Who Goes There?

This marks Tanith Lee’s third consecutive Halloween appearnace on this site, and why not. I wouldn’t call myself a Lee fan (yet), but as I chip away at her massive body of work I do find more to appreciate. And I do mean massive. Over the span of five decades Lee wrote something like ninety novels and 300 short stories, so we’ll be here for a while. She debuted in the late ’60s, but did not gain attention until midway through the ’70s with novels like The Birthgrave and The Storm Lord. She specialized in horror and dark fantasy at a time when this only just being made possible due to the proliferation of the mass-market paperback; had Lee tried breaking through a decade earlier she would’ve been ten years old or something she would’ve surely been screwed, due to how the market was at the time. But she did get to thrive, and write some nifty fiction while she was at it. “Red as Blood” marked Lee’s first appearance in F&SF, which is weird because it seems like the two were made for each other. No matter. I feel like I’m giving the game away by saying this now, but “Red as Blood” is a pretty neat (if at times confusing) retelling of Snow White, in a way that screams Tanith Lee. Look, dark fantasy retellings were more novel in the ’70s.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1979 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted quite a number of times, including but not limited to The Year’s Best Fantasy: 6 (ed. Lin Carter), Young Monsters (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (ed. Richard Glyn Jones and A. Susan Williams), and the Lee collections Red as Blood, or Tales of the Sisters Grimmer and Tanith by Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee.

Enhancing Image

Once upon a time (it’s that kind of story) there was a king and his queen. The queen gave birth to a daughter, but died in childbirth. The queen (or the Queen) was also kind of an odd woman. “She never came to the window before dusk: she did not like the day.” She had black hair and dressed in a crimson gown, and had made a blood sacrifice (her own blood, not someone else’s) to gift her future daughter with certain traits, “hair black as mine, black as the wood of these warped and arcane trees. Let her have skin like mine, white as this snow. And let her have my mouth, red as my blood.” She got what she wanted, although she wouldn’t live to see her daughter grow up. The daughter is Bianca, and for the past seven years she’s been living with her stepmother, the Witch Queen. The Witch Queen is somehow both a witch and a devout Christian who is repulsed by Bianca’s aversion to churchgoing and Christian symbols; she’d much rather spend time in her garden. The thing is that her problems only just beginning.

So, this is a retelling of Snow White, as in “Snow White” by the Brothers Grimm, although we all know the Disney animated film. Lee would do this multiple times, so much that she made a whole collection of such retellings, but this was still fairly early in her career. The idea of making Bianca (Snow White) a vampire is a novel twist on the classic story. At least in the Disney film the relationship between the Witch Queen and Snow White is unclear, as the former is indeed a queen and the latter is some girl who lives in the woods, whereas in “Red as Blood” Bianca is explicitly the Witch Queen’s stepdaughter; it’s also implied the Queen was a vampire and that Bianca is following in her “true” mother’s footsteps. This is a curious role reversal because in the normal story we would see Bianca as the protagonist and the Witch Queen as the antagonist, but now the Witch Queen is not only the POV character but has the understandable goal of wanting to do something on her vampire daughter. Yet this is not a horror story! It’s dark fantasy, but Lee is not trying to scare us.

I have some theories as to what Lee is going for with this story, because this is not just a case of “What if we told this classic fairy tale but it’s FUCKED UP?,” which makes a lot of fairy tale retellings dull. No, she clearly wrote it with thematic purpose—only I’m not totally sure to what end. There’s a surprising amount of Christian symbolism going on that only intensifies as we get closer to the end. This is also a short story, so there’s only so much ground to cover, and the fact that it’s a fairy tale everyone knows (albeit with a twist or two) means it’s hard to spoil. Lee doesn’t exactly make Bianca’s vampirism a secret, the implications she drops being so heavy as to be fucking anvils. You can’t possibly miss it. But part of the fun of reading this story, aside from the beauty of Lee’s controlled, almost Bible-inspired prose, is seeing the Witch Queen, from her perspective, realize that she has one hell of a problem child on her hands. When she asks her magic mirror what the mirror sees it says it specifically can’t see Bianca. Get it? Vampires don’t have reflections? When her mother was alive there was an epidemic of “wasting sickness” in the kingdom, which was never explained and which they never found a cure for; and when Bianca comes of age (gets her first period), the “wasting sickness” starts up again.

Well this is a problem.

The Witch Queen hires a huntsman to take care of her stepdaughter, but as with the fairy tale it takes all of five minutes for the deal to backfire—only this time Bianca outright kills the huntsman and sucks his blood (he doesn’t seem to mind too much). If I had to quibble about something I do find it concerning that Bianca is depicted (at least analogous to) sexually active and desirable… at 13 years old. This is a recurring thing in ’70s SFF writing and I don’t know if we should blame Michel Foucault or what. It makes me cringe, although for what it’s worth nothing explicit happens in this case. So the huntsman is dead and the Witch Queen has to come up with a plan B, which involves making a deal with a most unusual party: Satan himself. Or more accurately Lucifer, the fallen angel. Lucifer works up a disguise for the Witch Queen that Bianca will be certain to fall for, and we can guess well in advance that the Witch Queen will become an old hag somehow. So. As for the seven dwarves Snow White befriends they’re represented here by trees in Bianca’s garden, which come to life. The only weakness the Witch Queen knows of is that Bianca finds Christian iconography repellant, maybe to the point of it being maybe physically harmful.

There Be Spoilers Here

The climax of “Red as Blood” starts weird and only gets weirder from there, to the point where it becomes honestly mind-bending. The Witch Queen gives Bianca an apple, although it turns out to not be poisoned; instead it contained (I don’t know how, maybe through witch stuff) a wafer, “a fragment of the flesh of Christ.” How Catholic. So Bianca dies and is put in a transparent glass coffin, which may sound familiar, where she lies until a prince (just a prince, from where I don’t know) comes along and revives her. It’s implied, via a mark on his wrist, “like a star,” that he is the embodiment of Christ. (People often forget Jesus would have been nailed through the wrists, not the hands, a mistake even Christmonger and antisemite Mel Gibson makes.) The bad news is that Bianca is back, but it seems the love of the prince transforms her, into a series of birds before time goes backwards to when she was seven years old—only this time not a vampire. The prince had not only reversed time but seemingly cured Bianca of her vampirism. This is… confusing. Obviously it’s meant to be taken as allegorical, and it’s so overtly Christian that I have to wonder if it’s maybe satirical, or maybe if Lee was actually a churchgoer. I’m not sure if she was religious or not, truth be told. The Witch Queen is a Christian who ultimately is in the right, but she also had to seek Lucifer’s help to deal with Bianca’s vampirism, which is certainly odd. It could be that Lee is saying we need that bit of darkness, or that there’s some evil lurking in every one of us. Or maybe, when the chips are down, we must side with a lesser evil.

A Step Farther Out

I’m a bit weary at the idea of reading a whole collection of fairy tale retellings, but as an individual story I think “Red as Blood” is quite strong. Again it’s surprising it took until 1979 for Lee to get published in F&SF, but the pairing was perfect. The more I read Lee the more I understand what she’s going for, which actually makes me wonder if I had treated “Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Fleu” unfairly when I reviewed that a couple years ago. I was not as familiar with Lee at the time.

See you next time.