"Black as Ink," "Odds Against the Gods," and "When the Clock Strikes" by Tanith Lee

In 1986 Arkham House, the firm founded to print the work of H. P. Lovecraft and which quickly began publishing other weird and SF writers, released Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee.  Tanith Lee is a favorite here at MPoricus Fiction Log, and there is a scan of Dreams of Dark and Light at the internet archive, so let's read three Lee stories from the volume, stories I selected because I liked the sound of their titles.  But first I'll post links to my blog posts on those eleven of the collection's twenty-three stories that I have already read.

"Cyrion in Wax" and "A Lynx with Lions" :  I wrote "These [Cyrion] stories are good and I liked them, but I didn't love them...."
"Bite-Me-Not, or Fleur de Fur" : I called it a triumph.
"The Gorgon" : "...a pleasure to read."
"Magritte's Secret Agent" : "A strange and unsettling story that, like other Lee stories, surprised me without relying on any kind of gimmick or trickery."
"Medra" : "I like this one quite a bit," I said.
"Nunc Dimittis" : "This is one of Lee's stories in which she romanticizes, or at least makes sympathetic, decadent, perverted, and evil people."
"A Room with a Vie"  : I wrote "This is a story about how horrible family life can be....of course I recommend it."
"Sirriamnis" : "...the story benefits from Lee's pacing; we learn creepy things about Sirriamnis at just the right speed, creating a satisfying mood of impending but unidentifiable doom."
"Wolfland" :  "...a pretty good horror story with many striking images, feminist overtones...[and] outre erotic notes..."
"Written in Water" :  I said it was well-written and surprising.

"Black as Ink" (1983)

It looks like "Black as Ink," which is a little on the long side (isfdb calls it a "novelette"), first appeared in the DAW collection Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer, which back in the '80s enjoyed professional and appropriate covers by Michael Whelan (paperback) and Victoria Poyser (hardcover) and in 2014 was published behind a lame generic cover by George Mayer, typography by a randomly selected street urchin.  "Black as Ink" was apparently inspired by the folktales upon which the famous ballet Swan Lake is based.

Twenty-year-old Viktor's aristocratic family once owned the islands on the lake next to their estate, but now they are in other hands, and from their château Viktor's relatives can see the houses of the contemptible "nouveaux."  This summer, just having graduated from college, Viktor is staying at the château, when he would much rather be in Paris partying and having learned discussions with people his own age than in the country listening to his mother's and his uncle's reminiscences about the old days. 

One night, unaccountably, he hears modern dance music from the islands, and then sees, swimming in the lake, a beautiful naked blonde!  Wow!  The next night, which is moonless, he takes a boat to one of the islands, where he encounters the blonde.  She has clothes on, but Viktor is impressed to find she isn't wearing any cosmetics.  ("There was not a trace of artifice on her....")  She invites him in for tea, saying her uncle is away.  He leaves after an awkward visit, embarrassed and frustrated, she having told him he may not come again.  Viktor tells himself she was boring bourgeois, but of course the truth is he is in love with her.

Drunk the next night, he returns to the island despite the girl's warning, to observe through a window the strange behavior of the blonde and a large man in black, presumably the uncle.  When this big powerful man discovers Viktor spying on them a ferocious fight ensues and Viktor barely escapes with his life--almost drowned in the lake, it takes him months to recover.

Fifteen years later the château has been sold, Viktor's uncle has died, and Viktor career and sex life bore him.  He encounters the strange pair from the island again, and realizes the meaning, both horrible and horribly mundane, of what he saw on the island, what it meant.  And again he is severely beaten, but this time he does not recover.   

A painful tragedy about the terrible things that people endure and the terrible things that people do, the way people prey upon one another, the way those with good luck squander that luck and those with bad luck make desperate decisions in an effort to change their luck, about how we neglect what we have and desire what we lack, only to find that the things we desired bring no satisfaction when we achieve them.  Damn!

As we expect from Lee, the story is lushly written, with many images and metaphors, the way the sun reflects off the lake and the moon appears behind the trees and all that sort of thing.  The whole story is plotted and paced well, with effective surprises and some foreshadowing that chills you when the payoff comes.  Quite good, but I'm warning you, it is depressing.  Another warning: while there are hints that the supernatural is involved, I think Lee undermines all those possibilities, teasing us with the hope that the world contains magic, only to reveal the emptiness of such hopes--we can't blame our problems on devils, and we can't expect angels to solve our problems for us.  Black as ink indeed! 

"Odds Against the Gods" (1977)

In the late 1970s Andrew J. Offutt edited five volumes of original heroic fantasy stories under the series title Swords Against Darkness, and Lee contributed stories to most of them.  "Odds Against the Gods" was in Swords Against Darkness II and appears to have been well-received, being reprinted in Lin Carter's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 4 and some foreign anthologies.  

This is a fun romp about a smart person outwitting people and being outwitted in turn; it kind of reminded me of something Jack Vance might write (Lee is famously a fan of Vance's; see the 2009 New York Times Magazine article on Vance, "The Genre Artist"), the heroine like a sort of female Cugel, the witty dialogue not unlike that in many Vance works.   We might also see "Odds Against the Gods" as a satire of religion and of authority figures in general.

A little orphan girl is left at a very strict all-female religious order whose god is gleam of light that shimmers above an altar.  The girl resents the harsh discipline of the order, and when she is seventeen and another teenaged girl shows up at the temple it is not long before they are caught engaging in lesbian sex and sentenced to death.  Via ruses, disguises, and magical items, the girl escapes execution, achieves revenge on the order and their god, and embarks on a picaresque adventure in a land of deadly monsters, bizarre magic, and strange technologies, an adventure which offers her further opportunities to destroy religious communities and their deities.  

Entertaining.  

Even though it has a cover that reminds you of the sort of thing that might
happen in an eroge game, I think Science Fiction Almanach 1981 is a special issue 
celebrating women writers

"When the Clock Strikes" (1980)

In the early 1980s Weird Tales was briefly revived as a paperback book series edited by Lin Carter.  To the first issue (which has a cover by Tom Barber I think is terrific) Lee contributed the story "When the Clock Strikes;" Arthur Saha included it in The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 8, where he called it "a much darker version" of the story of Cinderella.  In the traditional story of Cinderella, Cinderella is oppressed by her wicked stepmother and stepsisters, but in this version Cinderella is a murderous Devil-worshipping witch!

There is a frame story to "When the Clock Strikes;" the text of the story is the monologue of a person in the (I guess?) 19th century, telling visitors about the inoperative clock in the decrepit palace of a once-flourishing but now decayed northern European walled city.  The narrator relates how, two hundred years ago, a Duke took over the city by having all the members of its hereditary ruling family assassinated.  The Duke, however, left one distant relative the ruling family alive, a beautiful woman who was an expert in the black arts!  She married some hapless merchant and, behind his back, worshipped Satan and made a voodoo doll and used it to inflict a mysterious debilitating illness on the Duke.  In her evil work she was aided by her daughter by the merchant, a stunningly beautiful girl.

When the girl was fourteen the merchant stumbled on his wife's Satanic rituals and she committed suicide.  The teenaged girl successfully hid her involvement in her mother's black schemes, and pretended that the tragedy had broken her mind, obscuring her beauty and diverting attention from herself by smearing ashes on her face and hair every day and staggering around town like a decrepit homeless wretch or a dazed maniac.  The merchant's second wife, a widow, and her two conventional fashion-minded and boy-crazy daughters, tried to help out the apparently insane girl, but their efforts were rebuffed.

At age seventeen the witch girl resumes her mother's campaign of black magic terror!  The Duke finally keels over, and his nineteen-year-old son ascends to the throne and proves a competent and just ruler.  Some months after assuming his office, this generous guy throws a big party, offering free food to the masses in the streets and inviting to a ball in the palace all the prominent families, including that of the innocent but short-sighted merchant.  Aided by demons, the witch girl cleans herself up so she looks impossibly gorgeous and attends the ball, where she uses her beauty and sorcery to drive insane the young ruler and set into motion the events that will result in the total collapse of the city's fortunes.

This story isn't bad, but it feels kind of contrived; Lee just couldn't contort all the components of the traditional Cinderella tale into a story of devil-worshipping murderers in a way that felt authentic and natural, and she didn't take the easy way out of just producing a farcical joke story--like "Black as Ink" this piece is admirably sincere.  Lee goes into detail describing women's clothes and the designs on the palace clock, but these images are just not as interesting as those in "Black as Ink" and "Odds Against the Gods," and the story also lacks the former's real human tragedy and the latter's wit and fun.  Below average for Lee, "When the Clock Strikes" is just OK.       

Among other venues, "When the Clock Strikes" was reprinted in Red as Blood and Marvin Kaye's Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural.  I guess Kaye and Saha liked it more than I did.

**********

"When the Clock Strikes" is a little disappointing, but "Black as Ink" and "Odds Against the Gods" are solid hits that I can strongly recommend--Lee embraces the reality that life is horrible, in one story depicting life as a tragedy for us all and in the other a black comedy in which the clever and fortunate may find opportunities to enjoy seeing their tormentors destroyed.

More Tanith Lee in the future, and more short stories of terror and the weird in our next episode!