About this WebMaster
Hi, I´m Gunilla and I live on the south side of the city of Stockholm,
Sweden, along with my man, Henka, and our black cat, the pantress
Diva. I read a lot, have always done so, and some years ago when I
was browsing the bookshelves in a store, a book by Tanith Lee named "Red As Blood"
popped out in front of my eyes. It was subtitled "or tales by the Sisters Grimmer" and
immediately caught my attention, since the classical fairy tales by the Brothers Grim were
some of my first readings. There they were, all those fascinating stories,
retold from a different viewpoint and making the reader take a deep dive,
down into the dark corners of emotion.
The title story is a reversed version of "Snow White" and others are
recognizable as "The Sleeping Beauty", "Pied Piper", "Cinderella" and
"Little Red Riding Hood". In "The Golden Rope" (Rapunzel) the author
introduces us to the ultimate transformation of a very well known concept -
the nature of demons - which later on was going to be the topic of her stories
about the Flat Earth.
In the Flat Earth-series the reader is confronted with the Prince of Demons as he roams the world together with his peers, three of the other Lords of Darkness. They are titled King Death, Prince Madness and King Fate, making their entrance in the second, third and fourth book. Their number, though, is supposed to be five, but the fifth Lord of Darkness hasn´t as yet introduced himself. Will you, please?!
These stories are by far the most intriguing I´ve ever encountered and I highly recommend them to anyone who really loves fantasy. There are numerous other stories in Tanith Lee's works of fantasy and science fiction and I´ve been fortunate enough to have read most of them. This is how I began to focus on this kind of literature - and literature it definitely is - even though some editors still won´t make the effort of arranging proper translations.
Happy reading!
Gunilla Strand
E-mail: gunillastrand@swipnet.se