Fantasy Magazine Online, January 2008

The January 2008 offerings from Fantasy Magazine are on the darker side: a mix of two parts magic and one part horror, with a dash of surrealism. This is one of the strongest (and the shortest) assortment they’ve served up since I started following the site.

Kelly Barnhill’s “Notes on the Untimely Death of Ronia Drake” is a gruesome, Carteresque exploration of female archetypes at war with one another. Like last month’s “Time to Say Goodnight” by Caroline M. Yoachim, it incorporates divorce in its fantasy, but that story’s gentle magical realism is the diametric opposite of this tale’s dark surrealism. It made me wonder whether Barnhill watched Pan’s Labyrinth recently. The characters’ physical transformations read like body horror, not enchantment, and the man-stealing here is anything but mundane. The flow feels a little fractured, the syntax a bit odd in places, but that only adds to the dreamlike unreality:

“You,” the girls said, pointing at the stepmother’s swollen belly, which had enlarged upon itself, doubling, then tripling its size until people joked that it must be a medicine ball shoved under her skin. Or a go-kart. Or a truck.

Ronia’s daughters, Alice and Anna, like the changelings of the British Isles, seem to possess preternatural means of perception and transformation, frightening their mother as well as their stepmother and bookending the middle of the three classic ages of woman, as it were, between their wild magic and that of the old woman from whom their nemesis stole her powers of enchantment.

If Barnhill’s offering is reminiscent of Angela Carter’s works, then Stephanie Campisi’s “Painting Walls in the Town of N—” aspires to resemble the stylings of Italo Calvino. A story of love, misunderstanding, loss, unreality, and stasis, a woman and her lover paint crumbling walls in a village outside of time, trapped in eternal winter. Just as the characters yearn to be in a classic like the ones they read, yet fall short—using words like “city-ness”—so, too, the accumulation of details, characters, and events fail to add up. The male love interest is opaque, as is the primary flaw in the relationship between him and the narrator. Everything feels just a little too self-consciously metaphorical, and it’s hard to care about either of them, or about what happens between them. However, for the most part, this piece is smoothly written; perhaps all it needs in order to succeed is some room to spread out in.

Gord Sellar skillfully blurs together myth and history in his standout story, “Pahwakhe.” Although I’m cautious about stories of Amerindian peoples which focus on decline and disappearance (in the manner of many nineteenth century romantic narratives), the cultural frame of reference within which Sellar locates “Pahwakhe” lends it legitimacy and power. Many groups have stories of young men or young women who either visit Ghost Town (or a similar place) intentionally (usually to retrieve a loved one), or who are taken there by force when they transgress, as a punishment. Although I am uncomfortable with the suggestion that the narrator’s punishment is the arrival of Europeans (presumably administered by a group of eavesdropping spirits who feel insulted in some way—that’s the way this usually happens in traditional stories), Sellar’s skillful merging of European traders and visitors from Ghost Town makes this retribution as poignant and creepy as it is unjust. The old rules remain the same: the host must show hospitality to his guests; his authority and standing must be maintained by his magnanimity to visitors. But this host is making his exchange with aliens and must maintain his power by surrendering something far more precious—although I’m not sure his actions are true to history, similar forced exchanges with supernatural beings do appear in some stories. Sellar’s skillful use of descriptive writing and visual imagery make his tale effective and haunting.

Sellar’s blending of Amerindian and European folktale traditions reminded me of Judith Berman’s Bear Daughter, and similarly, the universe of Leslie Claire Walker’s “Bones” brought to mind that of Susanna Clarke’s in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It certainly feels like part of a book of short stories set in a similar universe; its setting is tantalizing, strange, and never fully explained, although it is elucidated enough for things to make sense. In some ways, it is reminiscent of the Monty Python short film, “The Crimson Permanent Assurance.” Walker’s cutthroat businessmen engaging in, and trying to resist, hostile takeovers are also wizards dueling, fighting for survival as well as financial solvency. I’m not sure what I think of the ending, which equates humans who ruin others as a means of making a living with predatory animals—as if the humans, like the animals, had no choice other than to live destructively. As home foreclosures depress housing markets across the country and already well paid executives rake in holiday bonuses, it isn’t very easy to condone the behavior of people like Ballard and Laurel, regardless of their private heartbreaks, or sympathize with their desires. That said, Walker does an admirable job of conjuring a world vivid enough to enthrall and enough like our own to frighten, with a particularly strong opening.