The title might give it away to the informed reader approaching it without distraction. And, if not the title, the really attentive reader freed from any distracting thoughts or interruptions might even pick up on the clue planted right there in the opening line: “Yes, the great ballroom is filled only with dust now.” But the ability and perhaps even the desire to approaching fiction with such a lower level of distraction combined with an intensified level of awareness is no longer quite the fashion it once was. As a result, it is quite likely that the typical read coming to Tanith Lee’s “When the Clock Strikes” may well get all the into the story where the narrator observes, “I hazard you have begun to recognize the story by now” before the recognition hits that this story of a mother schooling her daughter in the ways of witchery for the purpose of long-game revenge is one with which they are much more familiar than they ever assumed.
And that point at which the narrator nudges their sense of recognition along is nearly three-thousand words into the tale. The typical reader will likely have picked up on what is going on with this story somewhere between the 2,000-word and the 2500-word mark. The really amazing thing about the story is that even upon realizing where it is going, few are likely to predict exactly how it ends despite knowing how it ends. If sounds illogical, do not worry. Making the familiar seem wondrously strange and new is Tanith Lee’s fundamental strength as a writer of fiction.
And fiction did she write. Her career was like the female equivalent of Stephen King; both becoming iconic examples of the writer whose job really was writing. Productive barely begins to come close to describing her output. As for prolific, her lifetime body of work makes that other writers commonly termed prolific seem like slackers. Even more amazing than her truly monumental literary output from a quantitative perspective is where it ranks qualitatively. Very often writers can be prolific but the quality of the final product varies beyond all imagination. They may write a masterpiece immediately followed by an absolutely embarrassment followed by two works of mere competence before embarking on a deeply flawed near-masterpiece.
Perhaps because Lee preferred to work not just within strict generic conventions, but also to write books as a series, this potential pitfall of productivity is mostly avoided. In 1989, Lee published Women as Demons: The Male Perception of Women Through Space and Time (yes, in case anyone wonders, Lee was a fan of Doctor Who) which is a collection of sixteen short stories connected thematically by the idea expressed in the title. Forests of the Night does that book four better with its twenty stories of fantasy and science fiction tales published in…1989. And then, just for good measure, 1989 also saw the publication of Lee’s novel, The Heroine of the World, about a very young fortune teller who has foreseen greatness for herself. The novel is sort of a fantasy tale, but also sort of a critical deconstruction of certain generic expectations and rules governing fantasy novels. It would be a relief, perhaps, to less productive writers to suggest that 1989 represented something of a outlier in her career, one of those fabulous years when everything was just clicking on on cylinders. The reality is that the productivity of that year is about average for Lee.
Although mostly working within the confines of fantasy and the fantasy spectrum of science fiction, the sheer breadth of the particular topics that found their way into her fiction reveals an author who most likely was constantly in writing mode because she herself was entertained or educated by the very act of creation. The Gods are Thirsty, for instance, demonstrates an interest in history as she creates a way to tell about a story about the French Revolution by centering real-life journalist Camille Desmoulins at its center. Sabella, or the Blood Stone mixes horror and science fiction in the story of an ancient necklace from Mars which transforms a woman into a vampiric entity. Electric Forest takes a peek in a future-is-now of government conspiracies and bionic body part replacements. Among her multiple examples of multiple-volume series are those focusing on the economic disaster caused by flooding the working class with robots and the novels comprising the self-described Piratica Series which takes place, as expected, aboard a pirate ship…but on a parallel version of earth.
Ultimately, one can come right back to the story “When the Clock Strikes” as a perfectly suitable metaphor that covers Lee’s body of work as a whole. It is presented initially as a completely original story of witchcraft and revenge and parenting that very much gives the indication that it could go in a number of different directions. That it eventually pursues a direction that follows the bare outlines of one of the most universally recognized stories in history comes as both a surprise at first and, upon a second reading, as a path that was clearly inevitable. Lee’s distinct talent for taking place the reader into situations that are simultaneously strangely new and comfortingly recognizable is almost unparalleled among her peers. It is talent that is put on display in new and remarkable ways across a truly breathtakingly expansive canon that is well worth the time it takes to wade deeply within.
