2025/155: Sabella — Tanith Lee

2025/155: Sabella — Tanith Lee

There are genuine ruins (beware tourist traps) here and there. Thin pillars soaring, levelled foundations crumbling, cracked urns whispering of spilled dusts -- all the Martian dreams that old Mars denied to mankind. [loc. 53]

Another reread, when I was (unsuspectingly) coming down with a migraine: I last read this in the last millennium, and had forgotten much of it. It's a short novel, an SF vampire romance set on Novo Mars -- like original Mars, but pink rather than red, with rapid sunsets and mutated earth-import flora and fauna. 

The novel opens with Sabella Quey receiving an invitation to her aunt's funeral. There's an ominous bequest (her aunt was a devout Christian Revivalist, and knew about Sabella's unsavoury youth) and a gorgeous young man who tracks Sabella back to her isolated home, and does not question her about her aversion to sunlight, or the bottles of red juice ('pomegranate and tomato juice... my physician makes it up for me') in the fridge.

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2025/156: Dreamhunter Duet — Elizabeth Knox

2025/156: Dreamhunter Duet — Elizabeth Knox

'I was finished. I wanted time to stop, and to let me stop with it. And I wanted revenge.
I ... said to the land, 'Bury me, and rise up. Rise up and crush them all.' [loc. 5131]

Rereads, after reading Kings of This World -- which is set in the same alt-Aotearoa-New Zealand, rather later than the Dreamhunter duet, which begins in 1906. My original reviews from (OMG) 2005 and 2007 are here: The Rainbow Opera and The Dream Quake.

The link points to the first of two volumes: the second has only just become available on Amazon.

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