1996).
The Corsican Brothers (1844) is a psychological fantasy about the bond between a pair of twins conjoined at birth but surgically separated.
Joseph Balsamo (1846; aka Memoirs of a Physician) began a projected series of novels about a quasi-messianic sorcerer whose Parisian manifestations were to include the famous lifestyle fantasist Count Cagliostro, but the magical element was progressively minimized during its serialization,
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and subsequent items in the series were rationalized. The Woman with the Velvet Necklace (1851; tr. 1897) uses the German fantasist E. T. A. Hoffmann as the central character of an extended version of an urban legend previously fictionalized by Washington Irving. Serialization of the epic novel he intended to be his masterpiece, a wholeheratedly fantastic account of the Wandering Jew entitled Isaac Laquedem, was interrupted in 1853 by Napoleon III’s censors, and he never resumed work on it. The Wolf-Leader (1857) is a folkloristic Faustian fantasy. Some of Dumas’s fantasies for children were translated in The Phantom White Hare and Other Stories (1989).
DU MAURIER, GEORGE (1834–1896). British writer and artist. His novels are sentimental fantasies with a strong element of wish fulfillment. Peter Ibbetson (1892) is an unusually extreme hallucinatory fantasy. The quasi-autobiographical Trilby (1894) remains famous for the sequence featuring the mesmerist Svengali, who turns the tone-deaf heroine into an opera singer. The Martian (1897) also has an element of delusional fantasy.
DUNCAN, DAVE (1933– ). British-born Canadian writer. A Rose-Red City (1987) features a supposedly ideal city with a population drawn from different historical eras. The portal fantasy trilogy comprising The Reluctant Swordsman (1988), The Coming of Wisdom (1988), and The Destiny of the Sword (1988) is stereotypical sword and sorcery.
Two four-volume sequences set in the lavishly populated land of Pan-demia—the first comprising Magic Casement (1990), Faery Lands Forlorn (1991), Perilous Seas (1991), and Emperor and Clown (1991), and the second The Cutting Edge (1992), Upland Outlaws (1993), The Stricken Field (1992), and The Living God (1994)—are more enterprising in their recycling of the familiar materials of commodified fantasy, the element of wit being conspicuously sharpened.
The Reaver Road (1992) and The Hunter’s Haunt (1995) have elements of Arabian fantasy. The Cursed (1995) features a great plague.
The Great Game trilogy of historical fantasies, comprising Past Imperative (1996), Present Tense (1996), and Future Indefinite (1997), makes elaborate use of portals linking alternative worlds in the run-up to World War I. Having reverted briefly to stereotyped sword and sorcery in a trilogy bylined “Ken Hood,” comprising Demon Sword (1995), Demon Rider (1997), and Demon Knight (1998), Duncan settled into his own distinctive brand of lighthearted military fantasy in a
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series whose main sequence, Tales of the King’s Blades, comprises The Gilded Chain (1998), Lord of the Fire Lands (1999), Paragon Lost (2002), Impossible Odds (2003), and The Jaguar Knights (2004). The spin-off King’s Daggers series comprises Sir Stalwart (1999), The Crooked House (2000), and Silvercloak (2001); Sky of Swords (2000) is a prequel.
DUNSANY, LORD (1878–1957). Irish writer who played a vital role in devising and defining the kinds of secondary world that were to become central to modern genre fantasy, contriving a bridge between the writers who influenced him—including contributors to the Celtic revival and the Decadent movement as well as George MacDonald and William Morris—and the Weird Tales writers who were introduced to his method by H. P. Lovecraft’s pastiches. The vignettes in The Gods of Pegana (1905) invented a mythos for a secondary world that was elaborated in the more ambitious Time and the Gods (1906) before flowering into gaudy maturity in the title story of The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), which—together with “The Fortress Unvanquish-able Save for Sacnoth”—pioneered the transformation of traditional chivalric romance into vigorous sword and sorcery fiction.
The stories in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) and The Book of Wonder (1912) became more languidly self-indulgent in their irony, while those in Fifty-one Tales (1915; aka The Food of Death) are slight. The stories in Tales of Wonder (1916; aka The Last Book of Wonder) and Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919) occasionally recapture the spirit of the earlier collections. This material is sampled in numerous collections; almost all of it is reprinted in the omnibuses The Hashish Man and Other Stories (1996) and The Complete Pegana (1998). Dunsany also wrote a number of plays set in similar milieux, beginning with King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior (1910), which was reprinted with others in Five Plays (1914). Plays of Gods and Men (1917), If (1921), Plays of Near and Far (1922), and Alexander and Three Small Plays (1926) also include significant elements of fantasy.
Dunsany’s first novel, The Chronicles of Rodriguez (1922; aka Don Rodriguez of Shadow Valley), is only marginally fantastic, but The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) is a dramatic extended plea for re-enchantment typical in its attitude and method of the postwar period.
The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926) is an impressive immersive fantasy and The Blessing of Pan (1927) a thoughtful intrusive fantasy in the same vein. Few of his subsequent works took fantasy as seriously; most
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of his relevant short-story collections are collections of tall stories narrated by a clubman; the series comprises The Travel Tales of Mr Joseph Jorkens (1931), Mr Jorkens Remembers Africa (1934), Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey (1940), The Fourth Book of Jorkens (1948), and Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey (1954). Alcoholic inspiration also figures large in My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), whose soft-focus adventures in animal fantasy are echoed in the title story of The Man Who Ate the Phoenix (1948) and The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950).
Lin Carter paid tribute to Dunsany’s historical centrality by sampling his work extensively in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy collections At the Edge of the World (1970), Beyond the Fields We Know (1972), and Over the Hills and Far Away (1974). Everett Bleiler also edited a sampler, Gods, Men and Ghosts (1972). In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (2004), ed. S. T. Joshi, includes two previously uncollected items.
DURGIN, DORANNA (1960– ). U.S. writer and wildlife illustrator. Dun Lady’s Jess (1994) features a magical horse changed into a woman; Changespell (1997) and Changespell Legacy (2002) are sequels, and Barrenlands (1998) is a prequel. The couplet comprising Touched by Magic (1996) and Wolf Justice (1998) is more action oriented, as are Wolverine’s Daughter (2000) and Seer’s Blood (2001). A Feral Darkness (2001) is a portal fantasy of the Celtic type, whose heroine accidentally starts a plague.
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EAGER, EDWARD (1911–1964). U.S. writer whose children’s fantasies— Red Head (1951), Mouse Manor (1952), Half Magic (1954), Knight’s Castle (1956), Magic by the Lake (1957), The Time Garden (1958), Magic or Not? (1959), The Well-Wishers (1960), and Seven Day Magic (1962)—are strongly influenced by E. Nesbit’s cautionary wish-fulfillment fantasies.
ECO, UMBERTO (1932– ). Italian scholar whose best-selling historical novel The Name of the Rose (1980; tr. 1983) launched a secondary career that continued in the monumental account of a secret history, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988; tr. 1989), and the baroque, postmodernist metafiction The Island of the Day Before (1994; tr, 1995). The inven-
EDDISON, ERIC RUCKER • 125
tive protagonist of Baudolino (2000; tr. 2002) is the creator of Prester John and the elaborator of many other fancies. See also TRAVELER’S
TALES.
EDDINGS, DAVID (1931– ). U.S. writer. The Belgariad commodified fantasy series comprising Pawn of Prophecy (1982), Queen of Sorcery (1982), Magician’s Gambit (1983), Castle of Wizardry (1984), and Enchanter’s End-Game (1984) became a best seller and was supplemented by a second quintet, the Malloreon, comprising Guardians of the West (1987), King of the Murgos (1988), Demon Lord of Karanda (1988), Sorceress of Darshiva (1989), and The Seeress of Kell (1991). The Ele-nium trilogy com
prising The Diamond Throne (1989), The Ruby Knight (1990), and The Sapphire Rose (1991) lightened the tone with elements borrowed from Cervantes and Perrault; it was followed by a carbon copy comprising Domes of Fire (1992), The Shining Ones (1993), and The Hidden City (1994).
Eddings acknowledged the long-term involvement of his wife Leigh
in his projects by adding her name to his byline when he returned to the world of the Belgariad in the prequel couplet Belgarath the Sorceror (1995) and Polgara the Sorceress (1997), as well as in the “nonfictional”
accessory The Rivan Codex (1998). The Redemption of Althalus (2000) is a picaresque fantasy. The Dreamers quartet was launched with The Elder Gods (2003) and The Treasured One (2004).
EDDISON, ERIC RUCKER. (1882–1945). British civil servant whose contribution to the post–World War I glut of pleas for re-enchantment was the remarkable heroic fantasy The Worm Ouroboros (1922), in which rival populations inhabiting the planet Mercury go to war in the enthusiastic spirit of the Nordic sagas, on which Eddison was an expert (the final scene of his historical novel Styrbiorn the Strong [1926] is set in Valhalla, and he translated Egil’s Saga [1930]). He returned to fantasy of a different kind in a series begun with Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia (1935), an eccentric afterlife fantasy that is broadly Arcadian, although feuds are pursued as zestfully as erotic adventures. It was followed by A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), which includes a highly unorthodox account of the creation of the Earth, but a third volume, The Mezentian Gate (1958), was never completed. Ballantine reprinted all Eddison’s fantasies in the wake of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, on the basis of a conspicuous kinship between the author’s interests and the extraordinarily self-indulgence of their private world-building.
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EDENIC FANTASY. Narrowly defined, Edenic fantasy is a subcategory of biblical fantasy, but the notion of a primal garden has a mythical resonance that extends beyond the story of Adam and Eve, linked to the classical notions of Arcadia. It lies behind such nostalgic fantasies as W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904) and the title novel of Gerald Warre Cornish’s Beneath the Surface and Other Stories (1918). Edenic satires include Mark Twain’s Extracts from Adam’s Diary and John Erskine’s Adam and Eve; more meditative exercises include Rémy de Gourmont’s Lilith, Gerald Bullett’s Eden River, Horace Horsnell’s The Cool of Evening (1942), Anne Chamberlin’s Leaving Eden (1999), and Elsie V. Aidinoff’s The Garden (2004). Fruit from one or other of the trees of knowledge occasionally crops up in intrusive fantasies, as in David Lindsay’s The Violet Apple.
EDGERTON, TERESA (1949– ). U.S. writer. The trilogy comprising Child of Saturn (1989), The Moon in Hiding (1989), and The Work of the Sun (1990) is a modified Celtic fantasy, as is the related one comprising The Castle of the Silver Wheel (1993), The Grail and the Ring (1995), and The Moon and the Thorn (1995). The couplet comprising Goblin Moon (1991) and The Gnome’s Engine (1991) employs a more idiosyncratic alternative historical setting, as does The Queen’s Necklace (2001).
EDGHILL, ROSEMARY (1956– ). U.S. writer in various genres who published her early work as “eluki bes shahar.” Her Bast series
(1994–96) of mysteries features a Wiccan detective; her wholehearted fantasies include the Twelve Treasures series comprising The Sword of Maiden’s Tears (1994), The Cup of Morning Shadows (1995), and The Cloak of Night and Daggers (1997); the timeslip romance Met by Moonlight (1998); and the satire The Warslayer (2002), in which a TV
actress is recruited by otherworldly wizards in search of a hero. The Childeric the Shatterer series, begun with Vengeance of Masks (2003), is also tongue in cheek. Her short fiction is sampled in Paying the Piper at the Gates of Dawn (2003). She has worked on shared world enterprises with Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Mercedes Lackey.
EDWARDS, GRAHAM (1965– ). British writer. The trilogy comprising Dragoncharm (1995), Dragonstorm (1996), and Dragonsflame (1997) is commodified dragon fantasy. The Stone trilogy, comprising Stone & Sky (1999), Stone & Sea (2000), and Stone & Sun (2001), features a vast
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enclosure where history is “stored,” and from which mythical creatures emerge through cracks in its vertical wall; a Victorian naturalist who goes through such a crack eventually gains access to the multiverse.
ELBOZ, STEPHEN (1956– ). British writer in various genres. The House of Rats (1991) is a dark fantasy in which a well-regulated house goes to pot when its master vanishes; the Gothic fantasy The Byzantium Bazaar (1996) is similarly replete with images of decay. The heroine of The Games-Board Map (1993) is trapped in a secondary world compounded out of various games. Ghostlands (1996) features a vicar’s wife who is a witch. In Temmi and the Flying Bears (1998), a baby bear with a broken wing is rescued from a witch-queen’s castle; Temmi and the Frost Dragon (2002) is a sequel. In the historical fantasy series comprising A Handful of Magic (2000), A Land without Magic (2001), A Wild Kind of Magic (2001), and An Ocean of Magic (2003), English magic is threatened by the advancement of 19th-century science.
ELF. A term that entered English from Saxon and Nordic sources, in which it signified a kind of dwarf. It then merged with Celtic notions of mischievous “little people,” such as brownies and leprechauns. In
Anglo-Norman writings, Saxon/Celtic elves were further merged with French images of fées (fairies). By the time literary works like Johann Ludwig Tieck’s The Elves, Charles Nodier’s Trilby, and James Hogg’s The Brownie of Bodsbeck were produced, these various terms were hardly distinguishable, although subsequent folklorists like Thomas Keightley and K. M. Briggs made heroic efforts to do so. “Elfland” became a popular literary synonym for Faerie in a British context, its popularity boosted by W. B. Yeats’s reference to “the Horns of Elfland” and Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Such re-ennobling exercises prepared the way for J. R. R. Tolkien to populate his works with a superior race of tall, aristicratic, and slightly ethereal elves who became prototypical of many similar races in genre fantasy and role-playing games. Not all American elves fit this stereotype; alternative images are developed in Jane Louise Curry’s accounts of relocated Welsh elves and in such works as Jan Carr’s The Elf of Union Square (2004).
ELIADE, MIRCEA (1907–1986). Rumanian scholar long resident in the United States, a prolific writer on religion, mythology, and occult science. These interests inform and permeate his contes philosophiques
and metaphysical fantasies, some of which are translated in Two Tales
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of the Occult (1940; tr. 1970; aka Two Strange Tales), Fantastic Tales (1948–52; tr. 1969), Tales of the Sacred and the Supernatural (1962–76; tr. 1981), and Youth without Youth and Other Novellas (1976–80; tr.
1988). They add marginal substance to the novels The Forbidden Forest (1955; tr. 1978) and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (1968; tr. 1979).
Much of his work in this vein remains untranslated, but he is a figure of central importance in the evolution of 20th-century literary fantasy, comparable to Herman Hesse and Italo Calvino.
ELLIOTT, KATE (1958– ). Name adopted by U.S. writer Alis A. Ras-mussen, who wrote the portal fantasy The Labyrinth Gate (1988) and the feminized planetary romance trilogy comprising A Passage of Stars, Revolution’s Shore, and The Price of Ransom (all 1990) under her own name. She achieved greater success with the commodified Crown of Stars series, comprising King’s Dragon (1997), Prince of Dogs (1998), The Burning Stone (1999), Child of Flame (2000), and The Gathering Storm (2002), in which seemingly extinct elves play a significant posthumous role in the fortunes of a secondary world.
ELLISON, HARLAN (1934– ). U.S. short-story writer in various genres (refer to HDSFL and HDHL). Most of the stories in his earlier collections, including Ellison Wonderland (1962), Paingod and Other Delusions (1967), and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967), employ the trappings of sf, but those in Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (1975), Strange Wine (1
978), and Shatterday (1980) mostly discard that apparatus in favor of straightforward fabulation. His work varies from poignant contes cruels like “Pretty Maggy Moneyeyes”
(1967) through intense psychological fantasies like “Shatterday”
(1975) to sentimental fantasies like “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty” (1970) and “Paladin of the Lost Hour” (1985). The Essential Ellison (1987) is a capacious sampler.
ELROD, P. N. (?– ). U.S. writer who pioneered hybrid/vampire detective fiction in the Vampire Files series, comprising Bloodlist (1990), Lifeblood (1990), Bloodcircle (1990), Art in the Blood (1991), Fire in the Blood (1991), Blood on the Water (1992), A Chill in the Blood (1998), The Dark Sleep (1999), Lady Crymsyn (2000), and Cold Streets (2003). The Strahd series of historical vampire fantasies comprises The Memoirs of a Vampire (1993) and The War against Azalin (1998). The Barrett series, comprising Red Death (1993), Death and the Maiden (1994), Death Masque (1995), and Dance of Death (1996), is similar to
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the Vampire Files. The Ethical Vampires series, written in collaboration with Nigel Bennett and comprising Keeper of the King (1996), His Father’s Son (2001), and Siege Perilous (2004), has an Arthurian/
grail/quest. Quincey Morris, Vampire (2001) is a sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In The Adventures of Myhr (2003), a catman and a wizard wander the multiverse.
EMERSON, RU (1944– ). U.S. writer. The Princess of Flames (1986) and the trilogy comprising To the Haunted Mountains (1987), In the Caves of Exile (1988), and On the Seas of Destiny (1989) are tales of dispossession and recovery, the first leavened with Tarot fantasy and the second employing a cat as narrator. Spellbound (1990) is a historical fantasy subversively transfiguring classic fairy tales. The Night Threads series, comprising The Calling of the Three (1990), The Two in Hiding (1991), One Land, One Duke (1992), The Craft of Light (1993), The Art of the Sword (1994), and the Sword of Power (1996), is a portal fantasy featuring an unusual variety of magic. She wrote The Sword and the Lion (1993), a historical fantasy about the displacement of goddess worship by triumphant patriarchy, as “Roberta Cray.”
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 25
