May Flowers....Tanith Lee's Blood of Roses

My first introduction to the writing of Tanith Lee was a double-novella compilation (Sometimes After Sunset) I got from the Science Fiction book club. (I loved mail orderbook clubs, especially those that would let you get 12 free books for joining.) The two novellas were Sabella, or the blood stone, a vampire tale, and the other was Kill the Dead.

I loved Tanith Lee's writing from the very start, her lush prose and gorgeous imagery just spoke to me and I embarked on a binge of Lee-reading, hoovering through the local library's collection of DAW paperbacks and then haunting used bookstores for copies of other books. Lee's a prolific writer but I still managed to catch up to her pretty quickly, and I've tracked her work ever since. I'm pretty sure I've read almost everything she's written in the last 20 years. Everything, that is, except for Blood of Roses.

Blood of Roses is another vampire novel and it is almost as hard to find as Jane Gaskell's legendary vampire novel Shiny Narrow Grin. Amazon sells used copies beginning at $30 and new copies for $88 and although I love me some Tanith, that's just a bit out of my price range right now. (Used to be I wouldn't think twice about dropping twice that much in a bookstore but these days I'm full-time freelance and $30 is a tank of gas, or a couple of printer cartridges or some other "mission-critical" item and I just can't justify spending that these days. So it's on the wish list for the days when my KDP royalties become more significant than they are now. Has anyone read it?  I'd love to know what you think.

May flowers...Every rose Has Its Thorn

I was surprised the first time I read an unexpurgated version of Sleeping Beauty and discovered how cruel and bloody a story it really was. (Which made me think how interesting it would be if George R. R. Martin wrote a series of fairy tales reimagined in his Game of Thrones world. Wicked Queen Cersei as any number of horrible stepmothers!  It would geektastic. But I digress.)

I've been thinking about the fairy tale because I'm working on a paranormal version of Sleeping Beauty in which the prick that sends the Princess to sleep is actually the sharp kiss of a vampire bite. I'm not sure how it's all going to work out, but it's a lot of fun working on it. And the rose imagery will be everywhere.

And meanwhile, here's my favorite version of the Poison song "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," the duet from American Idol with Brett Michaels and Casey James.

May Flowers--Flower confidential

I am fascinated by behind-the-scenes stories of various industries, whether it's the "Red Market" trade in organs and bones, and blood or something like the famous expose of the funeral business, like Jessica Mitford's American Way of Death.  turns out the flower business isn't so sweet-smelling either. I ran across Flower Confidential while looking for something else, and it's a book that's now on my wish list.

And if you've ever wondered why those perfect roses you buy for $5 a stem have the fragrance of a fridge-chilled plastic bowl, you'll find out here. This is a book to pique the flower fascination in us all.

May Flowers...Blood and Roses

"April showers bring May flowers" and I thought it might be interesting to blog about flowers this month and how flowers relate to dark fiction in general. Naturally, the first flower that comes to mind when I think of dark fantasy and flowers is the rose. I always liked "Blood and Roses" by the Smithereens (wonder what happened to them) and have a story in a collection of tales of the same name. (the collection is not available on Amazon.com, but the there are a slew of titles that use "blood" and "rose" in them.

There's also a "Blood and Roses" forum community that's connected to a series of paranormal books.  (roses are almost as integral to vampire lore as garlic and crucifixes, which is interesting because in religious iconography, the rose is Mary's flower. It's also associated with Muslim lore and poetry and is also the city symbol of  Islamabad, Pakistan.

I remember reading Margaret Truman's cozy mysteries set in DC an dfor some reason thought that she'd done a "Murder in the Rose Garden" title, but she didn't. (Here's a list of all her books.)  There's an Ellis Peters "Brother Cadfael" mystery called The Rose Rent. there's also a novel called The Blue Rose, that's part of an English Garden Mystery series.  there's just something very mysterious about blue roses, probably because they don't exist in real life. (There are breeders who are getting close but they're not there yet.)  But blood roses just seem dark and strange. Check out this blood rose image by Trivalia.

Z is for Zombie

From: World War Z

If you asked me what my favorite monster is, my answer probably would not be Zombies. And yet, I really enjoyed Zombieland and Warm Bodies, which are at the opposite ends of the zombie movie spectrum and could not be more different from each other if they tried. I've also tried my hand at writing a few zombie stories and Christopher Grant (of A Twist of Noir) indulged my taste in Z fiction by publishing a few of them on his zombie fiction blog, Eaten Alive.  One of the best stories from Eaten Alive was written by the late AJ Hayes. It's called "the End of Our Zombie Days." I was able to tell AJ (I didn't know him well enough to call him "Bill") how much I liked the story when I met him at Noir at the Bar. If you've never read it, it's heart-breaking and it's here.

Y is for Yoshimoto, Banana

I was glad to find out that "Banana" Yoshimoto is a pen name and not one of those unfortunate appellations bestowed at birth by parents who should really, really know better. The writer is pushing 50 now, but she still does teenage angst better than almost anyone, except perhaps S. E. Hinton. Her first novel, Kitchen, was published in 1988 (to wild acclaim and commercial success) and since then, she's been busy, with 12 novels and more than a few collections of essays. Her novel The Lake was published in English in 2010, but it was originally published in 2005. I wonder what she's up to now?

X is for book titles that begin with X

I belong to Goodreads and one of the things I really like about the site and its community is the endless array of lists that the readers have put together. Just out of curiosity, I went over there to see what they had to say about X and I found this list of books with titles beginning in X.turns out the list was created specifically for bloggers doing the A to Z challenge, which I appreciate.  Ihad to go down to number 15 before I hit a book I'd read, Lynn Hamilton's The Xibalba Murders. the first in her series of mysteries about  Lara McClintoch, an archaeologist.  There were 11 books in the series, with the last one coming out in 2007, the year before her death.

As it turns out, the only other book I've read on the list (which includes titles from writers as disparate as Edith Wharton and Andre Norton) is #27, Walter Greatshell's Xombies.