Search -
The Book of the Dead (Secret Books of Paradys, Bk 3)
The Book of the Dead - Secret Books of Paradys, Bk 3 Author:Tanith Lee Paradys -- the City -- was a place of decadence and decay, of luxury and lasciviousness, and, after the revolution, a graveyard peopled by the insane and the dead ... and by those who preyed on both. — All who came to Paradys were forever touched by its dread magic -- from the bride bespelled into the body of a weasel ... to the poet whose lust f... more »or vengeance drove him to a distant isle where voodoo held sway ... to the conjurer with a spell that enabled him to master almost everything ... to the woman whose mere presence seemed to herald death's approach ...
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.