancient ivory elephant. The subsequent murder of her sister’s husband leaves Annie homeless, and she is found employment in a country house far away.

Sir Hampton Smolte returned from India with a great fortune – and also a dark obsession with that conquered land. His mansion is fanciful and extraordinary, like a raja’s palace set down in green English parkland.

Annie becomes a scullery maid in this strange place full of stuffed animals, eccentric servants and the even more peculiar Smolte family. Soon she catches the eye of the handsome Rupert and gradually succumbs to his advances…till one night she learns in disgust and horror just what his lovemaking entails.

Annie’s helpless fury then transforms this dream-house into a whirlwind of panic and the impossible…legging in all the avenging power of the jungle, and unlocking Hampton Smolte’s darkest secrets.

Where the moon washed the deck, something sat, its huge head raised, more like the visage of a bear than a wolf, yet long-snouted, the jaws open. Cold eyes that had no soul in them mirrored the moon…
After the killing of his brutal father, golden and handsome Daniel Vehmund has sought refuge in an exotic faraway land. But his contentment is shattered when a fabulous diamond is pressed on him by a sinister graverobber. From that first fatal contact, Daniel is doomed each night of the fill moon to become something else…something dark and powerful and savage. And nothing that originates on this earth can destroy him.
Laura, a beautiful redhaired farm-girl, lives with her two awful sisters and her selfish grasping parents in the remote English countryside. Apparently condemned to a life of drudgery, all is transformed when she is wooed and wed by a wealthy local squire. But this gilded existence is threatened when a travelling magician persuades her besotted husband to buy from her a very unusual diamond. For this gem is “The Wolf”, the diamond that had transformed Daniel Vehmund’s destiny. And when he himself returns at last to England, his fate and Laura’s are devastatingly intertwined…
Meanwhile some dark, malignant presence continues to prowl the woodlands and hedgerows…and seemingly nothing can curb its unquenchable bloodlust.

Love, history or blood…which is the strongest?

In childhood something black settled on Mechail Korhlen and drank from his throat. And later somebody pitied him enough to kill his poor deformed body when he became an adult. But then Mechail chose to return from beyond the veil to enact revenge – and to follow Anjelen, ruler of the sinister monastery sited deep in the forest.

The fulfilment of his destiny had begun.

The fortune teller had spoken the words, shown her the cards that predicted she would become the focal point of great events. But now, a captive of those who had invaded her land, Ara could only wait, hoping to discover the true path of her destiny. But in a world ruled by the war, what chance did Ara have to attain her heart’s desire? Carried far from her home, alone among strangers, only the will of the goddess, the Lady Volmardra, could protect and guide her.

Yet the path the Lady had set her upon would lead Ara to the very heart of conflict. And through she might gain great wealth or lose it, become both pawn and player in the power games of princes and warlords, there was only one for whom she would risk everything, a soldier who some named traitor and others liberator, the man for whom she would strive to become-A HEROINE OF THE WORLD.

The free humans lived underground, secretive, like rats. Above, the world was a fearsome place for them – the open sky a terror, the night so black, and the striding machines from space so laser-flame deadly.

Esther dared the open; she saw the sky; she saw the Enemy. And she was taken – captive – to the vast alien empty city. Surrounded by marvels of a science not born on earth, Esther did not know what they wanted of her. There was mystery in the city, dread in the heavens, and magic in the handsome alien man who came to her.

In a parallel world, in a Renaissance Italy just a little bit different from that we know, a dashing young man named Romulan met a lovely young lady named Iuletta. But between their romance stood the hatred of their feuding families – and a witchcraft that really worked.

Even in today’s world there are corners where past evils still cast their terror-haunted shadows. When the young man, Christian, came to his inheritance – a once grand mansion in just such a remote corner of France – he knew only that there was some sort of alternate claim to that ancient building and its lands. Even as the villagers acknowledged him as lord of the manor, there came two from the forest to stake out their interest. And with them came fear and desire, terror and love…a combination which could be irresistible – and also fatal.