Dreams of Dark and Light is a collection of stories by Tanith Lee (1947-2015), published by Arkham House in 1986. This my 51st Arkham House book. There are a few barely imperceptible spots on the outside edges of the pages, but otherwise it’s in good shape. I’d missed out on a couple of bids for other copes this book, so I was somewhat surprised when I ended up with this one. At any rate, I’ve long wanted a copy. So, many years after it was first published, I ended up with my copy at twice the original price.
I own only a handful of paperbacks by Lee (ok, five, but were it not the fact that I avoid paperbacks with broken spines I would own a fair amount more), which is a tiny fraction of her total output of “90 novels and 200 short stories.” She’s one of three authors in Dark Harvest’s first volume of the horror/dark fantasy anthology series, Night Visions. I bought that book many years ago. I’m fairly certain that I read her stories, but since then I’ve read so much that they’ve long vanished into the mists of time. Finding her books in bookstores, at least since the late 1990s and 2000s, however, is almost impossible.
According to an obituary in The Guardian, “her career went through the doldrums, exacerbated by changes in publishing in the 90s and thereafter. [T]hose qualities that had built her career…were liabilities in a publishing world obsessed with strict category and with authors who produce the same reliable product. At one point, she complained that she was writing books because she could do no other, but was stacking them unpublished in a cupboard.” This probably explains why it’s hard to find her books these days, and also makes you curse those publishing changes. I don’t really read modern fantasy, and maybe that’s due to those changes.
Perhaps now is a good time, as I start to read these stories, to take another look at her other books, and those stories of Lee’s in Night Visions 1.
