FSF, December 2006

by Spilogale, Inc

  The fellow seemed somewhat distracted but said, “Odd that you would ask. We were to have dealt in such goods, but instead we are undergoing another change of orientation. All is in limbo until the new ownership is settled in."

  "I thought the new owner was operating at a remove."

  The man's face expressed fatalism in the face of unavoidable difficulties. “That was the previous new owner,” he said. “He is no longer part of the environment."

  "I don't understand,” said Bandar.

  "Nor do I. Apparently he has lost all interest.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Indeed, I have heard he has gone mad."

  Bandar expressed surprise, at which the man confided that it should have been expected: the stricken owner, he had heard, was one of those odd fellows who inhabit the Institute for Historical Inquiry. “I believe they're all canted well off the vertical,” he said.

  "You may be right,” said Bandar.

  "In any case, when the new owners take charge, they will have no need of me. I've heard that Fley Bandar may require some assistance and will seek employment there."

  "I wouldn't bother,” Bandar said. “He has all the help he needs."

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  Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  Monsters: A Celebration of the Classics from Universal Studios, Del Rey, 2006, $29.95.

  When I was a kid, you couldn't download movies from the Internet. There weren't DVDs. There weren't even VHS tapes. There was no cable. In fact, there were only three channels available on TV. You could see movies on TV, but it was a haphazard affair. You took what you could get, or you went to a theater.

  Horror movies weren't the most popular commodity, but you could find them on shows like Shock Theatre (a late Friday night film showcase, with that creepy hand coming up out of the quicksand in the opening credits), or as late, late night movies. Even more fun was to take in three or four at the drive-in, or spend the night at a dusk-until-dawn marathon at the movie theater.

  Now I'm not saying it's better or worse today. The only point I'm trying to make is that seeing a movie back then was more of a special event than it usually is today.

  But the feeling of it being an event isn't the only thing that seems to have gotten lost along the way.

  Horror movies used to scare the daylights out of a kid. I had nightmares for years after watching The House of Wax (though I suppose kids today might have nightmares after the remake, imaging the plastic face of Paris Hilton coming at them from out of the dark, but I digress...). As we got a bit older and, you know, sophisticated, we began to look for the seams in costumes and found the dialogue a bit camp, the plots more so. But it was still fun, and even though you might be able to mouth along with the dialogue, you could still get a start (like from the sound of the bus in the original Cat People).

  Today horror films don't much go for the scare, and I don't watch them anymore—for all the easy access I have to them. The problem is that, somewhere along the way, they stopped being about the frisson of the unknown, the dread that crawls up your spine, or the sudden shock of a horrific surprise. Instead, they mostly seem to be rather clinical portrayals of gruesome deaths, each one a little more inventive and graphic than the one before it, with a plotline tying together the “money shots” that are about as interesting as the “plots” you'll find in a porn film.

  But much as I dislike most of what's being done in contemporary horror film, I still carry a great affection for the classics, especially the old black & white films. So I was delighted with the arrival of Monsters in my P.O. box.

  It's a loving tribute to the Universal pantheon: Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera, Bela Lugosi's Dracula, Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  There are lots of terrific stills from the films, and remembrances by some of the children of the famous actors, as well as essays by Jennifer Beals, John Landis, Rick Baker, and others who write well about what they know well.

  These films still stand the test of time. When I was a teenager, they spoke of the passage between life and death. They evoked mystery and awe as they peeled back the shadows to give us a glimpse into the impossible beyond.

  And this book will also stand that test. It's a beautiful and affectionate tribute to a more innocent time, when what happened off-screen (and therefore in our imaginations) was a hundred times more frightening than the graphic splatter of blood on a contemporary film screen.

  * * * *

  Spirits That Walk in Shadow, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Viking, 2006, $17.99.

  We all know the disorientation of starting at a new school, or the first day on a new job. We're in over our heads, desperate not to screw up, and feel anything but comfortable.

  That's certainly the case with Kim Calloway on her first day on campus. But Kim has more problems than most of us might in such a situation. For one thing, she's suffering from a weird, debilitating depression that comes and goes. For another, her new roommate is, to all intents and purposes, a witch, from a long family of the same. This would be Jaimie Locke (who was first introduced to us in The Thread That Binds the Bones, but don't worry; no familiarity with that book is required to enjoy the one presently in hand.)

  Then it turns out that Kim's depressions are being forced upon her by a creature called a viri, and before she knows it, her life is filled with Jaimie's magics, the benefits of being befriended by a presence (sort of a small household god), and the protection of a whole gaggle of Jaimie's cousins. Oh, yes, and she learns a couple of things that would give anyone a good excuse to be depressed: the viri will probably kill her, and there's nothing that her new friends and benefactors can do to stop it.

  Though they certainly mean to try.

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman is one of a small group of writers who, when I get a new book by them, whatever else I'm reading gets put aside so that I can read it first.

  Spirits That Walk in Shadow was no exception, and didn't disappoint me for a moment.

  I love the way Hoffman looks at the world. She has a great insight into character—especially young characters such as the college-aged kids in this book—and one of the most inventive minds I've found when it comes to playing around with ideas of magic. Everything in her books always feels fresh.

  This time around, she shifts first-person perspectives every chapter. One will be told from Kim's point of view, the next from Jaimie's. What this does is let us see the magical world through Kim's eyes; we get to share her wonder and delight, as well as her fears. But we also get to see the mundane world through Jaimie's eyes, because she's as new to what her family calls the world of Outsiders (non-magical people outside their extended families) as Kim is to magic.

  So we get two tales of discovery; two views of the same situation that build upon each other, creating a deeper resonance.

  I mentioned earlier that Hoffman does youthful characters well. What I should also mention is that they're presented in such a manner that adults will get as much pleasure and insight from their company as the YA audience to which the book is being marketed.

  If you've never read Hoffman before, you are in for such a treat. Start with this book, then go back and read all the rest. You won't be disappointed.

  * * * *

  World's End, by Mark Chadbourn, Gollancz, 2000, 6.99.

  If this was a weekly television series, rather than a book column, it might start off: Previously on Books To Look For, we were discussing Mark Chadbourn's Book of Shadows, a two-issue comic book mini-series that serves as a prequel to the author's The Age of Misrule trilogy. I enjoyed the two issues so much, I mentioned that I was going to track down the prose books to see if Chadbourn could deliver the goods without the benefit of Bo Hampton's artwork.

  The quick answer is: yes.

  There is a small but growing (I hope!) number of writers who are reclaiming fairyland and the otherworld from wha
t sometimes feels like a never-ending flood of books that treat magic and wonder as no more than weaponry in vast wars between the forces of good and those belonging to some Dark Lord.

  Not that there's anything wrong with telling war stories, in using elves and orcs as battalions, or magic as a weapon. After all, such stories offer up high drama, and conflict keeps readers turning pages. But the sense of wonder gets lost, and I miss it.

  I know, I know. I go on about this far too much in these pages. But I think what happens is, I'll read the rare book that does offer the reminder that an encounter with the otherworld is a moment of awe that changes lives, and I'll realize how much I miss it otherwise.

  Chadbourn's writing certainly reminds me. His books brim with characters whose lives change, who are brought to the brink of impossible joy, and equally impossible terror and despair, through their encounters with magic.

  In later books, a war could well be brewing, but in this first outing we meet an unlikely group of five humans who are charged with reclaiming the four magical artifacts of Britain. When the artifacts are gathered together in the right place, they can be used to call back the lords of light to combat the forces of darkness that are wakening from one end of Britain to the other—perhaps all over the world. But these lords of light might have their own agendas, and the forces of darkness aren't entirely hell-bent upon the destruction of everything, and—

  Well, it's a lot like the way the non-magical world works, actually. Everyone isn't necessarily who or what they seem to be, and while World's End ends at a natural place for the reader (and the characters) to take a breath, it's obvious that there's still a lot of story to come.

  But what I loved about this book was the first encounters the characters have with the new world order, how they struggle and prevail against the darkness, and how, occasionally, they are rewarded with enormous insights.

  Chadbourn appears to be a busy man. After starting his career with four horror novels, at the time I write this, he's now two-thirds into his second fantasy series (The Dark Age). That's a nice weighty number of books. The good thing about coming to an author such as this, at this point in his career, is that there's so much material to catch up with.

  * * * *

  Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.

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  Books by James Sallis

  The Line Between, by Peter S. Beagle, Tachyon Publications, 2006, $14.95.

  The Empire of Ice Cream, by Jeffrey Ford, Golden Gryphon Press, 2006, $24.95.

  In the current spate of high fantasy novels, trilogies, and series, book after book trailing off to the horizon like Burma Shave signs, it becomes all too easy to forget the specific pleasures of classic fantasy and what drew us to it initially. That sense of otherness, of a world gone suddenly off-kilter, of unsuspected depths, signs and wonders. We are looking for escape, certainly—escape from the mundane, from what Heidegger terms “dailyness,” that so slyly takes over our lives—but more than that, we're looking for intensity: seeking, not unreality, but a hyperreality. And if what we find seems somehow connected to currents deep within us, archetypes at once as familiar and as strange as our own blood, then all the better.

  Peter Beagle's new collection, The Line Between, contains eleven stories, including “Two Hearts,"a much-trumpeted and wholly wonderful “sequel” to Beagle's The Last Unicorn, and my personal favorites, “Quarry” and “A Dance for Emilia,” stories richer than many another writer's novels. In “Quarry,” as in “Two Hearts,” Beagle revisits a world previously created, that of The Innkeeper's Song, to tell the story of a young man in flight from three scary things: two killer trackers, and his own youth.

  I never went back to my room, that night. I knew I had an hour at most before they would have guards on the door. What was on my back, at my belt, and in my pockets was all I took—that, and all the tilgit the cook could scrape together and cram into my pouch.

  Beagle writes some of the best opening and ending lines around. And he has an amazing identification with adolescents, among whom he discovers his most convincing and sympathetic protagonists. I say “discovers” because one forever feels that the story is not so much being written by Beagle as it is somehow simply passing through him on its way to us.

  Each story is framed by comments from the author, some of them a few lines, others running to half a page—and one giving credence to my remark just above. I immediately flagged it as something I wanted to take in to read to my students.

  Looking back at “Salt Wine,” I realize that almost every story I've ever written from a first-person point of view has been completely improvised according to the narrator's voice. It's a matter of trusting the source; of assuming that the storyteller knows what he or she is doing, even if I don't, and that the tale will structure itself and tell me when it's done.

  Just that kind of relaxed unfolding, that unhurried, unharried discovery of the narrative, is evident in all of Beagle's work. There is, too, everywhere a gentleness and easy humor. His love for his characters and his joy in writing, like a light behind the page, shows through every word, every sentence, every line.

  From “Gordon, the Self-made Cat” with its message that attitude is everything—almost; to “El Regalo,” a Buffyesque tale of two Korean-American siblings discovering their powers; to the open-road adventure of “Quarry” and the melancholy of “Salt Wine” and “A Dance for Emilia,” faultlessly Beagle reels us in, leaning in close, as though to whisper in our ears, to let his characters tell us important things.

  At the end of “A Dance for Emilia,” one of those rare stories that seems to be about everything that's important, a girl named Luz waits for baby Alex to wake and dances as she waits, a dance that quietly sums up at least four lives.

  Luz was still dancing on the sidewalk when the taxi came to take me to the train station. I said goodbye as I walked past her, trying not to stare. But she danced me escort to the cab door, and I looked into her eyes as I got in, and as we drove away. And what I think I know, I think I know, and it doesn't matter at all.

  Peter Beagle's writing here, as always, is replete with such passages, passages in which for the moment, as we read them, we float above our earthbound bodies and feel the mystery and the wonder of our lives break into blossom around us.

  * * * *

  Jeffrey Ford, whose previous collection The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and novel The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque I reviewed in these pages, also got a free ride to class. Two or three pages into The Empire of Ice Cream, I knew I'd be backpacking this baby into the wilds of “CRW 272: Structuring the Novel."

  This description from “Boatman's Holiday,” for example, as Charon sets off on yet another journey across The River of Pain:

  Beneath a blazing orange sun, he maneuvered his boat between the two petrified oaks that grew so high their tops were lost in violet clouds. Their vast trunks and complexity of branches were bone white, as if hidden just below the surface of the murky water was a stag's head the size of a mountain. Thousands of crows, like black leaves, perched amid the pale tangle, staring silently down.

  Or this, of a mural at the neighborhood bar to which the narrator's father used to take him, from “A Night in the Tropics":

  There were palm trees with coconuts and stretches of pale sand sloping down to a shoreline where the serene sea rolled in lazy wavelets. The sky was robin's egg blue, the ocean, six different shades of aquamarine. All down the beach, here and there, frozen forever in different poses, were island ladies wearing grass skirts but otherwise naked save for the flowers in their hair.

  At the mural's bottom edge, “just before paradise came to an end by the bathroom door,” the hand of an unseen watcher pushes aside the wide leaf of a plant to spy on the scene.

  Nothing sensational there. Just good, solid, evocative writing—writing wholly in the service of the story. Which is what you
find crackling and popping beneath your feet like gravel all the long way of The Empire of Ice Cream. Ford is among the major practitioners of what Michael Swanwick has called hard fantasy, literature of the fantastic that's original rather than conventional, challenging rather than comforting, fantasy that attempts to penetrate, by that subterfuge at the heart of all art, to the very heart of human nature and the nature of the world.

  The centerpiece, of course, is the award-winning title story, Ford's take on the doppelgnger theme, a beautifully realized and written story essaying the blur the boundary between the sensual and authentic worlds. The protagonist of “The Empire of Ice Cream,” the man whose fantasy becomes real, or whose reality becomes fantasy, is a musician, and artists of one sort or another abound in Ford's work, almost to the point of preoccupation with creativity and its manifestations.

  In the passage above describing the mural, writer and reader are equally behind that painted hand pulling back the leaf to look on. Add to it the fact that this story is about an adult returning to the place of his youth and seeing it anew, and you begin to get some sense of the reflections and reverberations going on in Ford's work.

  "Man of Light” is about an artist who creates his work of nothing substantial, but of light itself, and who makes of himself a mere bobbing head. Charon in “Boatman's Holiday” meets the author of his myth and becomes a collaborator, shaping the story he was once but a part of. The narrator of “Coffins on the River” is a failing writer. The previously unpublished “Botch Town” is a coming of age story, letting us look on as a child moves towards becoming a writer, the plywood toy town he has constructed on two sawhorses starting to reflect—and shape?—the actual town it shadows.

  In a recent interview, Ford echoed Beagle on letting stories have their way:

  I don't plan, don't take notes, don't have any idea where the thing is going. Writing fiction for me is the art of letting go, taking my hands off the steering wheel. If I second-guess and get nervous and try to start giving the guy in my head who writes the stories directions and advice on how to drive, there's a good chance the story is going to get lost or wind up in a ditch.