#tanith lee

Since Tanith Lee deserves to be known for much more than having been plagiarized, I thought I'd share some recommendations. She had a HUGE body of work, and I've seen it suggested that the reason she never became a household name in fantasy and science fiction is that she wrote so many things that were different from each other, rather than staying in one easily labeled niche. I've only begun to make a dent in her catalogue, but here's the stuff I liked the best.

Note: A lot of her stuff can be disturbing, and I can't remember everything well enough to give perfect trigger warnings.

Red as Blood and Redder Than Blood: These fairy tale collections are being talked about now for the title story, but my favorite is The Golden Ladder, an incredibly creepy and hot version of Rapunzel, or perhaps When the Clock Strikes, a horrifying beautiful take on Cinderella.

The Weird Tales of Tanith Lee: As you can see, I love her short stories. These are all the ones published in Weird Tales, which includes some of the above fairy tales (including When the Clock Strikes) but also Arthurian, steampunk and science fiction stories. It's a great sampler of all the things she could do.

Blood 20: One more short story collection! This one is (most of) her vampire stories, so I know you goths will like it! There are things erotic, fantastical and grotesque in here, but to me the most haunting is the tragically mundane The Vampire Lover.

The Secret Books of Paradys: In this series, an alternate history of Paris, bad things happen. Supernatural things, sexual things, horrifying things. And sometimes good things happen, such as a man saved by a Jewish sage an his beautiful daughter who then actually converts to Judaism.

The Secret Books of Venus: I've only read the first entry in this similar series about an alternate world version of Venice, but once again it leaves the reader feeling totally transported to this sometimes sinister, sometimes lovely place where romance and cruelty live next door to each other.

Vivia: This tragic medieval plague-influenced vampire story is maybe the darkest thing of hers I've read, but dear god can she paint a picture with words. Along with The Birthgrave (which I didn't like as much), George RR Martin definitely pulled a lot of Danaerys's story from the title character here.

Islands in the Sky: And now for something completely different- a children's book. I remember finding this at the library as a kid and wanting to cry when it was over, because it gave me an equal sense of wonder and happiness as The Lion the Witch and the Wardobe, which I hadn't known was possible and worried would never happen again.

E. J. Clery refers to the Gothic combination of sexual, familial and economic restrictions that creates a constrained environment and forces the heroine to recognise ‘the inescapable bonds of kinship.’ The hidden identities of characters and these ‘inescapable bonds of kinship’ that are linked to sexuality are revealed by endowing kin with either strikingly similar or opposite traits. Relatives are presented as either alike to the point of being interchangeable in looks, name and nature or as stark opposites.

—Jenny diPlacidi, Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression

The Bad Advisor deals with a lot of Wrong Shit; it's pretty much what I do here! Bad Advice trades in People being Wrong, and doing Wrong Stuff. But the most consistently Wrong-est thing that the Bad Advisor has dealt with on this blog lo these 11 (!) years of Bad Advice is the wholly incorrect perception that Neil Gaiman is its author.

I used to find this flattering, even charming, because Neil's fans (among which I counted myself since I started reading the Sandman series in the late 90s) incorrectly perceived his reposts as evidence that this blog was his work, not mine.

This blog is not now, and has never been, the work of Neil Gaiman.

It feels weird to spell it out, but also necessary. Occasionally I have responded to some posters who thought I was Gaiman (there truly have been too many over the years to respond to all of them). But Neil never did so, even in comments on his reposts that praised him for being the Bad Advisor, which he surely knew he was not.

Backstory: the Bad Advisor posted her first Bad Advice almost exactly 11 years ago today. In ensuing years, Bad Advice Nation has been a space of camaraderie and education and mutual support. The Bad Advisor herself (me, Andrea, the person writing this post) has generally shied away from affirmative self-identification; it was more interesting, I thought, to let the Bad Advisor exist as an idea rather than as an individual, even as Bad Advice existed elsewhere (RIP The Establishment) and was in some places attributed to my government name.

One of the first champions of Bad Advice, and arguably the reason Bad Advice originally went viral and garnered the audience it has, is because the sci-fi/fantasy author Neil Gaiman often reposted the blog. I was, initially and at length, flattered and enthused by Neil Gaiman's attention, because I was a near life-long fan of his creations, and thought that his affinity for my writing signaled something important about my talent and creative capacity.

Years ago, because Gaiman knew I was the Bad Advisor, Gaiman even invited me to meet him -- and then failed to deliver on that invite. I wrote it off at the time as a bummer but inevitable experience with fame.

I now suspect I dodged a bullet, knowing what we know about Neil Gaiman's predatory behavior toward women younger than him.

I posted a Bluesky Thread about this whole shebang, and the tl;dr is that it now seems obvious to me that Gaiman would never have even thought to correct posters who attributed my work to him, or credit me my for Bad Advice work, even when he knew people wrongly perceived him as being the Bad Advisor.

Neil Gaiman does not appreciate, celebrate, or lift up women's writing and intellectual work, despite his ill-earned reputation as a feminist man. If you love Sandman, as I once did, the Bad Advisor implores you to avail yourself of the work of Tanith Lee, who Gaiman never credited as inspiration for the story.

It's hard to have heroes. Some of them will fail us, inevitably. We are all broken, fallible people who will fuck up now and again. Some harms are beyond repair, while some harms bring us closer to each other as we persevere through them, together.

But we do not need to entertain fuckery.

Do not entertain fuckery.

She's dead now and it's too late to give her justice.

Twenty-year-old Gen, reading Sandman for the first time, knew that he was just a poor copy of Azhrarn the Beautiful, Lord of Wickedness, and that Death was Azhriaz, and Delirium was very like Chuuz, Lord of Delusion, and that Destiny was nearly a one-to-one copy of Lee's Destiny, and that aesthetically and structurally the Sandman just...stole, hand over hand, from Lee's masterwork. It was obvious.

I just figured nobody cared.