Tanith Lee passed away in 2015, and at the time I worried that meant her work would quickly vanish from bookstores.

That hasn’t happened, and it’s mostly due to the efforts of her long-time publisher DAW Books, who over the last three years has gradually been returning some of her most popular work to print in gorgeous new paperback editions, including all five Flat Earth novels, the Wars of Vis trilogy, the Birthgrave trilogy, and the just-released novella collection Companions on the Road. Most have covers by French artist Bastien Lecouffe Deharme (website here).

I’m especially appreciative that DAW also saw fit to release a brand new short story collection of dark fairy tales, Redder Than Blood, last year. It’s a companion volume to Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983), a paperback original published by DAW with a Michael Whelan cover no less than twenty-five years ago (above right).

[Click the images for bigger versions.]

Dark fairy tales were a Tanith Lee specialty, and she wrote a lot of them. Redder Than Blood contains 18 short stories and one novella, “My Life as a Swan.” Most of the stories appeared in Datlow/Winding anthologies like Snow White, Rose Red and Black Heart, Ivory Bones, or in magazines like Weird Tales. Two of the stories have never been previously been published.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

“Redder Than Blood”
“Snow-Drop” (Snow White, Blood Red, 1993)
“Magpied: (Translated from the Germanic-Alurguric Poem of the Same Name)” (Weird Tales, Summer 2013)
“She Sleeps in a Tower” (The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors, 1995)
“Awake” (Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold, 2003)
“Love in Waiting”
“The Reason for Not Going to the Ball (A Letter to Cinderella from Her Stepmother)” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 1996)
“Midnight” (Weird Tales, March-April 2004)
“Empire of Glass” (The Immersion Book of Steampunk, 2011)
“Rapunzel” (Black Heart, Ivory Bones, 2000)
“Open Your Window, Golden Hair” (Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome, 2013)
“Kiss Kiss” (Silver Birch, Blood Moon, 1999)
“Into Gold” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1986)
“Blood-Mantle” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1985)
“Wolfed” (Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, 1998)
“My Life as a Swan” (A Book of Wizards, 2008)
“The Beast” (Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, 1995)
“The Beast and Beauty” (Dark in the Day, 2016)
“Below the Sun Beneath” (Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, 2013)

I was not aware that there was a new Lee collection in the wings before her death, so Redder Than Blood was a complete surprise. I only recently discovered it, in fact, and purchased a copy online a few weeks ago.

The Bantam paperback edition of Companions of the Road (1979, cover by Lou Feck),
and the DAW reprint (June 2018, cover by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme)

After Lee’s death in 2015, we did a series of features on her work, titled The Novels of Tanith Lee. Our complete coverage includes:

The Birthgrave Trilogy
The Collections of Tanith Lee
The Books of Tanith Lee: Companions on the Road
The Novels of Tanith Lee: Days of Grass
The Novels of Tanith Lee: The Secret Books of Paradys
The Novels of Tanith Lee: Tales From the Flat Earth
The Novels of Tanith Lee: The Wars of Vis
Tanith Lee, September 19, 1947 – May 24, 2015
Tanith Lee’s Secret Books of Paradys by Matthew David Surridge
Tanith Lee’s Lionwolf Trilogy by John R. Fultz
Tanith Lee’s “The God Orkrem” & Interview at Fantasy by John R. Fultz

Redder Than Blood was published by DAW Books in April 2017. It is 314 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme.

See all our recent New Treasures here.