Musings From Oblivion's Vault

Whilst Tanith Lee is rightly celebrated for her many fine novels, I personally think that when she was composing in the short form she excelled . Over the last few years many fine collections of Tanith Lee's short stories have been issued, but this new gathering is particularly poignant because it appears to possibly be the final one that she personally assembled. The theme here is the sea and it weaves through these tales in all its various guises, temperaments and hues.   The earliest story is Paper Boat (1978) based on the final days of Shelley. The opening lines are gloriously feverish: The summer heat had come. It burned the hills to blocks of standing smoke. It filled the bowl of the shore and the spoon of the bay with its opium, it painted the terracotta of the house in progressively darkening washes of red and umber. The sea, a throbbing indigo, pulled itself to the beach and tumbled there as if drugged. The latest work in Legenda Maris are two short pieces

Soliloquy For Pan   Through the amethystine shadows of approaching midsummer, hooves like beaten silver of moonlight whisper softly though the grasses of malachite and the grasses of dark jade; he approaches through the deep beechen shades and through the antique shades of oak ...   The splendour that is Soliloquy For Pan is now available for pre-order from the Egaeus Press website - please click  here  to enter a portal of endless wonders. Including worldwide postage and packing at £35  Soliloquy For Pan is certainly money well spent for such a sumptuous volume of 350 pages of fiction, essays, poetry and numerous olden illustrations.   The violet shadows quiver in ecstatic anticipation of  the great Pan's advent...       Update : The book is now Out of Print from the publisher but should be available from reputable book dealers. However, there may be the possiblity of a second edition at some point.  

"...in flesh ...in smoke ...in dream..." A new story is due out soon in an anthology devoted to Pan and all his various incarnations: the collection is called  Soliloquy For Pan (edited by Mark Beech) and will be issued from that superb imprint  Egaeus Press. The new tale is named 'The House of Pan' and is the fourth story so far to be set in my Duchy of Greywall series, where the Realm of Faery is but the shadow of a leaf away and ancient magic is far from being an old and faded perfume...  For the interested the other stories in the Greywall sequence are: 'The Green Lady Pavilion' ( Haunted Pavilions, 1992; Allurements of Cabochon, 2011 ) , 'A Ghost At The Grange' ( Lichgate 1, 1995 ) and 'The Betrothed of Winter', ( Allurements of Cabochon, 2011) . Hopefully I shall write enough to fill a modest collection one day. I already have my contributor copies of Soliloquy For Pan to hand and as always with this quality small press th

Tanith Lee 19th September 1947 - 24th May 2015 Portrait by Dallas C. Goffin (From a photograph by Jerry Bauer) Something momentous and devastating happened on Sunday 24th May - the Mistress of Delirium, Tanith Lee, passed away. I find it almost impossible to express how much her work has affected me over the 30 or so years I have been reading and absorbing it's richness. I won't attempt to do that at the moment, but I will share the following piece which was written in June 1987 and published in Aklo (edited by Mark Valentine & Roger Dobson) Autumn 1992 . At the time the dedication to Tanith didn't appear, so I'd like to correct that now.   Dreamer's Soliloquy   (Dedication: Tanith Lee 1947-2015)   I shall draw the night from out the west, And wrap it about like a cloak; I will coax dim shadows from haunted woods, And plume my hair with their smoke. I shall take the moon from the curving sky, And hammer it into searing cold ri