（外文电子版资料）Tanith Lee - The Gorgon.pdf

THE GORGON By Tanith Lee Tanith Lee has been, from the beginning of her remarkable career, one of the best, most sensitive purveyors of Dark Fantasy —that is, someone who understands that a story does not have to be thunderous and explicit throughout in order to succeed on the primary, horror, level. Her people are people, and her settings, fantastical or not, are real. She also is about the best in layering her stories; none are exactly what they seem. This, perhaps more than anything, is what gives Ms. Lee s material that marvelous depth peculiar to her. Not necessarily a philosophical depth, but the kind you find in a black-water lake— deceptive; but its just as terrifying down there as it is up here, and there isnt a damn thing you can do about it once you go under . The Gorgon is yet another example of what a shadow can do; it also won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story . ~~oOo~~ THE SMALL ISLAND, which lay off the larger island of Daphaeu, obviously contained a secret of some sort, and, day by day, and particularly night by night, began to exert an influence on me, so that I must find it out. Daphaeu itself (or more correctly herself, for she was a female country, voluptuous and cruel by turns in the true antique fashion of the Goddess) was hardly enormous. A couple of roads, a tangle of sheep tracks, a precarious, escalating village, rocks and hillsides thatched by blistered grass. All of which overhung an extraordinary sea, unlike any sea which I have encountered elsewhere in Greece. Water which might be mistaken for blueness from a distance, but which, from the harbor or the multitude of caves and coves that undermined the island, revealed itself a clear and succulent green, like milky limes or the bottle glass of certain spirits. On my first morning, having come on to the