James Nicoll Reviews

Tanith Lee’s 1980 Kill the Dead is a secondary world fantasy novel.

Black-clad Parl Dro limps into town with a single purpose in mind: find his way to Ghyste Mortua, the city of the dead, where he will dispatch every lingering ghost he finds there. Despite his relentless determination, he lingers long enough to confront dead Cilny Soban, a decision that will have lingering consequences, not least of which is being saddled with a not especially useful sidekick.

Read more ➤

2013’s Cruel Pink was not Tanith Lee’s last novel (I believe last week’s Zircons May Be Mistaken was her final book) but it is the last Tanith Lee novel I will review in the series A Year of Tanith Lee. I hope the series has been an enjoyable diversion in what has been otherwise a festering bubo of a year.

Five people. One house in old London.

Read more ➤

[Due to a technical issue, this is unedited]

2014’s short novel Ghosteria II: Zircons May Be Mistaken is the second and final volume in Tanith Lee’s Ghosteria duology. 

The decaying stately home has stood for centuries. No living person has entered it in years, not since the Terror of 2020 dragged civilization down into the dark. Living people may never walk the corridors again. Indeed, it is not at all clear humans survived the Terror.

The absence of living people does not mean the mansion is unoccupied. There are still the ghosts.

Read more ➤

2014’s Ghosteria Volume 1: The Stories is the first of two ghost-story collections by Tanith Lee. I wish I’d read this in time for Halloween. 

Read more ➤

2007’s Piratica III: The Family Sea is the third and final volume in Tanith Lee’s Piratica series.

Former pirate turned privateer turned national hero Art Blastside has it all: fame, wealth, and family. If only she could be happy on land. If only she could stop doubting her husband Felix. If only Art could understand why it is she doesn’t love her daughter Africa.

Read more ➤

Tanith Lee’s 2006 Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island is the middle volume of her Piratica trilogy. 

Rescued from the gallows by the adoring mob, reformed pirate Art Blastside has everything society assures her she should want: wealth, position, and her one true love, Felix Phoenix. If there’s one thing of which stories assure us, it is that happy endings and true love are forever. 

If only Felix were Art’s only love. 

Read more ➤

2010’s Disturbed By Her Song is the second of Tanith Lee’s Garber collections (the third work including the novel 34.). Unlike Fatal Women, in which Lee adopted the persona of Jewish lesbian Esther Garber, in this Lee plays at being both Esther and Esther’s half-brother, the half-Arab, half Jew, entirely gay Judas. 

Read more ➤

2004’s Fatal Women is one of three works Tanith Lee wrote under the pen name Esther Gerber. 2004 also saw the publication of the Gerber novel 34, while Disturbed by Her Song came out in 2010. 

Read more ➤

2006’s Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl’s Adventure Upon the High Seas is the first volume in Tanith Lee’s Piratica trilogy. 

An exploding cannon cost Artemesia ​“Art” Fitz-Willoughby Weatherhouse her mother and her memory. At age sixteen, Artemesia regains her lost memories. They explain why she has never fit in at the Angels Academy for Young Maidens: Art is the daughter of Molly Faith, better known as the infamous pirate queen Piratica. 

Escaping from the academy is trivial. So is trading her dress for trousers, her hated surname for the far more satisfactory ​“Blastside.” An encounter with a hapless highwayman provides her with a pistol and a very snappy hat. Luck leads her to stumble across the remnants of Piratica’s old crew. All she needs is a seaworthy boat and Art Blastside can pick up where her mother left off. 

O Sing of the valour o’ a pirate so bold
Who robbed the seas over, and took all the gold
Of captains and traders, from Carrib to Inde,
And slipped by the nets of the Law like the wind 

There is just one small complication. 

Read more ➤

Tanith Lee’s 1989 Forests of the Night is a single-author collection. 

Unlike previous Lee collections, this one includes epigrammatic introductions by Lee herself, introductions that are often more allusive than informative. Forests of the Night overlaps with other collections I have reviewed — but only slightly. 

It includes what may be the single most Tanith-Lee-like short work I have ever read. 

Read more ➤