Night's Master by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, to my everlasting shame, I've come to admit that I'd never read anything by Tanith Lee until today.

I mean, it's not like she hadn't been recommended to me endlessly by old friends, or that I was told her lyricism would appeal to me, or that her relentless reliance on different kinds of mythologies and classical hardcore mythologizing in her own literature would probably lay me flat.

Ahem. Well, laid flat with spider demons. I thought, um, maybe? And set aside the desire.

Well, I finally returned here and discovered a wonderfully sadistic mythology surrounding the demon's demon of this world. Granting desires, almost always betraying the hapless human or creature in his care, always being wickedly sexy and cruel.

Did this appeal to me in particular? Well, no, not as such, but the writing is undeniably beautiful. So much so, I'm recalled of early Cat Valente and Angela Slatter and even Gaiman's Sandman. Of course, Tanith Lee wrote this in the seventies, so I've got all of my chronology all mixed up.

I can only assume that Tanith Lee inspired generations of authors after her. Weird, that. :)



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