FSF, October-November 2006

by Spilogale, Inc

  "Awesome,” he muttered. “Awesome, awesome."

  On impulse, Drea also told him about his fellow student being hospitalized after a suicide attempt.

  "I was thinking. Maybe if he could get off the dime with his story, it might help him with his other problems. And since you're a writer and young, and I'm not either one—"

  "Oh man, I would be so happy to give this screwed-up dude a hand. You know, I been screwed up myself."

  Next day they met at Georgetown and ascended to the ninth-floor solarium in an enormous elevator that also contained a fat man on a gurney and his gum-chewing attendant. Drea found U much improved. He could even coagulate again, and was proving it by working out a chess problem from the Washington Post in his head.

  "How's it going?” asked Drea, and U said, “It starts Qh7 check. It's pretty easy."

  He and Inshallah shook hands, and the latter immediately said, “Dr. Drea sold my story, and he says he could sell yours too, except you ran into some kind of a block."

  The double lie acted on U like two swigs of Lourdes water.

  "Really? You're not kidding me? He said that?"Apparently asking Drea, who was located about a yard distant, never occurred to him. He was staring at Inshallah like a wild pig at an anaconda, both fascinated and fearful.

  "Yes, he did. Now what exactly is your story about?"

  U told him, phrasing it to make it seem like nothing he would ever dream of actually believing himself.

  "Jeeeeeeeeeesus,” breathed Inshallah, “that is such a treeemendous idea! Where'd you get it from?"

  "It just came to me,” said U modestly.

  "Wow! I mean, look, all I do is—I'm like Tom Wolfe: I just report back what I hear on the streets. But you, man, you are like Edgar Allan Poe, wild stuff comes to you out the air. So what is your problem?"

  "Well, Dr. Drea says I have to explain to the reader where Jamie Cassandra got his vision of the dragonet. That's not totally honest, because I really don't know where it came from—"

  "No, no, no, no!” exclaimed Inshallah. “When you write, man, you invent a parallel universe. So you need an explanation to create a sense of ‘reality,’ a word Nabokov says means nothing unless it's between quotes."

  Enlightenment spread over U's pale countenance. “Oh yeah, right. He said that in his essay ‘On a Book Called Lolita.’”

  "As for your problem, man, that is so simple. Just haul out the old ESP. I mean, you named this dude Jamie Cassandra, right? Maybe a little sexual ambivalence there, which is good in itself. But the point is that Cassandra was the prophet nobody would believe."

  "Right. In the Odyssey."

  "No, man. The Iliad."

  They wrangled over this for a few minutes, then turned to Drea. Called upon for the first time to intrude on this astounding conversation, he muttered, “Actually, I think it was the Aeneid."

  Both young men instantly dismissed this information. “Whatever,” they exclaimed in chorus, and went back to their dialogue.

  "Anyway, you start with one of those canned scenes, everybody been doing it for eons now, where Jamie learns he has visions like Haley Joel Osment. I can see the trailer for the movie now. Then—"

  "You know,” U interrupted, “when I was little I really did see visions of things that weren't there. Like Daddy dropping dead in the lobby of the Metropolitan, or Uncle Uriel kissing the mailman behind the garden wall."

  "Really? You had the gift? How'd you lose it?"

  "Therapy. They started me on it when I was seven."

  "Oh yeah, that'll do it.... But look, that means you got a personal experience to build on, and that's important, right, Dr. Drea?"

  Drea, having learned his place, said nothing. Meanwhile Inshallah and U were shaking hands in various complicated ways and promising to see each other again real, real soon.

  As he and Inshallah were leaving the hospital, Drea said something about a friendship maybe developing out of this. Inshallah shook his head.

  "No man, I'm too busy. He's a sweet dude, but I got no time for him. Besides writing, I'm an intern in Senator Frist's office, I'm entering Georgetown Law, and my woman needs me at night. Oh, you mean what we said? No, that's just something you say. It don't mean anything."

  Before they parted, Drea asked Inshallah if he'd ever actually been in the Anacostia Project. His reply was perfectly unembarrassed.

  "Just once. To buy some dope. That was back when I was screwed up. Even then I didn't want to hang with those dudes. They're suicide bombers, man. They just want to die and take somebody with them."

  "Then why'd you claim you were born there when you weren't?"

  "It's bull,” Inshallah explained patiently, as if to a child. “It takes bull to get along in this world. Everybody needs a legend. Life, man, is something you make up."

  "I think you ought to be teaching the seminar, not me,” said Drea in a burst of candor.

  "No, I don't have time for that either,” Inshallah replied, and drove off in a new pearl-gray BMW his Daddy had given him.

  * * * *

  Gorshin returned from his Vegas marriage and honeymoon, played husband for a few weeks, then started visiting the Wine Cellar again.

  At first he brought his wife, whose actual name was Delia; Drea thought her far too sensible a woman to be stuck with Gorshin. Then he began leaving her at home. Drea gathered that not all was well in the new menage.

  "Phil, it's hard to listen to those goddamn nuts all day and her pointing out my flaws of character all night,” Gorshin said, slurping down a goblet of Mondo Rosso in two gulps.

  "You've got a lot of flaws for her to work on."

  "She has a streak of violence, too. When we were shopping for groceries the other day, I told her she was the most blatant case of penis envy I've ever seen, and she started throwing canned goods at me."

  "You should stay away from supermarkets. How are you and U getting along?"

  "Me and who?"

  "U. Pierson Clyde. The dragonet guy. He's out of the hospital and back in class, so—"

  "Oh him. He quit me. He's going to Krishnamurti. Of course I respect a patient's right to choose his own physician, but I just don't think you can cross a cultural divide that wide in anything as personal as analysis."

  "That's a nice way of saying Krishnamurti can't understand U's problems because Wog is Wog and White is White and never the twain shall meet."

  "I have never, ever been a racist,” declared Gorshin, believing it absolutely.

  Meanwhile U's story was developing, not in the gentle quiet of the study, but under a withering barrage of criticism from his fellow students. The nine aspirants to literature read each other's work and, after some initial diffidence, began shredding it in a style which—if only they'd had a better grasp of English—would have been downright Oxfordian in ferocity.

  Three people dropped out of class, unable to stand the gaff, and some (not all of them girls) went home in tears. But the survivors’ work, if not exactly earth-shaking, became increasingly coherent and pointed.

  Inshallah was especially fierce. Midway through the semester, a hip-hop magazine aggressively titled In Yo Face bought his story, made him cut it from 4,500 to 1,500 words, and renamed it “Nigga Project Rap.” When his agent began shopping for a book deal, he became something of a terror at the seminar table, dispensing his opinions with a faith in his own infallibility that might have impressed His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI.

  Fortified by his new shrink, U survived and even throve in this bracing atmosphere. Gradually Jamie Cassandra took form as a true fictional hero—somebody who both was and wasn't his creator. Jamie became a man escaping from the chaos of his youth, while at the same time clinging fiercely to his ESP-inspired vision of disaster and trying to force it on an unbelieving world.

  U's last problem was to find a bang-up ending. That came to him one night in a mysterious dream of vast, barren landscapes overlooked by a bloodshot sky. He jumped out of bed and almost wore out his PC, working
until dawn. Drea, who knew how seldom night-time visions last into daylight, began reading the new coda with misgivings—which soon vanished.

  Jamie Cassandra, giving up in despair his mission to alert humanity, decided to pursue his estranged wife Chelsea to California, where she'd taken refuge at an ashram run by her guru. Following the westward direction taken by the sun, the course of empire, and screwballs of all types, Jamie reached the Mojave Desert and checked into a tiny, rundown motel for the night.

  U did a good job conveying the barren grandeur of Death Valley—the ringing silence; the insinuating whisper of windblown sand; the searing day when the world was half sun and half rock; the frigid night when Jamie's cabin seemed to rise and hover among the stars.

  "That's not bad,” Drea allowed after reading this far. “When were you in the desert?"

  "Never,” said U. “But it sounds so great, I might go."

  There, in Death Valley, as Jamie strolled beneath the blazing panoply of the midnight sky, dreaming of a jewel that Chelsea wore in her navel and the greater jewel that she carried beneath it in what he termed her “moist and silken purse"—there, while Jamie's brain dreamed of love and his left hand tugged at his shorts—a sudden tremendous shock abruptly sent him sprawling on the gravel and dust of the desert floor.

  He raised his head. Great dry swells, gray in the starlight, rose in the distance and rushed toward him like spreading waves before a storm. The motel went dark, then disintegrated into tincans and toothpicks. Jamie's car upended and plunged downward into the earth like a Frank Herbert sandworm.

  Miles away in the depths of the valley, the shell of the planet burst open and a vast structure like a flattened Everest rose—and rose—and rose, a wedge of blackness driven into the Milky Way. Alone among the desert rats, sidewinders, and tarantulas witnessing the monstrous birth, Jamie knew what he was gazing upon: the egg tooth of the dragonet! Thunderously the earth continued to fracture, canyons spreading in a crazy weblike pattern, while out of them erupted fountains of fire.

  Unheard by any living thing, Jamie cried out—his last words before his own extinction—"You dumb bastards! Maybe you'll believe me now!"

  * * * *

  "It's an adequate finish,” Drea admitted. “Melodrama is the comfort food of the soul. Go with it."

  "Well, I still don't feel that it's really true, I mean there's ... I don't know ... something that's still a little off about it. But if you think this version works—"

  "It does. Try sending it to Fantasy & Science Fiction. I'll give you a covering note to the editor, Gordon Van Gelder. I met him someplace or other, I think in a bar."

  At semester's end, Drea gave U an A- for strenuous endeavor, Inshallah an A+ for triumphant mendacity, and everybody else who was still in class a C- for durable mediocrity. Those who had dropped out too late to be eligible for I's he flunked, despite their pleas for mercy. Dr. Dread had his reputation to think of.

  The night after handing in the grades, he found Gorshin already seated in the Federal City Wine Cellar, looking grim.

  "What's the matter with you?"

  "Delia left me today. Somewhere, somewhere in this world there's a sane, balanced woman I can spend the rest of my life with. I keep looking for her, but I always wind up with the wackos."

  "What'd she do?"

  "It's what she was thinking of doing. I know the signs."

  "What was she thinking of doing?"

  "Cutting off my penis while I'm asleep. Like that poor Wayne Bobbit character. I was afraid to go to sleep, and I can't face that parade of nuts all day long without eight solid hours."

  After gulping some wine, he added, “It's costing me three hundred dollars to get the locks changed so she can't sneak in at night and go for me with the blade from her Lady Elegance razor."

  "Gorshin—"

  "Don't try to comfort me,” he said. “I'm feeling too lousy."

  Drea wouldn't have dreamed of doing so. Instead, he sat sipping and musing on the events of the semester just past.

  The more he thought about it, the more he respected U's fantasy. How satisfying it must be to believe that some magnificent primal beast laid the Earth to contain and shelter its young—that this noble and simple act is the whole meaning and purpose of our world—and that human beings, with all their bizarre kinks, are only a kind of microorganism growing on the outside of the soon-to-be-discarded shell.

  Obscurely comforted, he raised his eyes over Gorshin's defeated bulk and rested his gaze on the Sony across the room. The latest signals from the Mars Orbiter were being broadcast, just as they arrived via Houston. Thus Drea happened to be one among the millions privileged to look on as the red planet split open along the sutures of its great barren valleys, and began to hatch.

  Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  The Blood Knight, by Greg Keyes, Del Rey, 2006, $25.95.

  If there's any sort of story that you think you dislike, there's always a book out there that will prove you wrong.

  Regular readers of this column will know that I'm not particularly enamored with secondary world fantasy novels—especially not when they're presented in trilogies or series. I won't go into the whys and wherefores, except to reiterate briefly that I've read too many of this kind of story and can usually tell where it's going within a few chapters. Also, I don't like a book that can't resolve to at least some sort of a satisfying end.

  So I was definitely not the target audience for Keyes's work when I picked up the first of this series, The Briar King, a few years ago. But I gave it a try nevertheless, and was hooked from the very beginning.

  The main thing I like about Keyes's writing is that, in this series, he doesn't make a parade of the same old problems that plague too many secondary fantasy novels. Those problems could probably comprise a book in and of themselves—and they do. That book is Diana Wynne Jones's brilliant Tough Guide to Fantasyland in which all the tropes and beginners’ mistakes are laid out, naked and blinking in the light of day. (It will have been reprinted by Firebird/Viking by the time you read this, in a fun package mimicking the “Rough Guide” series.) Explore its pages and you'll be surprised at how often even established writers get lazy, or don't think things through, or don't realize that fantasy isn't a war novel tricked out with elves and magic.

  But getting back to The Blood Knight, let me say that Keyes knows what works.

  Sure, there's a big, sprawling struggle on the go in this series, but it's the individuals who are important here, not armies moved across the landscape as though the books are playing boards or video games. There's variety as well, in the customs and mores of the different countries, in their religions, and he can write women characters as well as male—and they don't come off as men with breasts.

  Best of all, lying at the heart of this series is a magic as wild and potent as what first brought many old-timers such as myself to this field. Keyes creates a sense of wonder in every page, and plays fair with that magic—as well as the plots and characterizations. And while these books (The Blood Knight is the third of four) are certainly each a part of a larger story, each one leaves the reader satisfied.

  I'm being somewhat vague here in terms of referencing particular characters and plot situations, but that's only because this is an ongoing series and I don't want to spoil it for readers who might be intrigued by this particular book, but who have yet to pick up the others. Because, let me tell you, serious stuff happens to our cast from the previous books.

  What I will say is that I haven't been this enchanted with a secondary world fantasy in longer than I can remember. When we look back on this decade, sometime in the future, I don't doubt The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone will be considered one of the very best our field had to offer in the 2000s.

  * * * *

  Book of Shadows, by Mark Chadbourn & Bo Hampton, Image Comics, 2006, $3.50 each.

  And while we're talking about series, Mark Chadbourn has found an interesting way to extend one of his. Book of Shadows is
a two-issue miniseries that serves as a prequel to his much longer prose series The Age of Misrule (from Orion Books in the U.K.).

  Annie Lovelock works in a book shop and is just letting the days go by as she tries unsuccessfully to cope with the death of her boyfriend. To help deal with her grief, she has begun to dabble in magic.

  When the story opens, she performs a ritual, asking for some sort of sign that there's more to life than dead boyfriends and grief. What she gets is a visit from the Morrigan, and that visit sparks an opening between our world and fairy. And it's the signal that the age of reason has ended, allowing the beings of myths to walk the world once more.

  Like Keyes, Chadbourn understands the mystery and power of magic—what a powerful force it can be when it plays to awe, rather than letting it simply be horrific, or a thinly veiled analogy for powerful weapons. Though, I should add, it can also encompass both and still be satisfying—so long as the wonder of its Mystery isn't forgotten.

  Chadbourn also knows that it's the individual characters that make a big story work, and this is a big story, even though it's only the length of a couple of comic books. Lovelock offers a fascinating viewpoint into the proceedings: somewhat nihilistic, until push comes to shove, and she has to make the decision whether she wants to live.

  I like Chadbourn's storytelling. And I like his dialogue, and how it does what it's supposed to do: bring the characters to life.

  Bo Hampton's art is interesting here. I usually think of him as painting an illustrated story, but in this series the linework is definitely prominent, and the colors appear to be applied with a computer, rather than a brush. But it all works, creating what looks like a curious mash-up of woodblock, lithograph, and comic book art.

  You don't need to have read the prose books to be able to appreciate this miniseries. In fact, while it stands wonderfully on its own, one can almost see it as an extended advertisement for the prose series. It has certainly worked that way for me, since as soon as I finish writing this, I'm logging on to an online British bookseller to order myself a copy of World's End, the first of the three volumes available so far.