Personal Darkness

Tanith Lee

This is the second volume in the Blood Opera trilogy, and following up the brilliant Dark Dance is not a task to be taken lightly. Lee makes a good stab at it, but doesn't really come anyway near to pulling it off. The Blood Opera trilogy is something of a family saga, a strangely vampyric family, whose bloodline is based almost entirely on incest. This partially follows the breakaway of one of their members, a young woman called Ruth, the result of the incestuous relationship in the first book. She is on the road, and on the rampage, leaving death in her wake. Harmless, innocent, twelve years old and utterly deadly. She steps into the dark corners of the world and leaves them seeped in blood.

All the while, the remnants of the Scarabae family try and rebuild their lives, and when they are ready, to bring their lost wolf into the fold. It is an enjoyable book, and judged alone it might be seen in a more positive light, but as a sequel it just doesn't hold a candle to the original. It hits a repetitive note for a while, without the story really moving forward, and only really picks up towards the end when all the elements really come together. It may just be a case of the mid-trilogy blues, but the biggest problem is probably the fact that Dark Dance felt so complete that it didn't really need continuation. The stories left to tell pale in comparison to the ones already expressed. This one feels more contemporary, while the other was trapped in a fairy tale nightmare world of its own. Maybe that is the point, the Scarabae now stripped of their power and stranded in a contemporary world in which they don't really fit, but it just doesn't feel quite right. Taken alone it's not a bad book though, once it gets going it moves at a rapid pace. The characters are well drawn and when the shocks come they are genuine and tragic. This is a book by Tanith Lee after all.