TANITH LEE WRITING AS ESTHER GARBER
Published: 2004-04-01
Total Pages: 412
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Esther Garber is the character/novelist who inhabited Tanith Lee as she wrote Fatal Women, a collection of short novels and stories of lesbian love, both sexual and emotional. The stories' heroes and villains are women. Men, however pleasant - or atrocious - are peripheral to Garber's world. Mothers, grandmothers, peculiar aunts - and female lovers, always live out their lives centre stage. Erotic and sophisticatedly explicit, the motivation behind the histories draws from the psychology of women. But is driven by the reasonless logic of the obsessive heart. About Fatal Women In the Paris of 1900, Phhdre is an assassin. She assists female acquaintances suffering from specific male abuse - by 'removing' the abuser. Phhdre is sexually predatory but emotionally cool. Until she meets Rherlotte de Gillan in the Cemetery of St. Luc. Rherlotte's red-haired beauty and enigmatic, dignified sweetness soak relentlessly through Phhdre's shell, like honey. And soon the two women are joined in a dangerous game that is both courtship and duel. Elsewhere, in the late 1800s, the provincial town of Bois-la-Diane begins to be haunted by the dark, phantasmal creature - Virgile, the professional widow. Laure, bored with rural life, her childhood girlfriend and the disappointing 'ladies club' that holds its scandalous sessions in an old chateau, is instantly hypnotised by Virgile. But Virgile's fee is always death, and not only Laure's, but that of another. Each of the eponymous heroines who people Fatal Women has her own secret - one poisonous and potentially lethal, one bittersweet, and one that concerns perhaps the most priceless painting on earth.