The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  Significant werewolf stories that lean more toward fantasy than horror include Alexandre Dumas’s Faustian fantasy The Wolf Leader, Saki’s conte cruel “Gabriel-Ernest” (1909), H. Warner Munn’s “The Werewolf of Ponkert,” Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1933), Jack Williamson’s Darker than You Think, Anthony Boucher’s “The Compleat Werewolf” (1940), Richard Lupoff’s Lisa Kane (1976), Peter S. Beagle’s “Lila the Werewolf,” and Patrick Jennings’s The Wolving Time (2003). Although the earliest examples are Rachilde’s La Princesse des ténèbres (1896) and Clemence Housman’s The Werewolf, recent years have seen a spectacular increase in stories by female writers that use the motif as a metaphor for female sexuality; notable examples include works by Tanith Lee, Kelley Armstrong, and Alice Bor-chardt, and Annette Curtis Klaus’s Blood and Chocolate (1997).

  WEST, MICHELLE (1963– ). Pseudonym of Canadian writer Michelle Sagara, who published Into the Dark Lands (1991), Children of the

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  Blood (1992), Lady of Mercy (1993), and Chains of Darkness, Chains of Light (1994) under her own name before relaunching her career.

  The couplet Hunter’s Oath (1995) and Hunter’s Death (1996) feature a journey to an ancient city once ruled by Lord of Hell; the same secondary world is the setting of the epic Sun Sword series, comprising The Broken Crown (1997), The Uncrowned King (1998), The Shining Court (1999), Sea of Sorrows (2001), The Riven Shield (2003), and Sun Sword (2004), in which the awakening of long-dormant ancient powers provokes quests to locate the lost Cities of Man before an apocalyptic battle. Her short fiction is sampled in Speaking with Angels (2003).

  WESTON, JESSIE (1850–1928). British scholar whose strong interest in the possible pre-Christian origins of Arthurian legends—particularly the stories elaborated in The Legend of Sir Perceval (2 vols., 1906–1909), The Quest for the Holy Grail (1913), and several books about Gawain—led her to borrow inspiration from James Frazer in constructing the scholarly fantasy From Ritual to Romance (1920). Her decoding of Arthuriana in terms of fertility cults and long-obliterated matrilineal patterns of inheritance has inspired numerous fantasy writers, including Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gillian Bradshaw, Tim Powers, and Alexander Irvine; it is deftly parodied in David Lodge’s novel Small World (1984).

  WHITBOURN, JOHN (1958– ). English writer specializing in enterprising transfigurations of his homeland. The alternative world fantasy A Dangerous Energy (1992), which is closely akin to Keith Roberts’s Pavane, won a competition sponsored by the BBC and the publisher Gollancz; To Build Jerusalem (1995) is a sequel. Popes and Phantoms (1993) is an equally elaborate but blackly humorous historical fantasy.

  In The Royal Changeling (1998), elves and a villainous version of Arthur help the Duke of Monmouth launch a rebellion following the death of Charles II in an alternative England. In the satirical trilogy comprising The Downs-Lord Dawn (1999), Downs-Lord Day (2000), and Downs-Lord Doomsday (2002), a 17th-century curate is transported to a parallel world where he builds an empire and becomes a god-king before being exiled by angels; his eventual return threatens to precipitate an apocalypse. The short stories making up The Binscombe Tales (1997) are dark fantasy.

  WHITE, E. B. (1899–1985). U.S. humorist who wrote three animal fantasies for children: Stuart Little (1945), about a tiny child; the classic

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  Charlotte’s Web (1952), about the friendship between a pig and a spider; and the offbeat success story The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).

  WHITE, T. H. (1906–1964). Indian-born British writer. Earth Stopped; or, Mr Marx’s Sporting Tour (1934) is a humorous apocalyptic fantasy paying homage to the works of R. S. Surtees, whose addiction to hunting, shooting, and fishing White shared; in the sequel, Gone to Ground (1935), survivors of the catastrophe take psychological refuge in fantasy stories. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is a classic account of the boyhood and education of the future King Arthur. It was followed by the more broadly humorous The Witch in the Wood (1939) and the more earnestly sentimental The Ill-Made Knight (1940), but the publisher refused to issue the projected fourth novel in the series, which would have revealed its epic dimension.

  Once World War II was over, White published Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946), in which a young girl defends descendants of Gulliver’s Lilliputians from commercial exploitation by Hollywood; and The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947), an allegorical comedy in which an atheist, forewarned by an angel, builds an ark in anticipation of a second Deluge. With J. R. R. Tolkien’s crucial precedent in place to prove that quintessentially English epics could form the backcloth of seemingly lighthearted children’s books, White revised The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood—as The Queen of Air and Darkness—and The Ill-Made Knight for incorporation in The Once and Future King (1958) with the previously unpublished The Candle in the Wind. Once again, the publisher omitted a final section, although some sections of it were transplanted into the first part; it was eventually published as The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King (1977).

  Several short stories from Gone to Ground were reprinted with later items in The Maharajah and Other Stories (1981).

  WILDE, OSCAR (1854–1900). Anglo-Irish writer best known for the plays he wrote in 1891–95. He was the central figure of the English Decadent movement and its chief theorist; “The Decay of Lying”

  (1891) is a deceptively lighthearted tirade against the disenchanting effects of narrative realism. Poems (1881) is redolent with lush fantastic imagery, whose expression reached its zenith in that medium in The Sphinx (1894). “The Canterville Ghost” (1887), a classic fusion of humorous and sentimental fantasy, was reprinted in Lord Arthur Savile’s

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  Crime and Other Stories (1891); its 1887 title story employs the sparkling wit for which Wilde became famous as a sarcastic gloss on the hapless protagonist’s attempts to cheat destiny.

  The children’s fantasies in The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) are subtly embellished with a cynical irony most evident in “The Nightingale and the Rose.” The four stories in A House of Pomegranates (1891) extrapolate this trend to its extreme; “The Young King” (1888) refuses the regalia of his office after discovering the hardships that his people endured in paying for his coronation, but no one respects his decision.

  In “The Birthday of the Infanta”(1889), a similarly ostentatious display of callous wealth is the background to a harrowing tale of disillusion-ment. In the Hans Christian Andersen–influenced “The Fisherman and His Soul,” the soul the fisherman rejects in order to marry a mermaid soul returns periodically to tempt him with visions of a world full of exotic promise, but their eventual reunion is tragic. “The Star-Child” tracks the tribulations of an infant betrayed by delusions of grandeur.

  Wilde’s most extravagant decadent fantasy, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a Faustian fantasy involving a painted doppelgänger.

  He wrote the play Salome (1893; tr. 1894) in French, with stylistic assistance from Marcel Schwob and Pierre Louÿs; it was produced in Paris in 1896 after being refused a license for English production in 1892. The longest item in a cycle of Poems in Prose (1893–94; book 1905) is a curiously plaintive Christian fantasy. Following his imprisonment after the collapse of his libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry and his subsequent prosecution for gross indecency, Wilde wrote nothing except The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), although an intensely bitter moralistic fantasy he improvised orally was reproduced by Laurence Housman in Echo de Paris (1923). Jeremy Reed’s Dorian, Rick R. Reed’s A Face without a Heart (2000), and Will Self’s Dorian update the story of Dorian Gray.

  WILDER, CHERRY (1930–2002). Pseudonym of New Zealand–born

  writer Cherry Barbara Lockett Grimm. Most of her work is sf (refer to HDSFL), but the trilogy comprising A Princess of the Chameln (1984), Yorath the Wolf (1984), and The Summer’s King (1986) is a polished heroic fantasy. Her short fiction, much of it cleverly
hybridizing sf and mythical fantasy, is sampled in Dealers in Light and Darkness (1995).

  WILKINS, VAUGHAN (1890–1959). Welsh writer. After Bath; or, The Remarkable Case of the Flying Hat (1945) is a children’s fantasy, and

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  the lost-race story The City of Frozen Fire (1950) was also marketed for children, although Wilkins always listed it with his adult novels. Its Celtic fantasy elements were more enterprisingly extrapolated in the elegiac portal fantasy Valley beyond Time (1955).

  WILLARD, NANCY (1936– ). U.S. writer and scholar. Much of her fiction and poetry is for younger children. Three delicately polished fantasies collected in Sailing to Cythera and Other Anatole Stories (1974) were supplemented by the novellas The Island of the Grass King: The Further Adventures of Anatole (1979) and the marvelously phantasmagoric Uncle Terrible: More Adventures of Anatole (1982). The same artful combination of literary style and visionary extravagance is displayed in A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers (1981); similar homage to other influences is paid in The Voyage of the Ludgate Hill: Travels with Robert Louis Stevenson (1987) and Pish, Posh, said Hieronymus Bosch (1991). The sentimental sports fantasy Things Invisible to See (1984) combines many of the author’s favorite themes and images, including angels.

  Firebrat (1988) is a children’s quest fantasy similar in spirit to the Anatole trilogy. Sister Water (1993) is an adult novel in which fantasy elements are carefully muted into deft symbolism. Willard’s recycled tales include East of the Sun and West of the Moon: A Play (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1992). Her short fiction, some of which has fabular elements, is sampled in The Lively Anatomy of God (1968) and Childhood of the Magician (1973), and is combined with critical essays—some of which analyze and celebrate the literary uses of

  fantasy—in Angel in the Parlor, Five Stories and Eight Essays (1982), A Nancy Willard Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991), and Telling Time: Angels, Ancestors and Stories (1993). The last title features two essays ingeniously cast as fables: “Danny Weinstein’s Magic Book” and

  “How Poetry Came into the World and Why God Doesn’t Write It.”

  WILLIAMS, CHARLES (1886–1945). British scholar and writer, an associate of A. E. Waite in connection with an early interest in occultism, subsequently a recruit to the Inklings and a significant influence on C.

  S. Lewis’s later works. His novels are key contributions to the tradition of Christian fantasy, ingeniously embedding theological and metaphysical arguments in formats borrowed from popular fiction.

  War in Heaven (1930) recasts the quest for the Holy Grail as a thriller. The intrusive fantasy The Place of the Lion (1931) describes

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  an invasion of Platonic archetypes. Many Dimensions (1931) describes attempts to save a powerful magical object from commercial exploitation. Shadows of Ecstasy (1933 but written before the others) features a dangerous pagan revival. The Greater Trumps (1932) is an elaborate allegorical occult fantasy involving gypsies. Descent into Hell (1937) is a powerful visionary fantasy with elements of posthumous fantasy. The latter were further extrapolated in All Hallow’s Eve (1945), which describes the struggle against an ambitious Antichrist.

  Williams’s poetry, collected in Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), includes a good deal of Arthurian material.

  WILLIAMS, MICHAEL (1952– ). U.S. writer whose early works were game tie-ins. The trilogy comprising A Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1990), A Forest Lord (1991), and The Balance of Power (1992) is in much the same vein, but the couplet comprising Arcady (1996) and Allamanda (1997) is very different, set in a world where William Blake’s works are canonical texts, serving as scripture and magical compendia.

  WILLIAMS, SEAN (1967– ). Australian writer whose early work was collaborative sf (refer to HDSFL). In the Books of the Change series, comprising The Stone Mage and the Sea (2001), The Sky Warden and the Sun (2002), and The Storm Weaver and the Sand (2002), children with magical ability are taken to the Haunted City for elaborate training. The Crooked Letter (2004) is a contemporary fantasy, the first in a prequel series, Books of the Cataclysm.

  WILLIAMS, TAD (1957– ). U.S. writer. Tailchaser’s Song (1985) is a whimsical animal fantasy featuring cats. The epic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, comprising The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Stone of Farewell (1990), and To Green Angel Tower (1993; in 2 vols. as Siege and Storm), sets out to criticize and correct aspects of J. R. R.

  Tolkien–descended genre fantasy that Williams considered problematic, including racist undertones and the easy separation of Good and Evil.

  Two novellas offer similarly considered responses to familiar themes: Child of an Ancient City (1992 with Nina Kiriki Hoffman) is a vampire story drastically transfigured by its removal into an Arabian fantasy scenario, while Caliban’s Hour (1994) takes issue with Shakespeare by presenting Caliban’s account of the events leading up to The Tempest and their consequences.

  WILSON, DAVID HENRY • 433

  The Otherland series, comprising City of Golden Shadow (1996), River of Blue Fire (1998), Mountain of Black Glass (1999), and Sea of Silver Light (2001), is a hybrid science fantasy about a “private multiverse” constructed in virtual reality, controlled by the avaricious and sinister Grail Brotherhood. The War of the Flowers (2003) is an elaborate portal fantasy juxtaposing San Francisco with an industrialized Faerie.

  WILLIAMSON, JACK (1908– ). U.S. writer best known for sf (refer to HDSFL). His early sf, including planetary romances and portal fantasies, was strongly influenced by A. Merritt, but the fantasy elements in the hybrid science fantasy Golden Blood (1933; book 1964) were more closely akin to the sword and sorcery fiction then popular in the magazine in which it appeared, Weird Tales. Similar inclinations are evident in his first wholehearted fantasy, the classical fantasy The Reign of Wizardry (1940; book 1964), which appeared in Unknown. For the same magazine, he wrote the classic hybrid theriomorphic fantasy Darker than You Think (1940; exp. 1948), in which the hero becomes reconciled to his true nature—unlike the similarly challenged character of the earlier werewolf-featuring horror story “Wolves of Darkness”

  (1932). Although he remained firmly committed to sf thereafter,

  Williamson continue to adapt genre fantasy materials to firmly rationalized frames in such novels as Demon Moon (1994).

  WILLIAMSON, PHILIP G. (1955– ). British writer whose first two novels, The Great Pervader (1985) and Dark Night (1989)—both satires—

  were bylined “Philip First,” as was the collection Paper Thin and Other Stories (1987). He reverted to his own name for the sardonically edged trilogy comprising Dinbig of Khimmur (1990), The Legend of Shadd’s Torment (1993), and From Enchantery (1993). A second trilogy set in the same secondary world comprises Moonblood (1993), Heart of Shadows (1994), and Citadel (1995). The series comprising Enchantment’s Edge (1996), Orbus’s World (1997), and The Soul of an Orb (1998) is similar, leading to a stylized climax in the Tower of Glancing Memory.

  WILSON, DAVID HENRY (1937– ). British writer, primarily a playwright, long resident in Germany. His first novel for adults—an elaborate version of “Cinderella” cast as a sophisticated animal fantasy—

  was published in German translation in 1985 before appearing as The Coachman Rat (1987). His other works are for younger children; they

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  include Elephants Don’t Sit on Cars (1977), Superdog the Hero (1986), and Gideon Gander Solves the World’s Greatest Mysteries (1993). The Castle of Inside Out (2002) is an enterprising portal fantasy.

  WINDLING, TERRI (1958– ). U.S. editor and artist who played a central role in establishing and defining genre fantasy, initially as fantasy editor for Ace Books, for whom she coedited a series of showcase anthologies, Elsewhere (3 vols., 1981–84) with Mark Alan Arnold. Her enterprising ventures in the 1980s included the MagicQuest young-adult fantasy series, a series of novel-length
transfigured fairy tales and the Bordertown shared-world series, all of which eventually fell victim to an economic downturn. She became a freelance editor in 1987, helping Tor Books to develop a fantasy line. In the same year, she founded the Endicott Studio of “Mythic Arts,” initially an actual artsts’ studio in Boston, which became virtual when it moved online in 1990; it now

  hosts her Journal of Mythic Arts (founded 2003), to which Midori Snyder is consultant editor.

  Windling collaborated with Ellen Datlow (refer to HDSFL) on an annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, for which she handled the fantasy component from 1988 to 2003. Her introductions tracked the fortunes of the commercial genre and parallel developments in literary fantasy, and her eclectic selection of texts helped to make manifest the intimate kinship between the two, while demonstrating that the best writers operating in the commercial genre could produce works of very high quality. She also collaborated with Datlow in a editing a series of anthologies of transfigured fairy tales, comprising Snow White, Blood Red (1993), Black Thorn, White Rose (1994), Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (1995), Black Swan, White Raven (1997), Silver Birch, Blood Moon (1999), and Black Heart, Ivory Bones (2000). A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales (2000), The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest (2002), Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold (2003), and The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm (2004) are in similar vein.

  She produced a story of her own for her solo anthology The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors (1995).

  Windling’s first novel, The Wood Wife (1996), was originally intended for another of her projects, dramatizing illustrations by the artist Brian Froud, but outgrew its original inspiration to become a complex contemporary fantasy drawing on Native American folklore. A Midsummer Night’s Faery Tale (1999) is a brief Shakespearean fantasy.