Weirdo Writer #1: Tanith Lee
Doing something new! Each post in this "weirdo writer" series will offer the briefest of thumbnail biographies, a couple of links for reading more, and an image or two.
Of all the authors who've created fiction genres into which I've delved, I would say I most resonate with the worldview of people who have written / who write The Weird. I enjoy all kinds of speculative fiction, but it's only within this specific genre that I encounter written ideas that seem like something I might have thought myself. As for the name, I believe The Weird got its category name from Weird Tales magazine, which in its original incarnation(s) was on newsstands for thirty years beginning in the 1920s. `
The one element of The Weird which earmarks it as special for me is the sense of a mysterious driving force behind what happens during the story. I find this very different from other points of view. The strange happenings in The Weird is not necessarily set in a grim void of random meaningless, nor arethey the work of demons or brought on by the wrath of God. There might be considerable human wickedness happening, but that's generally an effect, not the cause of the trouble.
Sometimes within a modern weird story there's a whiff of Lovecraftian hidden evil lurking so deeply in universal consciousness that it cannot link to the modern mind. The plot may involve mad science or alien intelligences or strange emanations from the Earth itself. These things are more like tools of whatever is causing the events, again not the cause. So many questions lurk within The Weird: When did the strange events start? When will they end? Is there any reason or purpose to it all? Are these events connected to anything in the non-weird world? Does anyone at all even know??
An obvious overlap exists between The Weird and the world of horror. One of the weirdest stories I've ever read in my life -- like Bram Stoker weird -- first appeared in a commemorative magazine given out at the 2010 World Horror Convention held in Brighton, England. This publication, called Brighton Shock, contained the novelette "The Black and White Sky," by Tanith Lee.
"The Black and White Sky," like Daphne Du Maurier's "The Birds," is a tale of nature gone awry. If you want a full summary of the plot, you can go to this blog post. But I suggest that before you read even cursory critical essays (like this one), you find the novelette and read it for yourself.
"The Black and White Sky" is included in a number of publications edited by Ellen Datlow, including The Year's Best Horror, Volume Three (2011), as well one of Datlow's best-of-the-best anthologies.
You can also find the long story in this collection of Tanith Lee's work:
Now, a bit about Tanith Lee herself. If you're been wondering if that was a pen name, it wasn't. And f you want to know who'd name their daughter, born in 1947, "Tanith," the answer of course is : creative types. Lee's parents were traveling performers, dancers who gave public exhibitions of ballroom style.
This meant of course that young Tanith moved, with her family, from place to place and enrolled in school after school. Given the unchanging nature of girl societies, it's unsurprising to find mentions in interviews with Lee (who passed away in 2015 at age 67) of the bullying she experienced while young. Surely childhood victimization must be one of the foundational motivations of authors who pen tales of The Weird.
Most of Tanith Lee's author photos were dramatic. She was Goth before there was Goth. But looking at Lee's eyes in this photo, I find that there's something there -- the shape of the eye, the intensity of the gaze -- which can't be created by mascara upsweeps. Those are, I believe, the eyes of someone who sees things others don't, whether she wants to or not.
Lee was prolific (close to a hundred books), popular with readers, often on bestseller lists, and yet. . . her writing life was complex. She was born ten years before I was, and I well remember how limited the scope of women's career life was when I was a girl. I assume Lee had a third of the support and choices I had. She began with writing horror stories in the late 1960s, then wrote some dragon-and-castle books for young readers. Big changes came in the middle 70s, with the opportunities brought by mass market paperbacks (especially those from DAW). At last, Lee could quit work as a librarian to write full-time. She was a very busy author, with more than one series going at a time and her name was on book covers everywhere.
And then the work dried up. The paperback publishers were losing money, not making it, and Lee would query publishing houses she'd once written for, and was lucky to get a refusal instead of silence. But then. . . the internet. And you know where you could find lots of alienated people with unusual, fantastic, futuristic readers? People who have been bullied and excluded from childhood on? People with odd dreams that they'd like to see turned into stories? Cyberspace access made Tanith Lee incredibly popular all over the world. There were digital reissues of oaoerbacks which hadn't been reprinted for a long time. And Lee busily wrote new stuff, even when health challenges took their toll as the author moved through her sixties.
I'll close with this photo of Tanith Lee and her husband, John Kaline. He looks like a character from one of Tanith's books. Wonder if she could have somehow. . . Well, I imagine weirder things have happened.
Of all the authors who've created fiction genres into which I've delved, I would say I most resonate with the worldview of people who have written / who write The Weird. I enjoy all kinds of speculative fiction, but it's only within this specific genre that I encounter written ideas that seem like something I might have thought myself. As for the name, I believe The Weird got its category name from Weird Tales magazine, which in its original incarnation(s) was on newsstands for thirty years beginning in the 1920s. `
The one element of The Weird which earmarks it as special for me is the sense of a mysterious driving force behind what happens during the story. I find this very different from other points of view. The strange happenings in The Weird is not necessarily set in a grim void of random meaningless, nor arethey the work of demons or brought on by the wrath of God. There might be considerable human wickedness happening, but that's generally an effect, not the cause of the trouble.
Sometimes within a modern weird story there's a whiff of Lovecraftian hidden evil lurking so deeply in universal consciousness that it cannot link to the modern mind. The plot may involve mad science or alien intelligences or strange emanations from the Earth itself. These things are more like tools of whatever is causing the events, again not the cause. So many questions lurk within The Weird: When did the strange events start? When will they end? Is there any reason or purpose to it all? Are these events connected to anything in the non-weird world? Does anyone at all even know??
An obvious overlap exists between The Weird and the world of horror. One of the weirdest stories I've ever read in my life -- like Bram Stoker weird -- first appeared in a commemorative magazine given out at the 2010 World Horror Convention held in Brighton, England. This publication, called Brighton Shock, contained the novelette "The Black and White Sky," by Tanith Lee.
"The Black and White Sky," like Daphne Du Maurier's "The Birds," is a tale of nature gone awry. If you want a full summary of the plot, you can go to this blog post. But I suggest that before you read even cursory critical essays (like this one), you find the novelette and read it for yourself.
"The Black and White Sky" is included in a number of publications edited by Ellen Datlow, including The Year's Best Horror, Volume Three (2011), as well one of Datlow's best-of-the-best anthologies.
You can also find the long story in this collection of Tanith Lee's work:
Now, a bit about Tanith Lee herself. If you're been wondering if that was a pen name, it wasn't. And f you want to know who'd name their daughter, born in 1947, "Tanith," the answer of course is : creative types. Lee's parents were traveling performers, dancers who gave public exhibitions of ballroom style.
This meant of course that young Tanith moved, with her family, from place to place and enrolled in school after school. Given the unchanging nature of girl societies, it's unsurprising to find mentions in interviews with Lee (who passed away in 2015 at age 67) of the bullying she experienced while young. Surely childhood victimization must be one of the foundational motivations of authors who pen tales of The Weird.
Most of Tanith Lee's author photos were dramatic. She was Goth before there was Goth. But looking at Lee's eyes in this photo, I find that there's something there -- the shape of the eye, the intensity of the gaze -- which can't be created by mascara upsweeps. Those are, I believe, the eyes of someone who sees things others don't, whether she wants to or not.
Lee was prolific (close to a hundred books), popular with readers, often on bestseller lists, and yet. . . her writing life was complex. She was born ten years before I was, and I well remember how limited the scope of women's career life was when I was a girl. I assume Lee had a third of the support and choices I had. She began with writing horror stories in the late 1960s, then wrote some dragon-and-castle books for young readers. Big changes came in the middle 70s, with the opportunities brought by mass market paperbacks (especially those from DAW). At last, Lee could quit work as a librarian to write full-time. She was a very busy author, with more than one series going at a time and her name was on book covers everywhere.
And then the work dried up. The paperback publishers were losing money, not making it, and Lee would query publishing houses she'd once written for, and was lucky to get a refusal instead of silence. But then. . . the internet. And you know where you could find lots of alienated people with unusual, fantastic, futuristic readers? People who have been bullied and excluded from childhood on? People with odd dreams that they'd like to see turned into stories? Cyberspace access made Tanith Lee incredibly popular all over the world. There were digital reissues of oaoerbacks which hadn't been reprinted for a long time. And Lee busily wrote new stuff, even when health challenges took their toll as the author moved through her sixties.
I'll close with this photo of Tanith Lee and her husband, John Kaline. He looks like a character from one of Tanith's books. Wonder if she could have somehow. . . Well, I imagine weirder things have happened.
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| Garbo |
You've intrigued me. I fell in love with this genre myself, as a teen, but never went as far in as you did. It started with me after reading We have Always Lived in The Castle. I read lots of Vonnegut, then, too. I think my love of The Weird got shortcircuited after I read The Exorcist, which borderline traumatized me for a long time... But I have had an itch to dip back in to this type of story, lately. Must be the times...
ReplyDeleteIt occurred to me to drop back in here to mention what I should have weeks ago, that I picked up the A TO Z collection - opted for a Kindle version as part of my push for economy of space, and have been on the whole enjoying it.
ReplyDeleteReading this, I recall what subtly put me off of The Weird (not that I'd applied that term at the time) while I was in my teens was that it so often felt like a cheat. My taste in fiction was very detail-oriented, so if something happened I expected, even demanded (indirectly, as it would be the criteria for whether or not I'd return for me) an explanation by the story's end. I recall many times I'd come up with an idea for a story, only to never follow through with it because I didn't have a clear explanation, and often didn't have what I saw as a true resolution in mind. Consequently, over the years, I've often seen others to whom the same ideas occurred go on to write them out as screenplays for tv and movies, often to moderate or better success.
Fortune does not favor the timid.
Skip ahead four decades, and - depending upon who I'd ask - I've either mellowed or been worn down by a world that very often didn't make such demands.
Thanks for this and your other pieces, including the inherent recommendations.