Collins also has written a considerable body of
short fiction, the best of which is contained in
Nameless Sins(1994), Knuckles and Tales(2001),
and Dead Roses for a Blue Lady(2002). Her most
successful stories include “The Vargr Rule” (1992),
“Cold Turkey” (1992), “The Needle Men” (1993),
“Avenue X” (1995), and “Catfish Gal Blues”
(1999).
“Come, Lady Death” Peter S. Beagle(1963)
Despite having produced a very small body of work
over the more than 40 years of his career, Peter S.
BEAGLEis one of the most highly respected of all
fantasy writers. His short stories have been even
less frequent than his novels, but this early tale has
become a classic. The setting is 19th-century En-
gland, and the main character is Flora, Lady
Neville, an elderly, extremely rich woman who
dominates London society to such an extent that
even the king would not refuse an invitation to
one of her parties.
Lady Neville realizes one day that she is bored
and decides to resolve the problem by inviting
Death himself to attend her next get together.
After considerable effort to determine the manner
in which Death should be addressed, she faces the
difficulty of delivering the invitation, although
since Death is presumably a nobleman, she con-
cludes that he must live quite close by, since hers is
the best neighborhood in all of London. She hits
upon the idea of giving the invitation to the father
of a dying child, to be delivered when Death ar-
rives to take his due. In due course she receives an
acknowledgment, accepting her invitation. By the
nature of the handwriting, however, she and her
friends conclude that Death is, after all, female.
Death appears in the form of a beautiful young
woman, and the guests are charmed as well as
frightened. The party proceeds as expected, but
only one aging soldier is brave enough to dance
with Death, although when morning approaches
and she announces that it is time for her to leave,
there is a storm of protest at her going, not all of it
genuine. She tells them that she would like to stay
and be human, but to do so she must find someone
from among their company to take her place. She
chooses Lady Neville, having decided that the
woman’s heartless cruelty toward the dying child is
proof that she is suited for the position, which she
identifies as a curse, not a privilege. For her part,
Lady Neville is so bored with life that she offers no
objection.
The concept that the role of Death can be
passed on from individual to individual recurs in
Mort(1987) by Terry PRATCHETT, who uses the de-
vice for darkly humorous purposes, and in the In-
carnations of Immortality series by Piers ANTHONY,
but Beagle’s short story is still its most effective
presentation.The Conan SeriesRobert E. Howard and others
(1932–2004)
The character Conan was first created by Robert
E. HOWARDin 1932 and appeared in one novel
and slightly more than a dozen shorter pieces dur-
ing the four years prior to Howard’s death. Conan
was a brash but powerful barbarian warrior from
Cimmeria in Hyborea, a primitive world presumed
to be in Earth’s past some time following the fall of
Atlantis. Howard showed Conan at various stages
in his life, naive and youthful, seasoned, mature,
and established as king, and fragments of addi-
tional stories survived Howard’s death. Hardcover
publication in the 1930s brought them to the at-
tention of fans and some writers, but not the gen-
eral reading public. They languished in relative
obscurity until the 1960s, when they were brought
back into print in mass market paperback editions.
The existing material was extensively elaborated
by the completion of many of those fragments, pri-
marily by L. Sprague DE CAMPand Lin CARTERand
by the conversion of other stories to feature Conan
in place of the original protagonist. These did ex-
tremely well in book form, and Howard’s reputa-
tion has continued to grow ever since. He was a
remarkably prolific writer and produced a wide va-
riety of work, not all of it fantasy, but most of it re-
cently reprinted in various collections and
cross-collections. Publishers have mixed the
Conan stories into so many combinations that it
may appear that Howard himself wrote much more
material than is actually the case.
Howard’s original stories contain examples of
mild racism at times, but several of these, includ-62 “Come, Lady Death”