Friday, December 26, 2008

Tanith Lee - The Early Books

In times past I was a great fan of Tanith Lee's heroic fantasy books. She is remarkably prolific, producing something like 20 novels in the 1970s alone.

She first came to my notice in 1975 when DAW released her first adult fantasy novel The Birthgrave as a DAW original paperback. I had never before read anything quite like her fantasy, so became addicted to her novels thereafter. As you will see I did collect a great many of her books, though ceased to do so in the late 1980s.

So first up The Birthgrave and its sequels Vazkor, Son of Vazkor and Quest For The White Witch. I recently reread this sequence just to see how they appealed to me today. I decided they were a fun read, definitely not boring and certainly didn't throw them down in disgust. The covers these days look quite exotic with the muscular savage looking men and provocative busty women.

tanith_lee_birthgrave

Cover art by George Barr

tanith_lee_vazkor tanith_lee_witch

Cover art by Gino D'Achille

Next, The Storm Lord and its related novel, Anakire.

tanith_lee_stormlord tanith_lee_anakire

Cover art respectively is by Gino D'Achille and Michael Whelan.

The next two early Tanith Lee books are her dystopian Four Bee novels. These two books of hers are the only ones I regularly reread. I recently reviewed them on my other blog Cat Politics.

The cover art of Don't Bite The Sun is by Brian Froud and Don Maitz did the artwork for Drinking Sapphire Wine.

lee_sun lee_wine

More Tanith Lee will follow soon.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Sadly she died in May of breast cancer.
Kobus

Anne S said...

I did hear that she had passed away and was saddened by the news.