The Book of the Dead by Tanith Lee | Date: 11 April 2011, 13:02
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Product Description:True to the color motifs of the Paradys Tetralogy, "The Book of the Dead" (third in the series, although I read it last) is subtitled "Le Livre Blanc et Noir" and takes place, for the most part, in the possessed, twilight city of Paradys, the Paris of a darkened alternate world. Other than the common setting and a few literary twists here and there, there is not much to link "The Book of the Dead" to its fellows. (Although I did like the hint that Leocadia, protagonist of "The Book of the Mad," was the author of this volume...) With two exceptions, "The Nightmare's Tale" and "The Moon Is A Mask," the eight stories collected in this book are weird and ghoulish, but hardly up to the dark and fascinating standards of the rest of the Tetralogy.
For the sake of the two aforementioned exceptions, I will recommend "The Book of the Dead." These were stories that remained with me after the pages had closed; they had some of that blend of fascination and repulsion, darkness, tragedy, and resolution that so characterizes Paradys. "The Nightmare's Tale" takes place perhaps twenty years after the Paradys equivalent of the French Revolution, when young Jean de St. Jean (possibly a sideways relative of Andre St. Jean, the poet of "The Book of the Damned") learns that the man who sent his parents to the guillotine is still alive and living on the Caribbean island of Black Haissa. Sailing across the ocean in search of revenge, Jean de St. Jean discovers that there is much more to the business of vengeance than he expected, especially when it comes to the price. Though the atmosphere is not the city setting of Paradys, the mystery shrouding Haissa is expertly evoked, Jean de St. Jean made sympathetic even as he gambles his life on an obsessive revenge, and a real sense of the night rises up from the pages. In "The Moon Is A Mask" the storyline returns to Paradys, perhaps around the turn of the century, where an impoverished girl named Elsa Garba comes into possession of a mask of black feathers. By night, the mask allows her to transform into a vampyric owl-harpy, in which form she ranges over the City until dawn; in time a mender named Alain becomes her lover, but their relationship can only end in death. Here Lee's talent is in full force, describing the almost suicidal pleasure that Alain and Elsa derive from each other, Elsa's night flights over the roofs and towers of Paradys, detail and imagery building allusively onto each other until the final, unsettling ending.
The rest of the stories are, if not conventional, hardly as good as anything set in Paradys deserves; their sole saving grace, averting the dreadful condemnation of "mediocre," is Tanith Lee's detailed and evocative writing. Only (and you must remember that this is my opnion, not certain fact; please feel free to read the book!) "The Nightmare's Tale" and "The Moon Is A Mask" hold any real atmosphere or depth. Two stories out of eight, a figure that reduces to one-fourth-the fraction that exactly describes my dislike for the Paradys Tetralogy: three books excellent, one...not. Rest assured: I would hardly say that this book is poor reading-even substandard Tanith Lee is far better than the pinnacles of other authors I could name-but in the wake of such masterpieces as "The Book of the Damned" and "The Book of the Beast," it is a slim and wan offering. Tanith Lee is dazzling. So could "The Book of the Dead" have been.
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