The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  Crossley-Holland’s most original contribution to fantasy literature is a trilogy of historical fantasies set at the end of the 12th century. Their hero takes heart from visions of the Arthurian past that help him to rise above the awful brutality of the conflicts in which he is engaged; it comprises The Seeing Stone (2000), At the Crossing Places (2001), and King of the Middle March (2003).

  CROWLEY, ALEISTER (1875–1947). British occultist who became an exceedingly flamboyant lifestyle fantasist. In 1898, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and soon attempted a takeover, abandoning the resultant splinters in 1908 to form the Argentinum Astrum.

  The inspiration he drew from literary sources included the establishment of his own Rabelaisian Thelema in a Sicilian villa. His early works included many self-published volumes of poetry with mystical and

  mythological themes, including Songs of the Spirit (1898), Tannhäuser; A Story of All Time (1902), the verse drama The Argonauts (1904), and Orpheus: A Lyrical Legend (2 vols. 1905).

  Crowley’s occult fantasies include two volumes of erotica, White Stains: The Literary Remains of George Archibald Bishop, a Neuropath of the Second Empire (1898; rep 1973)—whose first edition was allegedly destroyed—and The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz (1910; 1991). A series of short stories based on James Frazer’s Golden Bough, most of which were published in The International in 1917–18, was belatedly collected as Golden Twigs (1988). Moonchild (1929) is a roman à clef, including characters based on W. B. Yeats and Arthur Machen; in these books, two societies of rival magicians quar-rel over an experiment to incarnate the eponymous supernatural being.

  The Stratagem and Other Stories (1930) includes the graphic posthumous fantasy “The Testament of Magdalen Blair.” A series of occult detective stories was assembled as The Scrutinies of Simon Iff (1987).

  Crowley became the primary model for 20th-century literary images

  of the black magician, appearing in light disguise in W. Somerset

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  Maugham’s The Magician (1908), Edgar Jepson’s No. 19 (1910), and various works by Dion Fortune and Dennis Wheatley; the image was, however, secondhand, borrowed from Éliphas Lévi (whose reincarnation Crowley claimed to be). His literary connections were further complicated when the scholarly fantasist Kenneth Grant “discovered” elaborate parallels between his metaphysical inventions and H. P.

  Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.

  CROWLEY, JOHN (1942– ). U.S. writer. The Deep (1975) and Engine Summer (1976) are hybrids/science fantasies (refer to HDSFL). The magisterial Little, Big (1981) is a definitive contemporary fantasy, which redefines the relationship between the primary world and Faerie both geographically—making it a kind of microcosm—and culturally, as a refuge from and counterweight to the potentially apocalyptic spoliation of the world by the forces represented by the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club. The epic historical fantasy launched in Aegypt (1987)—intended to extend over four volumes, of which the second is Love and Sleep (1994) and the third Daemonomania (2000)—is equally ambitious, weaving the traditions of Renaissance magic and alchemy into a secret history as complex as Little, Big’s. Crowley’s short fiction, including items published earlier in Novelty (1989) and Antiquities: Seven Stories (1993), is fully assembled in Novelties and Souvenirs (2004).

  CRUMEY, ANDREW (1961– ). Scottish writer. Music, in a Foreign Language (1994) is a polished exercise in postmodern/metafiction set in an alternative world. Pfitz (1995) is a similar but more lighthearted endeavor set in the 18th century; its protagonist reappears in “Tales from Rreinnstadt,” one of three linked novellas making up D’Alembert’s Principle (1996), formally exploring the relationship between “Memory, Reason and Imagination.” The similarly three-stranded plot of Mr.

  Mee (2000) reconnects the 18th century with the present in accounts of the search for a lost encyclopedia that had a profound effect on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Mobius Dick (2004) is a surreal account of multiple alternative histories.

  CUNNINGHAM, ELIZABETH (1953– ). U.S. writer from a family of Episcopalian priests; her fantasies react against this tradition with scrupulous politeness. In The Return of the Goddess: A Divine Comedy (1992), the goddess is incarnated as a playdough figure in the hands of the priest’s wife. The Wild Mother (1993) is a contemporary

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  biblical fantasy exploring the eternal triangle of Adam, Eve, and Lilith. How to Spin Gold (1997) transfigures Rumpelstiltskin. The hybrid Magdalen trilogy launched by Daughter of the Shining Isles (2000), to be completed by Holy Whore and The Voice of the Phoenix, has a Celtic heroine.

  CURRY, JANE LOUISE (1937– ). U.S. writer of children’s fiction. Her wide-ranging and inventive fantasies include the Abaloc series, comprising Beneath the Hill (1967), The Change-Child (1969), The Day-breakers (1970), Over the Sea’s Edge (1971), The Birdstones (1977), The Wolves of Aam (1981), and The Shadow Dancers (1983), collectively describing various phases of the 16th-century relocation and gradual adaptation of a community of Welsh elves to America. The Sleepers (1968) is an Arthurian fantasy in which Merlin is freed from his long imprisonment. Mindy’s Mysterious Miniature (1970; aka The House-napper) and The Lost Farm (1974) unravel the mystery of squatters in a doll’s house. The Ice Ghosts Mystery (1972) is similar in spirit. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Time (1975), The Magical Cupboard (1976), Moon Window (1996), and Dark Shade (1998) are timeslip fantasies. Poor Tom’s Ghost (1977) and The Bassumtyte Treasure (1978) offer variants of conventional stereotypes. Me, Myself and I: A Tale of Time Travel (1987) is a zestful account of accumulating paradoxes. The Christmas Knight (1993) is a Christmas fantasy. The Egyptian Box (2002) takes a cautionary approach to the prospect of magical assistance.

  CUSACK, LOUISE (1959– ). Australian writer. The novella “The Goddess and the Geek” (2000) employs a chimerical strategy further developed in the Shadow through Time trilogy comprising Destiny of the Light (2001), Daughter of the Dark (2002), and Glimmer in the Maelstrom (2003). The latter is an afterlife/quest fantasy that moves through a baroque series of quasi-allegorical settings, including the Earthworld of Ennae, the Airworld of Atheyre, the Fireworld of Haddash, and the Waterworld of Magoria (i.e., Earth) to a climactic confrontation with the Serpent of Death.

  CUTTER, LEAH R. (?– ). U.S. writer. The Oriental/historical fantasy Paper Mage (2003) features an original system of magic based in the art of origami. The Caves of Buda (2004), set in Eastern Europe, draws ingeniously on Romany and Jewish folklore, featuring the struggle to maintain a demon in close confinement.

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  DAHL, ROALD (1916–1990). British writer best known for children’s fantasies, although he also wrote numerous contes cruels; TV dramatizations labeled them Tales of the Unexpected. The eponymous race featured in his first short story, “The Gremlins” (1942), were redeployed in Some Time Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948). His career as a fantasist resumed with James and the Giant Peach (1961), an uninhibited wish-fulfillment fantasy. The best-selling Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), which leavened its wish-fulfillment element with ostentatious moralizing, established him as the most popular children’s writer of that era. It was followed by The Magic Finger (1966), Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972), Danny, the Champion of the World (1975), The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1977), The Enormous Crocodile (1978), The Twits (1980), George’s Marvelous Medicine (1981), The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983), The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985), Matilda (1988), Esio Trot (1990), and The Minipins (1991). The stories are blithely excessive in every respect, including their violence, whose absurd grotesquerie turns their horrific element into humor in the tradition of animated cartoons; the direct appeal to daydream extravagance helped make Dahl enormously popular.

  DALKEY, KARA (1953– ). U.S. writer associated with the group founded by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, whose early work was done
for their shared world enterprise. The couplet comprising The Curse of Sagamore (1986) and The Sword of Sagamore (1989) is a humorous/heroic fantasy. The Nightingale (1988) is a transfiguration of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. Euryale (1988) is a classical fantasy. The Oriental fantasy trilogy comprising Goa (1996), Bijapur (1997), and Bhagavati (1998) is set in 16th-century India. The historical fantasies Little Sister (1996), The Heavenward Path (1998), and Genpei (2001) are based on Japanese myths. Steel Rose (1997) and Crystal Sage (1999) are urban fantasies set in Pittsburgh. The Water trilogy comprising Ascension (2002), Reunion (2002), and Transformation (2002) is an Atlantean fantasy featuring “mermyds.”

  DALTON, ANNIE (1948– ). British writer of children’s fiction. Her fantasies are mostly contemporary fantasies following a template laid down in Out of the Ordinary (1988), about unexpected opportunities

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  offered by a summer job. Night Maze (1989) is a dark/alchemical fantasy. The Afterdark Princess (1990) features a mysterious baby-sitter; its sequels are Dreamsnatcher (2001), Midnight Museum (2001), and Rules of Magic (2004). The Alpha Box (1991) features sinister magical music. The Witch Rose (1991) is a magical flower. Naming the Dark (1992) draws material from Atlantean and Arthurian fantasy. Swan Sister (1992) employs a standard fairy tale motif.

  In the Angels Unlimited series, a dead teenager attends a school for angels where the headmaster is Michael; the protagonist returns thereafter to Earth in different historical periods to carry out various mis-sions, complicated by a rule forbidding manifestation in human form.

  The series comprises Winging It (2001), Losing the Plot (2001), Flying High (2001), Calling the Shots, Fogging Over (2002), Fighting Fit (2003), Making Waves (2003), Budding Star (2004), and Keeping It Real (2004). The Lilac Peabody series, featuring a minuscule trainee fairy godmother, is similar; it comprises Lilac Peabody and Sam Sparks, Lilac Peabody and Bella Bright, Lilac Peabody and Charlie Chase, and Lilac Peabody and Honeysuckle Hope (all 2004). Her short fiction is sampled in The Starlight Princess and Other Princess Stories (1999).

  DALTON, JAMES. British writer, all of whose work was published anonymously. The Gentleman in Black (1831) is a humorous/Faustian fantasy, as is The Invisible Gentleman (1833)—the first three-decker fantasy novel—which anticipates F. Anstey in the manner in which the invisible protagonist’s exploits continually go awry. The moralistic tone of these works is echoed in some of the stories in The Old Maid’s Talisman and Other Strange Tales (1834) and “The Beauty Draught” ( Blackwood’s, 1840). Chartley the Fatalist (1831) and The Robber (1832) are Gothic parodies. The Rival Demons (1836) is a comedy in verse.

  DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321). Italian writer who produced one of the key taproot texts of modern fantasy in the Divina Commedia (written 1307–21), whose three parts— Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—

  offer a comprehensive account of the Christian cosmos. Dante’s highly distinctive landscapes—particularly the organization of the Inferno into a series of concentric circles to which different kinds of sinners are as-signed, according to the seriousness of their errors—became fundamental to the imagery of Christian eschatology, reducing all rivals to the status of variants and reactions. For this reason, Dantean fantasy is a prolific and highly significant subgenre of afterlife fantasy.

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  Dante’s whole scheme is recapitulated in Harry Blamires’s trilogy and Santo A. Giampapa’s A Journey in the Otherworld (1964), but selective recyclings are more common; only two components are retained in R. H. Mottram’s couplet The Gentleman of Leisure (1955) and To Hell with Crabb Robinson (1962). Revisited infernos—including those in John Cowper Powys’s Morwyn (1937), Larry Niven and Jerry Pour-nelle’s Inferno (1976), and E. E. Y. Hales’s Chariot of Fire (1977)—far outweigh revisited Paradisos. Recycled Purgatorios are rare; Lord

  Holden’s Purgatory Revisited (1950) is a notable exception. Dantean fantasy is an important medium of illustration, its interpreters ranging from Hieronymous Bosch through William Blake, Gustave Doré and Robert Rauschenberg to Wayne Barlowe, in Barlowe’s Inferno (1998).

  DARK FANTASY. A term sometimes used as a quasi-euphemistic substitute for “horror,” although it is more useful as a description of an ambiguous subgenre of stories that incorporate elements of horror fiction into one or other of the standard formulas of commodified fantasy.

  Most sword and sorcery fiction is dark edged, but Karl Edward Wagner’s work in the subgenre is definitively dark. There is also a dark element in many folktales that can be redeployed in darkening modern fairy tales and heroic fantasies, following a pattern foreshadowed in Robert Browning’s “Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”

  Because commercially defined horror fiction is almost invariably set in the primary world, it is, in effect, a subcategory of contemporary fantasy; horror stories set wholly or partly in secondary worlds—particularly the ultra-decadent fantasies pioneered in Weird Tales by Clark Ashton Smith and other writers of the Lovecraft school—are thus more readily classifiable as dark fantasy. The term is also applicable to intrusive fantasies that are scrupulous in marginalizing the existential unease generated by magical entities drawn from the standard repertoire of fantasy motifs, as in various works by Jonathan Carroll and many diplomatic fantasies for younger readers by such writers as Anne Bishop, Catherine Fisher, Margaret Mahy, and Bridget Wood.

  DARLINGTON, W. A. (1890–1979). British writer whose fantasies are modeled on those of F. Anstey. A series of morale-building sketches written during World War I for Passing Show was recast as the best-selling Alf ’s Button (1919), in which a working-class conscript fails to make good use of a uniform button derived from Aladdin’s lamp. Alf ’s Carpet (1928) is a sequel to the movie version, which had a markedly

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  different ending. World War II inspired a further sequel, Alf ’s New Button (1940). In Wishes Limited (1922), a fairy’s attempts at wish fulfillment are restricted by trade union rules. In Egbert (1924), a barrister is turned into a rhinoceros by an offended wizard.

  DART-THORNTON, CECILIA (?– ). Pseudonym of Australian writer and composer Cecilia Thornton. The Bitterbynde series, comprising The Ill-Made Mute (2001), The Lady of the Sorrows (2002), and The Battle of Evernight (2002), deftly hybridizes Celtic fantasy with other mythical elements—some of them Australian—taking a rather disenchanted view of the syncretic amalgam and eventually inclining toward an

  Odyssean quest for normality. A linked series, The Crowthistle Chronicles, is launched by The Iron Tree (2004).

  DAVID, PETER (1956– ). U.S. writer for various media—including comics—whose early books were bylined “David Peters.” His contemporary fantasy Knight Life (1987) was much expanded for a new edition of 2002, when he added the sequel One Knight Only (2003), in which Arthur launches a quest for the grail from the White House. Sir Apropos of Nothing (2001) takes a similarly sceptical view of the materials of chivalric romance; the humor becomes broader and more extravagantly satirical in its sequels The Woad to Wuin (2002) and Tong Lashing (2003). Fallen Angel (2004) is an enterprising graphic novel.

  DAVIDSON, AVRAM (1923–1993). U.S. writer closely associated with

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which he edited in 1964. Much of his early work was quirky contemporary fantasy, mingled with sf (refer to HDSFL) in the collections Or All the Seas with Oysters (1962), What Strange Stars and Skies (1965), and Strange Seas and Shores (1971). His work thereafter was more strongly biased toward historical fantasy, as exemplified by The Enquiries of Doctor Esterhazy (1975; exp. as The Adventures of Doctor Esterhazy, 1990) and The Redward Edward Papers (1978). Collected Fantasies (1982) is an eclectic sampler, while Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven (2000) specializes in Jewish fantasies. His early novels were less distinctive; Joyleg (1962, with Ward Moore) is a comedy about immortality, while Rogue Dragon (1965) and Clash of the Star-Kings (1966) are hybrid/

  science fantas
ies.

  The ornate proto-alchemical fantasy The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969) recasts the Roman poet Virgil as Vergil Magus; it was intended to be the first in a nine-part series, but only Vergil in Averno (1987)

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  reached print. Peregrine: Primus (1971) is a humorous fantasy with a fortune-seeking hero who was similarly left bereft of anticipated sequels. Ursus of Ultima Thule (1973) and Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (1988, with Grania Davis) are more carefully rounded out. The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil (1998, with Grania Davis) is a dark fantasy about exotic haunters of urban dwellings.

  DAVIES, ROBERTSON (1913–95). Canadian writer. Many of his works are lighthearted calls for re-enchantment with strong metafictional elements. The Salterton Trilogy, comprising Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958), employs a special production of Shakespeare’s Tempest as a transformative device. The Deptford Trilogy, comprising Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975), is a magical mystery informed by Jungian psychology. The Cornish Trilogy, comprising The Rebel Angels (1981), What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988), carries the same cast forward into more explicitly supernatural territory.

  High Spirits (1982) is a collection of ghost stories in the Christmas fantasy tradition. Murther & Walking Spirits (1991) is narrated by a ghost.

  The Cunning Man (1995) features a man of science struggling to reconcile his worldview with the knowledge that he owes his life to a miracle.

  DAYDREAM. A consciously formulated fantasy, often indulged to while away spare time or to give expression to frustrated desires. Daydreams are intensely private possessions that most people are reluctant to dis-close (although several collections of sexual fantasies have reached print), but their content is presumably reflected in a great deal of wish-fulfillment fantasy and fantasies designed to facilitate escape. Daydreams may be used constructively to plan actual encounters or to examine ways in which past encounters might have been better