The Alehouse at the End of the World

by Stevan Allred

  They say the fisherman’s body remained hairless, and his skin blue, and that he lived for a thousand times a thousand days. They say the only sign of his aging was the pair of spectacles he took to wearing perched on his nose, and that with them he could translate any scroll that was brought to him, no matter how ancient the language. They say he traded a gold brooch covered in rubies for an alehouse, some say in Hav, and some say in Cex, but most say in Cerdes, the City of Marvels, beneath the shadow of the two-pronged unicorn that guards the gate to the city. They say he lived out his days there. And whether the alehouse was in Hav or Cex or Cerdes, they all say that he brewed the best ale the city had ever drunk. He called his establishment the Alehouse at the End of the World. They say that late at night, when the fire burns low and the candles gutter, a piratical frigate bird emerges from the shadows and tells stories about a great beast who swallowed the spirit world, and a tyrant crow on the Isle of the Dead.

  All the tales agree that the fisherman happened upon a comely woman in a slave market, a woman neither young nor old, but with a look of wisdom in her face, and of kindness in her heart. They say he paid for her with a silver chain, very finely made, and that she knew a great deal about the brewing of ale. They say he freed her, and they soon fell in love, and that he made her his wife.

  They say she had yellow eyes.

  About the Illustrator

  Reid Psaltis is an illustrator from the Pacific Northwest. Always interested in expressing an interest in animals through art, he majored in oil painting at Western Washington University, completed the science illustration graduate program at California State University Monterey Bay, and interned in the exhibitions department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Recent achievements include the publication of The Order of Things: A Bestiary by Secret Acres Books and being awarded a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Reid currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works as a freelancer and manages a shared studio space called Magnetic North.

  About the Author

  Stevan Allred lives in Portland, Oregon, halfway between Hav and the Isle of the Dead, which is to say he spends as much time burrowed into his imagination as he possibly can. He is the author of A Simplified Map of the Real World: The Renata Stories, and a contributor to City of Weird: 30 Otherwordly Portland Tales.

  Acknowledgments

  It took a community to raise this book. My deepest gratitude to everyone who helped:

  Nikki Schulak, you listened to every single word of this novel multiple times, and never failed to give me heartfelt encouragement and intelligent critique.

  The Dream Team—Joanna Rose, Kate Gray, Cecily Patterson, Mary Milstead, Jackie Shannon Hollis: you workshopped an early draft with me, and gave me your collective wisdom.

  The Quartet—Michelle Fredette, Tanya Jarvik, Cris Colburn, Steve Denniston: you read a middle draft, and let me interview you for hours about what was working and what was not.

  The Salon at the Edge of the World: you gathered for sixteen Sundays in a row, and you listened to me read a late draft of the whole novel aloud, laughing at all the right places, gasping deliciously at plot twists, and hanging around afterwards to provide fellowship and to share delicious food. I list here everyone who attended, starting with the most stalwart attendees: Calvin T. Wonderdog, Steve Barber, Nikki Schulak, Cheryl Lynn, Dina Rozelle Renée, Shannon Brazil, Katy Murphy, Martta Karol, Suzanne Sigafoos, Helen Sinoradzki, Byron Palmer, Jan Baross, Mohamed Asem, Irene Parikal, Eric Lee, Michelle Fredette, Betsy Porter, Pierre Provost, Celeste Hamilton Dennis, Yuvi Zalkow, Edee Lemonier, Golda Dwass, Stephen Mickey, Steve Arndt, Janell Lee, Chad Burge, Catherine Kumlin Gamblin, Harold Johnson, Leah Baer, Desiree Wright, Donna, Barbara, Janie Cohen, Greg “Woody” Nyeholt, Nicole Rosevear, Sherri Hoffman, Susan Brazil, Eva Gibeau, Ry Allred, Ben Poliakoff, Cris Colburn, and Joanna Rose.

  Tom “it-is-this-way” Spanbauer, you taught me a most excellent set of writing chops. Without the foundation you gave me I would not be the writer I am today.

  Dr. Bruce D. Dugger of Oregon State University, you gave me a crucial anatomical fact about the frigate bird when I needed it most.

  Gigi Little, you designed the cover, and oh my god, what a sweet piece of eye candy you have designed. Delicious!

  Reid Psaltis, you did the ravishingly beautiful illustrations, huzzah!

  Throughout my years of work on Alehouse, I got by with a little help from my friends and family:

  Shannon Brazil, you sang the praises of this novel loudly to anyone who would listen, and you wrapped your arms around it with so much love; all of the Polymamas: you cheered me on and had my back whenever I needed it; Jan Baross, you have been unstinting in your praise, and generous with your time and your camera; Cado Allred, you covered my day job so I could write (with help from Taryn Winterholler); Ry Allred, you listened to my kvetches and nodded your head wisely at all the right moments; Wiley Allred, at seven years old you listened to the first thirty pages as a bedtime story, and gave me a crucial thumbs up: “almost as good as Harry Potter, Grandpa”; JoAnn Allred, you teach me compassion and humility every time I see you; Ben Poliakoff, you fed me such good dinners, followed by feasts of leftovers, and you listened sympathetically to my worries, and you celebrated with me when things went well; Haru Schulak Poliakoff, you made lovely posters, one with the crow, and one with the frigate bird, for The Salon at the End of the World; Leo Schulak Poliakoff, you helped me find the hero’s journey in my own life.

  And you, Laura Stanfill, most especially you: you are friend and publisher, editor and publicist, advocate and promoter, visionary and literary savant; you are fierce and brilliant and indefatiguable; and you have made me part of the family at Forest Avenue Press. My gratitude to you knows no bounds.

  Reading Group Questions

  1. What does the author gain or lose by making several of his characters shapeshifters and demigods?

  2. The fisherman does not think of himself as a hero. Would you agree? Who are the true heroes of this novel? If we are the heroes of our own lives, what does that imply about how we should approach each day?

  3. This novel has an unusual sound built into its sentence and vocabulary. Some words are made up. Others are intentionally antiquated. How does the language serve the story? Did you spot any of the made-up words?

  4. Are some mythologies sacred? Or are all mythologies invented? Can a mythology be both?

  5. What is the central myth of our times? Is there more than one? Can we change ourselves by changing the myths by which we live, and the stories we hold in common?

  6. There are more than fifty references to pop culture in this novel. What are some of your favorites? What purpose, other than the author’s delight, do they serve?

  7. Do you believe in fate? What does fate mean to you?

  8. The Kiamah beast swallows all in his path. Is he merely a character in this tale? What might he represent? Does he frighten you?

  9. How does The Alehouse at the End of the World examine the relationship of the body to the mind?

  10. Do you believe in an afterlife? If yes, then how do you imagine it to be? Will your personality persist after death?

  11. Are there political leaders who remind you of the crow? How about the goddess? Who are they? What are the similarities?

  Some Notes from the Author

  In July of 1891 the story of James Bartley, a man who claimed to have been swallowed by a whale, began circulating in American newspapers. Bartley said he was a crewmember on the whaling ship Star of the East when a wounded sperm whale surfaced beneath his longboat, tossing him into the sea near the Falkland Islands, where the whale swallowed him. When the now-dead whale was recovered by the crew of the Star of the East, Bartley was discovered in the stomach, hairless, bleached white, babbling incoherently, but alive. Or such was his account.

  Historians have not been kind to Bartley’s tale, but for me, it opened the door into The Alehouse at the End of the World.


  §

  I wrote this novel by candlelight and the glow of my laptop, starting before the sun rose each morning, and working into the daylight. Candlelight carried me backwards in time, and the computer gave me access to the eternal now of the internet, where I found many odd bits of language that suited this tale.

  §

  I have over twenty t-shirts with crows on them, and a few with frigate birds and pelicans, and one with a goddess and a pelican. The daily ritual of putting on a crow shirt before setting out to write reminded me that I do not own the story. I serve it.

  §

  Alehouse draws on historical and analytical sources as well as mythological ones. The work of Joseph Campbell is an obvious influence. I found Watunna: An Orinoco Creation Cycle, by Marc de Civrieux, to be a fascinating case of a living mythology that has incorporated into itself the story of first contact with the outside world.

  Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, with it’s narrative clarity, sent me time-traveling into a world view centuries earlier than my own. For readers interested in the 16th & 17th century spice trade, which forms the backdrop of the fisherman’s story, I recommend The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade, by Charles Corn. I also drew upon Charles C. Mann’s two exemplary history volumes, 1491, and 1493, for a sense of the world as it might have been during the fisherman’s lifetime.

  Readers interested in the sexual mores of Dewi Sri, the pelican, the fisherman, and Cariña may find Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, as engrossing as I do.

  §

  Alehouse is strewn with paraphrases of classic rock lyrics, Victorian slang, bits of my own Mormon roots, and references to Mae West, the Bible, Natalie Goldberg, John Keats, Mel Brooks, and Adelaide Hamby, to name but a few. There are traces of books I have loved my whole life through. Some of them are well known (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lord of the Rings, One Hundred Years of Solitude) but I would like to call out Jan Morris’ novel Letters from Hav for special mention.

  §

  I have long had a fascination with fiction that creates a strongly imagined sense of place. In my short-story collection A Simplified Map of the Real World I built a town called Renata. For “Notes from the Underground City,” my story in City of Weird, I built a city called Melquiopolis. Here, in The Alehouse at the End of the World I have created the Isle of the Dead, with an afterlife as strange as any I have ever heard tell of, and one suited to the world of this novel, a world in which the Abrahamic religions have never taken root.

  §

  Crows, cormorants, pelicans, frigate birds, and fish eagles (osprey) are all beings I admire. Crows because they are smart, and socially sophisticated, and because I love watching them in the evenings when they gather to roost in the neighborhood trees. Cormorants because I have watched them dive for fish from the surface of the Willamette River, and then pop up as much as twenty yards away from where they started, with fish in bill. Pelicans because they fly in stately formation, like the Canada goose, and because their capacious bills are magnificent adaptations. Frigate birds because I have watched them in the skies of Manzanillo, Mexico, spending all day spiraling upward on a thermal. Osprey because they build their huge, cartoonish nests in the tallest trees along the water’s edge in the Pacific Northwest.

  I am not a traditional birder (long may they prosper) nor any sort of expert. What I love is watching the birds that are right there in front of me.

  §

  The stories we tell have the power to change who we are. The Alehouse at the End of the World gives us a vision of a world in which a small band of heroes take on a tyrant. I can think of no better story to tell in these troubled times.

  Also by Stevan Allred

  A Simplified Map of the Real World

  “Stevan Allred’s stories strike to the very heart—the pathos, the humor, the hope—of the American frontier. He is OUT there. Raymond Carver would love this book.”

  —Robin Cody, author of Ricochet River

  Fifteen linked stories chart a true course through the lives of families, farmers, loggers, former classmates, and the occasional stripper. In the richly imagined town of Renata, Oregon, a man watches his neighbor’s big-screen TV through binoculars. An errant son paints himself silver. Mysterious electrical humming emanates from an enormous barn. A secret abortion from three decades ago gets a public airing. In A Simplified Map of the Real World, intimate boundaries are loosened by divorce and death in a rural community where even an old pickle crock has an unsettling history—and high above the strife and the hope and the often hilarious, geese seek the perfect tailwind. Stevan Allred’s stunning debut deftly navigates the stubborn geography of the human heart.

  Blackstone Publishing released the audiobook edition of A Simplified Map of the Real World, narrated by the author, in February 2018. It’s available wherever audiobooks are sold. Allred’s debut collection, which launched Forest Avenue Press’s fiction catalog, was named a top title of 2013 in the Powell’s Staff Top 5s and a 2014 Multnomah County Library PageTurners Book Club Pick.

  City of Weird:

  30 Otherworldly Portland Tales

  Edited by Gigi Little

  City of Weird conjures what we fear: death, darkness, ghosts. Hungry sea monsters and alien slime molds. Blood drinkers and game show hosts. Set in Portland, Oregon, these thirty original stories blend imagination, literary writing, and pop culture into a cohesive weirdness that honors the city’s personality, its bookstores and bridges and solo volcano, as well as the tradition of sci-fi pulp magazines. Editor Gigi Little has curated a collection that is quirky, often chilling, at times surprisingly profound—and always perfectly weird.

  Contributors include: Stevan Allred, Jonah Barrett, Doug Chase, Sean Davis, Susan DeFreitas, Rene Denfeld, Dan DeWeese, Art Edwards, Stefanie Freele, Jonathan Hill, Justin Hocking, Jeff Johnson, Leigh Anne Kranz, Kirsten Larson, B. Frayn Masters, Kevin Meyer, Karen Munro, Linda Rand, Brian Reid, Bradley K. Rosen, Nicole Rosevear, Mark Russell, Kevin Sampsell, Jason Squamata, Andrew Stark, Adam Strong, Suzy Vitello, Leslie What, Brigitte Winter, and Leni Zumas.

  Pacific Northwest Independent Bookseller bestseller

  #1 Powell’s Books bestseller

  #1 Powell’s Books holiday bestseller, 2016

  Powell’s Pick of the Month and Pick of the Season

  #1 Annie Bloom’s Bestseller

  Adapted for live radio by The Willamette Radio Workshop

  Now in its fourth printing

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