Search Worlds Without End

Three bizarre, spellbinding novellas comprise the first volume of this series. "Stained with Crimson" is an erotic, horror-filled vampire tale. In "Malice in Saffron," a young girl exacts vengeance against men as a result of being brutally raped, but then tells of her eventual redemption and horrible self-sacrifice. "Empires of Azure" is a grim tale of death and sorcery. The unifying element is the setting: the magical French city of Paradys during the medieval era. Lee's superb imagination and her creative use of language to convey mood has generated three fantastic tales.

Table of Contents:

• Stained with Crimson - (1988) - novella
• Malice in Saffron - (1988) - novella
• Empires of Azure - (1988) - novella

A haunted house and a ghostly woman are the instruments that release an ancient curse upon the forgotten city of Paradys. As a savage, unholy beast prowls the city's streets, a young student seeks to uncover the secrets that will lead to his salvation. Lee infuses this dark tale with a dreamlike quality that hovers, like the world she has created (also seen in The Book of the Damned), on the border of reality.

The ambience of fin de siecle France imbues these eight gothic tales in the third volume in Lee's Secret Books of Paradys tetralogy, tracing the tortured lives once led by those buried in the crypts and cemeteries of the mythical (or forgotten) city of Paradys. "The Weasel Bride" twists a folktale about a man who marries an enchanted weasel and dies of her bite into an account of a young husband who kills his beloved bride on their wedding night and takes her dreadful secret to the gallows. The artist in "The Glass Dagger," who normally saves her emotion for her art, is consumed by jealous rage and turns to supernatural revenge when a jaded aristocrat tries an old stratagem to win her love. In "The Moon Is a Mask" a drudge who creates a world of beauty in her garret room steals to buy a mask that turns her into a vampire owl. The miasma of corruption and death, combined with vivid and at times elegiac writing will engross readers who fancy this dark shade of fantasy writing.

Table of Contents:

• The Weasel Bride - (1991) - shortstory
• The Nightmare's Tale - (1990) - novelette
• Beautiful Lady - (1991) - novelette
• Morcara's Room - (1991) - novelette
• The Marble Web - (1991) - novelette
• Lost in the World - (1991) - novelette
• The Glass Dagger - (1991) - novelette
• The Moon Is a Mask - (1991) - shortstory

The culmination of Lee's horror-fantasy tetralogy (The Book of the Dead, 1992, etc.). The previous entries are composed of related stories, but this one, though elliptically structured, forms a novel in its own right.

In the perpetually mist-shrouded, magical city of Paradise live the twins Felion and Smara, murderers who consider themselves the city's sole sane inhabitants. They hold the keys to a magic labyrinth of ice whose mercurial doorways give entry to an alternate city--scrubbed, bright, high-tech, laid-back Paradis.

Here, hard-drinking visionary painter Leocardia's grand house and fortune were willed to her by the same mysterious uncle who bequeathed the labyrinth to Felion and Smara. A third city, Paradys, lies in Paradis's stark Victorian past; here, beautiful, impressionable adolescent Hilde falls for a narcissistic actor, is raped by him, suffers a breakdown, and is consigned to an asylum where the depraved attendants routinely torment the inmates. Slowly, logically, inevitably, the lives and fates of Felion and Smara, Leocardia, and Hilde converge, with astonishing consequences.

Beautifully woven, with fascinating characters in a compelling narrative, brilliantly set forth in Lee's spare, firm, spiky prose. Sheer enchantment.