Tanith Lee: "Sea Warg," "A House on Fire," and "Beyond the Sun"

When recently I read Gene Wolfe's sword and sorcery chess and gender roles story "Bloodsport" in Paula Guran's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 2011 Edition, I noticed the book also included a story by Tanith Lee.  Let's check that story out and two other stories from the period by the talented Ms. Lee, who has one of the best prose styles in speculative fiction and regularly stuffs her fiction full to bursting with strange and disturbing images and themes.

"Sea Warg" (2010)

Here's the story from Guran's 2011 "Best of" anthology.  The editor's note in front of "Sea Warg" pessimistically says that we live in an "Age of Solipsism" in which people only care about themselves and only notice another's unhappiness if it has been photographed.  We're in disturbing territory already!

"Sea Warg" is a monster story with an intricate plot which I won't describe in detail here, and two characters with rich backstories, whose histories and personalities I won't exhaustively detail either.  There is also quite a bit of detective business going on, with one character committing monstrous crimes and going through various tergiversations and manipulations to conceal them, and the other using his particular abilities to see through the monster's deceptions and camouflage, collect and interpret clues, and then lay a trap for the monster that destroys it.  There is a lot of plot material here, but the story does not feel long and it doesn't bust your brain--Lee's smooth and evocative prose renders everything easy to digest and quite engrossing.

"Sea Warg" begins with a description of an abandoned pier and a town, once a fashionable seaside resort with a ferry to France, now the decrepit haunt of drug addicts and the dealers who supply them their "skunk" and "crack."  Decay and decline are one of Lee's themes; another is the selfishness hinted at in the little intro.  Related to this solipsism is the idea of alienation--the monster, a sort of aquatic werewolf, is of course an outsider who is callous or cruel to ordinary people, but the man who engineers the destruction of the killer beast is a cold and callous outsider himself who preys upon people in his own fashion and who doesn't slay the monster because he feels any duty to defend society but as a sort of entertaining puzzle.  The trap he springs on the monster snares some innocent ordinary people, and the monster slayer shrugs these casualties off as acceptable collateral damage. 

A great weird tale; I can't think of any flaws in it--five out of five severed hands found washed up on the beach!   

"Sea Warg" was first printed in the 2010 anthology Full Moon City; it can also be found in the 2019 Lee collection A Wolf at the Door and Other Rare Tales.  I'd like to see a scan of Full Moon City as there is a Gene Wolfe story in there, but the scan at the internet archive is no longer operative for able-bodied people.  I guess I could claim I have a disability to get access, but that would be like claiming I had a disability to get extra time on a school exam, or claiming I was a girl so I could compete against young women in some kind of sporting event, and no self-respecting person indulges in such knavish tricks.

"A House on Fire" (2011)

Stephen Jones, indefatigable anthologist, presented to the horror community in 2011 a volume entitled Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead that reprinted a bunch of tales Jones considered classics as well as ten new stories.  Among the reprints are tales by people we read, like Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg, Basil Copper, Ramsey Campbell, and Karl Edward Wagner, so maybe I'll look into this book again.  But today we're reading the original-to-this-volume story by Lee, "A House on Fire."

The epigraph of "A House on Fire" is an excerpt from a fictional book of "legal mysteries," a brief description of how some guy murdered his mistress and then burned down her remote house to hide the evidence.  The authorities were fooled, and judged the woman to have died in the fire which they deemed an accident, but then the killer confessed and was hanged.  The main story of like 27 pages explains why he confessed.

It is the late 19th century.  Slum-born Edwin Onslowe received a considerable inheritance and as an adult lives a life of leisure with his London apartment as his home base.  For some years he has been conducting an affair with Violet North.  Wealthy middle-aged businessman Mr. North spends most of his time in India, the British climate not agreeing with him, leaving his young attractive wife Violet alone in England for long months at a time.  Edwin and Violet only meet a few times a year, and make an elaborate game of their trysts, wearing disguises, putting on fake accents, giving false names at inns and hotels, etc., ostensibly to protect their reputations, but largely because this deception is fun--in fact, Edwin has come to enjoy all this espionage business more than the actual sex.

Via a pseudonymous letter, Violet invites Edwin to one of her husband's remoter properties, a 17th-century country house.  Edwin dons a disguise and boards the train to meet her there, reflecting that this will probably be the last time he meets her--he is tired of her and has just met a 19-year-old woman he thinks he can seduce (Violent is now 27.)  The 17th-century house has a strange effect on Edwin; Violet says it is built on some kind of pagan holy ground, made of bricks and wood collected from holy sites throughout the world, designed and built by carefully vetted men of high character.  Edwin feels like the house is watching him, listening to him, judging him.

After they have sex Violet breaks the news to Edwin--Mr. North has fallen in love with an Indian princess, and is abandoning Christianity and giving Violet a divorce and a huge settlement, including this house.  Violet tells Edwin she is in love with him and now they can get married!  Edwin has never loved Violet, and never suspected Violet loved him, and he wants nothing more to do with her.  His rejection drives her to hysteria.  When she assaults him, he kills her.  Then, to cover his tracks, he burns the house.

Back in London, Edwin is haunted by the smell of smoke, nightmares whose theme is heat, optical illusions when he looks at gas lamps or other fires, and eventually hallucinations of fires.  Things get worse and worse; Edwin goes totally insane and we are told straight out that the dead house is haunting him by making him experience its death--its murder at his hands--again and again.  The police find Edwin collapsed in the street in his nightclothes; he confesses to the murder of Violet and as his execution approaches he seems to welcome death.

"A House on Fire" is good but not great.  I enjoyed all the stuff with the Norths and Edwin's relationship with Violet.  But the escalating haunting of Edwin back in London is kinda long and kinda repetitive.  And the whole idea of a house of goodness that is essentially alive and then seeks revenge is a little silly; Lee suggests the house is a healer and a protector, so why is it on a campaign of vengeance?  Turn the other cheek, house!  

In my humble opinion, if Lee wanted to write a story about a vengeful house, she should have made it the house built by a murderer on the site of a massacre, and if she wanted to write a story about a good goody house, she should have depicted it protecting a woman from murder and reforming the bad guy.   

In 2013 "A House on Fire" was reprinted in the Lee collection Animate Objects.

"Beyond the Sun" (2011)

Over the years, we've read like seven stories from the 2015 Lee collection Blood 20.  Well, here's an eighth.  "Beyond the Sun" made its debut alongside a bunch of stories by people I've never heard of in 2011's Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead; we are reading it in a scan of that very volume.

Here we have a sympathetic vampire story, one that paints vampires as superior beings, as both romantic and tragic; "Beyond the Sun" is a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy for those who dream of being immortal and sexy aristocrats.  The more original and creative part of the story is how Lee speculates on how the super powers vampires have might be utilized in the star hopping future and how this might shape the role of vampires in larger human society.

Our narrator is Anka, though she sometimes writes about herself in the third person.  We learn her life story out of chronological order, in flashbacks as we observe her current work as a terraformer/sunmaker.  

Anka was born into a future world in which vampires were accorded special legal status because they are so useful to society--after all, they are perfect astronauts, able to live without oxygen, fly on their own mental power, see in the dark, etc.  And out in most of space they can work 24/7 because vampires only need sleep when close to the hated rays of a sun.

Vampires in modern society typically have two human companions, blood donors, who act as their source of food.  Having your blood sucked by a vampire is erotically exciting, at least for some people, so there are plenty of people willing to fill these jobs.  Anka, at age 20, becomes one of a handsome vampire's blood donors and falls in love with him; they get married and he turns her into a vampire.  After some decades together, they break up and Anka takes a job flying around the galaxy in a spaceship with her two blood donors, preparing colonies for humans by terraforming planets and creating new suns to warm them.  We hear plenty about how the sex life of this interstellar menage a trois operates and how Anka marvels at the beauty of outer space and planetary surfaces as she flies around at the head of her squadron of robots, directing their terraforming efforts.

The big climax of the story is the revelation that vampires have better dreams than us, that their dreams seem real and occur to them when they are awake, seeing as the vampires in this story do not sleep.  Anka periodically has dreams of having sex with the vampire who turned her into a vampire, and these dreams are the best part of her life but are also heartbreaking and leave her crying in her cabin on her space ship.

"Beyond the Sun" is merely acceptable.  Lee's story lacks tension, didn't surprise me, and failed to make me care what happened to any of its very fortunate characters (if I was a leftie or a religious person I would call them "privileged" or "blessed" instead of "fortunate.")  The plot is kind of boring--the characters don't really face risks or make decisions--and the images and characters are not very engaging or moving--we've got beautiful people living beautiful lives seeing beautiful things.

Not a bad story, but a disappointment considering how fine so many Lee stories are.  Ripe for class and gender analysis, though.  We might say that "Beyond the Sun" has a stereotypical plot designed to appeal to females--a girl is turned into a princess by a man.  (The corresponding stereotypical plot designed to appeal to males is a young man killing a bunch of people or monsters and thereby making himself king--John Carter, Tarzan, and Conan do this sort of thing.)  And then there is all that business of the vampires getting special legal status and lording it over the commoners, whom they can raise to the aristocracy if they see fit.

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It is too bad that the first story we read today was the finest and the last was the least satisfying, but such is life.  

No doubt there will be more Tanith Lee in our future, but first, short stories by other SF authors.