In my late teens I borrowed Tanith Lee’s short-story collection Red As Blood from the library. “Nine devilishly twisted fairy tales as the Brothers Grimm never dared to tell them” runs the blurb, hence the slightly laboured subtitle or, Tales from the Sisters Grimmer. While I didn’t enjoy all the stories equally, the book left a positive & lasting overall impression and lingered indistinctly in my memory for decades afterwards.
Last year I bought two other volumes of her short fiction: Tempting the Gods and Hunting the Shadows. It’s commonplace for short story collections to be mixed bags, but in these books I found an unusually (dramatically) wide variance between how much I loved the best stories and how actively I disliked the worst of them. Lee could write very fine prose - with something of a purplish hue - but seems to have been equally content to turn out pulpy pot-boilers. Literary finesse hadn’t been her only yardstick, whereas it was, in retrospect, the only one I had brought along.
Last month I obtained a copy of Red As Blood to re-read, some thirty-seven years on from my first encounter with it. Lee’s revisions, inversions & outright perversions of the traditional tales struck me as more successful (or at least, more enjoyable) than Angela Carter’s traversal of similar terrain in The Bloody Chamber. Again I preferred the slightly more literary pieces (especially the memorably eerie ‘Black as Ink’) to the pulpier ones (e.g. ‘Wolfland’), but on this occasion, helped by the distant echoes coming back from my first encounter with the book, I was more content to go with the flow and enjoy all of the stories on something more like their own terms.
I still have yet to read any of Lee’s novels. If I were to make a start on them I’d have to be selective, as neither free time nor shelf-space are in indefinite supply - and she wrote dozens of the things.