The Book of the Dead (The Secret Books of Paradys, 3)

Rating:
Summary: A very good book, but not her best.
Review: This was the first book of Tanith Lee I read. Immediately, I was striken by the magic of the language and the plot. The eight stories in this volume are excellent examples of Tanith Lee's talent. All the stories are situated in a forgotten French city somewhere in the 17th-century. Led by a mysterious guide, an anonymous I-person visits the ancient graveyard of Paradys. The guide points out eight graves and tells the story that goes with them. The result is a collection of thrilling stories about a vagina with teeth; a quest for a secret valley; a voodoo-dripping horror story; a typical Lee vampire; a plague-woman; the real dream of a girl; a woman called Morcara; and a female artist who posesses a glass dagger. Although the erotic element in these stories is nihil, they each have that undefinable taste of the unreal that Tanith Lee can summon so well. As always, she manages to make me shiver, just by describing the city. There are, however, things I really miss. The extra dimension behind the thrill, for example. After I had read more of her novels, I re-read 'The Book of the Dead' and I was expecting that extra dimension, but was a bit disappointed. This is not Tanith Lee at her best, but it is a very good try.

Rating:
Summary: A mixed bag of black and white...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A mixed bag of black and white...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing after the others...
Review: While I am a devotee of the Paradys books, I read this one last and found it to be the least satisfying in the series. The stories are not bad--I don't think Tanith Lee has ever written anything bad--but, other than their setting in Paradys and their common subject material of the dead, the living, and all the things in between, they have little connection to one another. Some of them would be rather poor indeed without Tanith Lee's beautiful writing to hold them together. (Of course, the fact that she makes them work does say something about her skill as a writer...) In defense of "The Book of the Dead" I should say that I did enjoy reading the stories, and particularly the last one in the book, "The Moon Is A Mask," a tale quite beautiful and tragic: a lonely young woman named Elsa Garbe comes into possession of a feathered mask that allows her, by night, to take the form of an owllike creature and venture forth across the City where she feeds on blood, like a vampire, and finds a relationship of a sort with a man named Alan; his inevitable betrayal sends her to her revenge and her death. Also, mention of this book crops up in the fourth Paradys book, "The Book of the Mad," where this book's authorship is attributed to the artist Leocadia. I found that very cute. There are other connections to the other three books: a descendant of Andre St. Jean of "The Book of the Damned," a man named Philippe who might be Philippe also of "The Book of the Damned," etc...To sum it all up, "The Book of the Dead" may be hardly as good as any of the other three, but it is enjoyable and deserves its own reading. If you long for the black and white companionship of the dead, read and enjoy!