Tanith By Choice

by Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee is one of the finest writers to ever grace the field of speculative fiction. The author of around 100 novels and several hundred short stories, she wrote two episodes of the iconic TV series Blake’s 7, was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award – which she followed with two World Fantasy Awards, shortlistings for all manner of accolades including Nebula and BSFA Awards – and in 2013 she received a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ from the organisers of World Fantasycon…

Tanith has left one heck of a legacy. I would never dream of attempting to compile a ‘Best of’ collection, so instead I’ve let others do so for me.

TANITH BY CHOICE features many of her finest stories, as chosen by those who knew her.

Contents:

1. Introduction by Ian Whates
2. Red As Blood
3. The Gorgon
4. Bite-me-Not or Fleur de Fur
5. Jedella Ghost
6. Medra
7. The Ghost of the Clock
8. Cold Fire
9. The Crow
10. White As Sin, Now
11. After the Guillotine
12. Taken at His Word
13. The Isle is Full of Noises

With contributions from Storm Constantine, Craig Gidney, Mavis Haut, Stephen Jones, John Kaiine (Tanith’s widower), Vera Nazarian, Allison Rich, Sarah Singleton, Kari Sperring, Sam Stone, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Freda Warrington, Nadia van der Westhuizen, and Ian Whates, each story is accompanied by a note from the person responsible for selecting it explaining why this tale means so much to them.

Available as a paperback and a numbered limited edition hardback.
The hardback includes patterned endpapers that feature photos of the author, many taken from the publisher's private collection.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Science Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Tanith Lee was a British writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. She was the author of 77 novels, 14 collections, and almost 300 short stories. She also wrote four radio plays broadcast by the BBC and two scripts for the UK, science fiction, cult television series "Blake's 7."
Before becoming a full time writer, Lee worked as a file clerk, an assistant librarian, a shop assistant, and a waitress.

Her first short story, "Eustace," was published in 1968, and her first novel (for children) The Dragon Hoard was published in 1971.

Her career took off in 1975 with the acceptance by Daw Books USA of her adult fantasy epic The Birthgrave for publication as a mass-market paperback, and Lee has since maintained a prolific output in popular genre writing.

Lee twice won the World Fantasy Award: once in 1983 for best short fiction for “The Gorgon” and again in 1984 for best short fiction for “Elle Est Trois (La Mort).” She has been a Guest of Honour at numerous science fiction and fantasy conventions including the Boskone XVIII in Boston, USA in 1981, the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, Canada, and Orbital 2008 the British National Science Fiction convention (Eastercon) held in London, England in March 2008. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror.

Lee was the daughter of two ballroom dancers, Bernard and Hylda Lee. Despite a persistent rumour, she was not the daughter of the actor Bernard Lee who played "M" in the James Bond series of films of the 1960s.

Tanith Lee married author and artist John Kaiine in 1992.

Reviews

[Karl]

This limited hardcover is numbered 46 of 100 signed copies and is signed by Ian Whates

Cover Artist: John Kaiine

[Jay Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Tanith Lee but this short story collection was a bit of a hit or miss for me. It does however showcase the diversity of her writing. Tanith couldn't be put into a box, the themes, topics, genres and way she constructed her stories differ widely in this collection.

Tanith is an excellent writer in regards to her prose but some of these stories missed the mark for my tastes. Would I say that these stories reflect "The Best of Tanith Lee"? I would say no some of the stories fall flat, others overwrought and difficult to follow. There was times where I felt like DNFing but forced my way through the collection to the end. Some stories felt long winded and didn't hold my interests eventhough I persevered. I definitely need to read some of these short stories again.

The collection doesn't feel cohesive because it is a collection of stories selected by the authors who edited the collection, in future I think I will stick to short story collections from Tanith that she intended to be grouped together.

My favourites from this collection:

+Red as blood ***(best in collection)
+The Gorgon
+Bite-me-not or Fleur de Fur
+Medra
+White as Sin, Now

[Robert Adam Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of two recent Best Of collections, in this one the stories are chosen by friends (many people you'd expect, although I was surprised to see no Liz Williams). The other is called A-Z, a much larger collection of mostly newer stories chosen entirely by her husband John Kaiine (he chooses a story and supplies cover art for Tanith By Choice).
The Selected Stories series (2 books) from 2009 was misleadingly titled. "Selected Stories" tends to be an upper-class publishers way of saying "Best Of", but these two were just regular collections.
Dreams Of Dark And Light from 1986 was the first Best Of. Forests Of The Night from 1989 might have been a retrospective but I'm not sure, as quite a lot of her collections have overlap and choose some old favourites.

My three favourites in this collection are...
(1) "Bite-Me-Not Or, Fleur De Fur". Wonderful setting: a castle of decadent royalty and vast surrounding mountains populated by winged humanoids, beautiful story.
(2) "White As Sin, Now". Fairy tale told from fragments of different viewpoints from different time periods.
(3) "After The Guillotine". Funny story about the afterlife of a group of people executed in the French revolution. I kept smiling at "let us pause to admire him". Gorgeous ending.

Although I tended to prefer the type of stories most associated with Lee, there's a good range, surprising at times. Especially "The Ghost Of The Clock", a fairly modern gritty British story. Perhaps too many stories were chosen for the circumstances in which they were first encountered?

I could see some people making a good case for "The Isle Is Full Of Noises" (final piece, the only novella) as the best in the collection. Even quite a long way into it, I wasn't sure what shape it would take or what sort of story it was, the uncertainty was enjoyable. There's so many parts to consider and piece together, to puzzle over. What was "the sound"?
Sarah Singleton says it's one of a few Tanith stories that sort of casts Rutger Hauer as a character (I have a strong feeling that "After I Killed Her" from another collection put me in mind of Hauer, which is bizarre, since I cant imagine any detail so specific suggesting him so effectively) and it has some commentary on using real people in this way.
I thought it was mostly great but I often struggled to visualize the shapeshifter in a satisfying way and a bit more detail could have fixed that, I know it was purposely vague but I felt it could have been less awkward. And some of the comparisons used throughout the novella seemed too much of a stretch. An impressive piece all the same. Loved the way it criticized talk shows too.

Unfortunately, there's quite a number of typos and one story has the wrong title across the upper corner of the pages. I'm guessing scanning technology was used because a few times "1" was used instead of "l" or "I". "Cold Fire" has lots of course slang written in an unfamiliar way, so possible typos were doubly dangerous there.
Every book should be proof-read but when you're trying to ensure a writer's legacy and talk in the introduction about the preciousness of their words, it's a bit harder to swallow a lack of proof-reading. Still a very strong book though.

After I've read A-Z I might come back here and say how it compares as an introduction to the writer. This is only my second book by her so I cant say how well selected it is.

[Andrew Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection, chosen by friends, colleagues and admirers of the late author, is a great introduction to one of our great speculative short story writers. Tanith Lee effortlessly blends myth, fairytale, science fiction and erotica in a way both subversive and compelling. The stories are also often very witty; in ‘Red as Blood’, for example, Snow White with her unearthly pale skin and blood-red lips is less a fairytale princess than something far more disturbing. That she doesn’t show up in the magic mirror of her desperate, put-upon step-mother is another clue again.
There are loads of great twists like these, although they are very much part of the stories rather than the whole point of them. In ‘The Gorgon’, one of the numerous author characters in the collection (all but one of whom are male) blags his way onto a forbidden island to confront the titular she-demon only to find a charming, beguiling woman who happens to wear a mask all the time. There is a great sense of lost potential in the relationship between these two; the male character is extremely well-drawn: he knows he is vain and arrogant, but the knowledge does nothing to stop him ruining things with the woman, who has seen and heard it all before. There is a dreadful price to pay of course, but it is not the one we are expecting.
‘Bite-me-Not or Fleur de Fur’ could be a vampire story; equally it is about a love so powerful it transcends species. There are echoes of the final novella in the collection, ‘The Isle is Full of Noises’, which similarly examines a super-charged, transformative eroticism whose consuming nature, while terrifying, is also incredibly seductive.
With her subversive wit, fairytale darkness and linguistic agility, Lee has been rightly compared to Angela Carter; however, a big difference is how beguiling Lee makes her horror. Even when people know what is happening to them, they do not break away because their new experience is so much more meaningful and intense than the hypocritical banality around them.
Not that these stories aren’t scary. ‘The Ghost of the Clock’ is a genuine shocker in the best sense of the word. The snippy, relatable young female protagonist, down on her luck and having to stay with a nightmare aunt in a remote house by the sea, comes up against a phenomenon that reflects the sheer, awful power of the human mind.
There’s a happier, or at least more ambiguous version of the same idea in ‘Jedella Ghost’, in which a young woman who appears to be either a ghost or immortal appears in a small American town at some point in the early twentieth century. Notionally an investigation story, it is about the ways knowledge can bring corruption as well as enlightenment. As is the case with all these tales, the ending is sublime.
‘Medra’ is the most overtly science fictional story in the collection and is set in a hotel in an empty city on a planet inhabited only by the mysterious girl of the title. A young male suitor arrives; does he have a sinister ulterior motive? Well, of course he has, but this being Tanith Lee that’s not the girl’s main problem, or indeed the young man’s. As in ‘The Gorgon’, the woman is a repository of deep and terrible knowledge that brings her no succour, and the young man’s regard is not enough to compensate for it.
As with ‘Medra’, the idea of willpower as a defining universal force is explored in both ‘After the Guillotine’, in which victims of the executioner’s blade find themselves in a limbo defined by last-moment expectations, and ‘Taken At His Word’, in which a rejected writer’s words become physically lethal and vampiric.
It would be tempting to view the latter as wish-fulfilment; Tanith Lee’s career spanned decades and seemed more than usually full of the ups and downs of publishing. However, the stories are never less than generous in spirit. ‘White As Sin, Now’ is a series of fragments of what feels like a lost mythology; familiar and yet achingly strange. Another lost young woman weaves her way through fairytale surroundings filled with other desperate characters whose story seems to have broken up around them. Planned as an experimental piece that could be read in any order – and probably still could be – each little section resonates with another in a similar way to the entire collection.
Despite that cohesion, the stories all feel and sound very different. The male writer in ‘The Crow’ is very different to the one in ‘The Gorgon’; however, in both stories perception is revealed to be limiting, even untrustworthy. ‘The Crow’ explores the transformative nature of art, in terms of an unexpected visual revelation and the way such an experience radically alters the protagonist’s viewpoint. Afterwards, he sees his lover for the narrow-minded person he is and their relationship ends via a detour through the carnal.
The narrator of ‘Cold Fire’ is very different again; he sounds like an extra in ‘Moby Dick’. The younger half-brother of the skipper of a boat tasked by the government to haul an iceberg up to the Arctic, he reveals what it is about the ice that has everyone so worried. ‘Cold Fire’ is one of the more straightforward stories in the collection; its strength is in its mythic simplicity and unique use of language: a kind of colloquial poetry that has you wanting to read it aloud. Then there is the mystery itself: haunting and fantastic, it is one of the many images in this book that stays with you.
This was only meant to be a short review, but the pieces are so inspiring I found I wanted to mention them all. ‘Tanith By Choice’ one of those books you happily recommend to people directly, so I repeat that suggestion here because the storytelling is exquisite.

[A.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

SHITTY no good publication without a functioning Table of Contents.

Hard to rate: 1 star for the publication, 4 for the stories?

I had never heard of her, but read Fleur de Fur in a Vampire anthology and was utterly blown away. I went out and bought this immediately, I was so impressed. She wrote literally hundreds of short stories. COOL! More to collect.

But this is a really poorly formatted edition with words missing, and obvious typos; if the collection was put together to honour her, they have done a really shitty job.

And I am NOT talking about Cold Fire, the story written in patois /dialect so hard to decipher you have to say it out loud to comprehend.

This is the first LINE of Medra:

At the heart of a deserted and partly ruined city, an old hotel rose up eighty-nine storeys into the clear m sunset air.

I hit the M key all the time instead of the comma, and if you know that, you should look for it. First line. Come on...

More:

the only dive thing - instead of live

If von are Medra - should be you

The Prince, comma demanding antics constantly that evening from Heracty, interrupted the dwarf’s study a hundred times. - face palms COMMA??? ffs

More, it seemed set to ob1iterate him. - HOW do you transpose a One for an L?

there are dozens of them; more than I am going to bother to list.

I'll buy more Tanith books but NOT from NewCon press.

Contents:

1. Introduction by Ian Whates

2. Red As Blood - a rework of Snow White - with vampires, crucifixes and holy wafers - mind blown. Of course the mirror cannot see her if she is a vampire.

3. The Gorgon

An arrogant writer intrudes on a Greek Island the locals have told him is out of bounds, and he finds a young woman who wears a mask.

4. Bite-me-Not or Fleur de Fur

Oh my god. Mind blown. Excuse me while I go and BUY all the Tanith Lee books I can find.

What a glorious retelling of a vampire tale with a cursed duke, an innocent scullery maid and a prince with wings like a fallen angel.

It was like a uber fantasy Angela Carter.

Amazing.

5. Jedella Ghost

an interesting idea; an extension of the theory that you are the product of the five people around you all the time. What if they were always young and beautiful? would you never age in a world manipulated to remove death and aging from your knowledge?

6. Medra

A woman and a weapon; alone on a planet, living in an automated hotel, until a ship hovers and a golden man steps off onto her balcony. But what if the woman and the weapon were in the same body?

7. The Ghost of the Clock

An odd ghost story, where an evil aunt takes in her down-on-her luck niece with the intent to make her an unpaid servant. She buys a 'haunted' clock to try to bully her, and inadvertently summons the all too real ghost.

8. Cold Fire

A boat is offered rum and coin to tow an iceberg, but the crew starts to realise there is a frozen dragon inside the iceberg. The government agents have poisoned the rum and only one man does not drink it. He cuts the cables and frees the dragon, who watches him do it.

9. The Crow

A man and his lover discover a ruined villa in the hills, and years later he realises the man who lived there was a famous artist. His lover thought he was a crow magician; can he be both?

10. White As Sin, Now

A fascinating rework of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with a priest, a wolf, a hunter, a prince, a queen, and a lost child.

11. After the Guillotine

Four people sent to blade find themselves in four different places after their death.

12. Taken at His Word

Another kind of vampire; this one made of spite and ink.

13. The Isle is Full of Noises

Yet another vampire story written in a novel palimpsest form- this one is a piano. [yes, I said piano] Perhaps I have read too much Pratchett lately, but I had the image of the accursed piano scuttling about like the enchanted pearwood luggage. She clearly adored Rutger Hauer, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It is a little bit on the nose with the black and white thing. hand wobble.

[Tristan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was created as a tribute to a great writer by close friends and collaborators, who chose examples of the author’s work as being most representative to their minds of her genius, rather than just being a bland “best of” compendium. It is therefore absolutely scandalous that such a book contains so many typographical errors as to be almost unreadable in places. Whereas it was intended as an affectionate homage, it comes across as careless to the point of contemptuousness. Despite the brilliance of most (but not all) of the contents, the book fully deserves the score of 2/5 for ruining the author’s absorbing work.

This collection contains the following stories:

* Red As Blood - a very dreamlike and mysterious vampiric and religious retelling of Snow White.

* The Gorgon - a gorgeously written and philosophical take on the myth of the Gorgon, a really exceptional poetic masterpiece, but it is marred by the poor quality of the edition: random letters are missing from words, so are random words from paragraphs, perhaps more, which is upsetting.

* Bite me Not (or Fleur de Fur) - this is a poetic tale of doomed courts (reminiscent of Gormengast), traditional folk-tale vampires, ineffable love, and tangled fate, with curses, redemption, and retribution, all woven together in a few pages of timeless beauty. Sadly, once more, the appalling typesetting rips through the text like interference marring a radio transmission of a perfect aria.

* Jedella Ghost - like “Gorgon”, this is a reminiscence of a male writer witnessing something extraordinary, which the female author of this tale inhabits remarkably well. (But why make that choice of first person narrator?) This tale is less striking in its imagery, but has a striking concept: can ignorance of ageing or of death grant immortality? Very intriguing.

* Medra - this is a golden-age space opera, mixing space treasure hunters with metaphysics and a cruel love story, where the victim orchestrates her own pain for a higher purpose. And what a powerful line: “Hope is a punishable offence. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.”

* The Ghost of the Clock - this is a very effective, witty ghost story with an unusual, metaphysical twist. This is a master class in creating atmospheric settings and compelling characters in surprisingly few words.

* Cold Fire - this is a somewhat disappointing experimental piece mimicking the use of language of an illiterate, uneducated, recovering alcoholic describing a dragon within a Joseph Conrad style maritime tale, but the poor typography makes me wonder whether this experimental style hides many printing mistakes.

* The Crow - this is a very bizarre unclassifiable story, a reminiscence of a gay man with Jewish and Arabic parentage whose hints of character and backstory are more intriguing than the curious event he relates.

* White as Sin, Now - this is an experimental reworking of a number of folk tales, mainly Snow White, which to my mind overtops itself and fails where “Bite me Not” worked so well.

* After the Guillotine - this is a whimsical musing on belief, afterlife, and love, set during the French Revolution.

* Taken at his Word - this is a wonderfully witty take on vampirism and unconscious revenge, as well as the twin curses of writer’s block and boorish critics. Absolutely brilliant, anarchic and irreverent. One of the best of the collection.

* The Isle is Full of Noises - this is a novella, substantially longer and more complex than the shorter tales of the collection. It’s a formidably sexual vampire story, and a truly surreal one (the vampire takes the shape of a grand piano), with a mixture of bohemian near future sci-fi and post colonial racial tension and decline. Very few stories I have read have been this colourful and flavoursome, if a little overlong and drawn out where a gothic ghost story shock ending would have been appropriate. Very intriguing, exotic, erudite, and befuddling.

[Andromeda M31 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've was over the moon when Immanion Press continued to publish Tanith Lee works after her death. I had been afraid I was going to have to scrounge up beat up copies of her novels in used book stores. Tanith by Choice is a collection of short stories I was happy to get my hands on. The stories are selected by friends and fellow authors, each discussing the relevance of their pick.

After reading this I'm not sure I'm going to bother with any Immanion Press books ever again.

This has clearly not been proof read. The amount of weird errors is shocking. Letters are flat out missing from words and several times I saw a '1' in place of an 'i'. Another review mentioned this might have been an image to text copy error, which I think is likely right. One chapter has the wrong title. It's just messy. I know Immanion Press is a tiny publishing house, but come on.

As for the content, Tanith By Choice contains an odd mix of stories, several of which I own in other collections. Some of these are the very best. Some of these are not too memorable. One I am very glad to now have a copy. Many of these are vampire stories. I keep wondering why they're not in chronological order. Reading through these here brought me back to when I first stumbled across a few of these stories.

Red as Blood, published in 1979, is one of Tanith Lee's inverse fairy tales, with Snow White as a demonic witch. This was first published in a collection of stories known as the 'Sisters Grimmer' my father handed to me in middle school, and was my first introduction to Tanith Lee.

Bite Me Not or Fleur de Fur, written in 1989, I found in a collection of vampire tales in my college library. I borrowed the collection two times just so I could reread this mountain story of a bird monster prince and his paramour.

Ilse of Noises, written in 2000, I read while at Burning Man one year, attempting a sensory deprivation night hiding in my car. This is a odd story of stories held together by a vampire piano.

My favorite in this collection that I had not read before was Cold Fire, written in 2007, selected by non other than Tanith Lee's surviving partner, John Kaine. I'm less of a fan of Kaine, I've never found his covers for Lee's books enticing, but this story of a ship towing an iceburg to the Arctic containing a hidden mythical beast is now seared into my memory.

I could not recommend this edition to anyone outside of a hardcore fan, specifically for the atrocious errors. I will likely try out at least one more Immanion Edition of an older Tanith Lee work, but if it contains the same sloppy editing, I will be sticking to finding better used copies.

[carol mammano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tanith By Choice

Tanith Lee is one of best writers of sci-fi, horror...no, strike that. Tanith Lee is one of the writers, period. She's just brilliant, open the book read any story, they're all wonderful

[Suzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fleur de fur

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up because I had read some strong reviews about her writing and I had never read anything of hers.
Overall, she is definitely a unique writer and I did enjoy most of her stories. Her take on common fantasy and horror tropes was quite different in some cases and I enjoyed a lot of her efforts. The novella at the end was a bit too long but, for the most part, the content was fascinating.