Sabella, or The Blood Stone by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Martian Chronicle for Adults When I was a teenager, I was in love with Tanith Lee. Her fantasy and sf were plentiful, unpredictable, cruel, scary, sexy! To see how my crush has held up, I’ve taken up my old yellow-paged, yellow-spined DAW paperbacks, rereading some like Kill the Dead (1980) or reading some for the first time, like Sabella: Or the Bloodstone (1980). Sabella is vintage Tanith Lee: a compact, potent brew of gender, sex, death, guilt, pleasure, pain, symbolism, surrealism, and religion, all written in a style that is terse and poetic, elliptical and overwrought: e.g., “It [a church] had an austere whitewashed frame, through which had been stabbed great wounds of windows, like sliced pomegranates, green angelica and blue ink.” The novel takes place in the future on Novo Mars, where certain aspects of our culture appear in a distorted mirror, like an evangelical Reformed Church; Mara the mother of Jesus; “Anice (or is it Alicia)” falling into a “hare’s warren”; self-driving cars; drugs like hashish cigarettes and “mescadrine”; Sin City-like conurbations with bars, “girl-houses,” hyper-markets, and 3-V cinemats, etc. The plot gets going when a charismatic and persistent stalker called Sand Vincent forces himself into the life of the first-person narrator Sabella Quey—a vampire—when she flies to her aunt’s funeral, receives a poisonous inheritance, and then returns to her home, where she’s been living away from cities and keeping a low profile among Martian desert “wolves.” As she tells her story, Sabella recounts how she came to be a vampire after her first menstruation when, disturbed by her body, she took refuge in a quarry tunnel (“which may have been a metaphor for the vagina”), where she found (by chance?) a mysterious “bloodstone” that she made into a pendant that made her a vampire. Her first experience drinking male blood came during a date rape that climaxed in the death of her partner. After that bloody start, she learned how to somewhat restrain her impulses so as to usually avoid killing her partners, how to dump them so they wouldn’t continue to pester her, how to drink deer blood mixed with fruit juice as a (less fulfilling) alternative to human, etc. Throughout her sexual vampiric encounters, the line between victim and victimizer has often been blurry; she has been raped more than once, and, in the case of Sand, there is more to him than meets the eye (which is one reason Sabella tries to discourage him). And I won’t mention Sand’s hot, masculine big brother Jace who shows up asking pointed questions, calling Sabella things like Jezebella, and bulldozing her basement. This being a Tanith Lee book, there is sex, violence, dreamlike scenes, sudden escapes, new identities, provocative dialogue, stunning revelations, fear or acceptance of the other, and intense description (e.g., “His skin smooth and marvelous, his loins blossomed into a single hard fierce flame”). The novel adopts some elements of the vampire tradition (super speed and strength and charisma, vulnerability to sunlight, craving for blood, relation of blood drinking to sex) while rejecting others (inability to cast a shadow or reflection, crucifix phobia, Dr. Van Helsing, turning new vampires). I liked reading the play-like novel, an early example of the sympathetic vampire, though I didn’t enjoy it, as the characters are not so appealing: e.g., “I'm the masochist you supposed me to be. Because I want you to hurt me for what I do to you, I want to expiate my sins with your blows ringing on my flesh.” That said, once I started the novel, I sure couldn’t stop reading it, for it evokes a strange and visceral mood. It minds me of a Ray Bradbury Martian Chronicles story for adults: the question of indigenous vs. colonist Martians, the metaphoric use of sf motifs, the lack of scientific explanations or technological underpinnings, the poetic language, the nightmarish quality. I feel a little more critical of Lee after this one, but I’m still in love with her. What next: Don’t Bite the Sun or Death’s Master?? View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University