Fantasy Magazine, March 2008

Hans Christian Andersen, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, and Tim Burton seem to have been whispering in the ears of Fantasy Magazine’s March contributors. An assortment of folk and fantasy elements bubble through the mix; there’s humor, insight, and even romance here, with an undercurrent of darkness. The wobblier stories can be hard to follow, their narrative meat sometimes laid too thinly over the bones of an interesting idea, but this month’s offerings are never boring, whatever their weaknesses. I particularly enjoyed “Petrella” and “Turnipseed,” although “Alphabet” is weirdly intriguing.

Traditional villains become unlikely, mischievous heroes in Erik Amundsen’s “Turnipseed.” This remixed fairy tale is simultaneously appropriate for twelve-year-olds and satisfying for grownups, and Amundsen endows it with complexity while remaining true to his obvious influences in Nordic folklore. The village of Four Wells has been attacked, a knight in shining armor sets out to find the troll who’s presumably responsible…and then the tale turns on its ear:

“’I won’t need an army for you fiend.’ No, I’m not lying; he really
said those words exact. If I’d laughed, maybe that would be the end
of the story. The young knight charged me and I ate him with my
brothers that night, the end. My body was feeling lazy and my tongue
well-rested, and the man’s language, born as he was in a foreign land
that took the rights to contend with the problems of this one, is new
to my mouth, and I was eager to see what I could say.
‘Truly, you look very strong,’ I said.”

More interesting and psychologically realistic motives than hunger, anger, or simpleminded goodness propel Amundsen’s characters—boredom and business sense, to name two. In combination with a well-crafted narrative voice, skillful approach to setting, and judicious use of detail, they make “Turnipseed” a success.

This month’s second story is a puzzle; it has many interesting pieces, but put together as they are, they don’t make sense, and there seem to be a few missing from the box. “Alphabet” loves the man who found her and her brother adrift near the Pole, shivering in a coffin, and they all moved into his mansion.

“She used to light all the candles on her silver arm at night, to trickle wax down her lover’s bare back while she knelt above him, naked, the firelight making her into a Picasso sketch.”

The scents of copulation and death hang heavy in the atmosphere, while infidelity and hints of consanguineous affairs shadow the shattered plot. Becca de la Rosa slathers her odd fairy tale with ambiance and adjectives and hints at dark doings, but the substance and thrust of her story are unclear, and it doesn’t go anywhere; perhaps more elbow room might allow her to tie a sail to this glittering little casket.

Most glass mountain stories focus on the boys who tie on claws and bloody themselves climbing; Nikki Alfar’s “Glass” speaks for the point of view of the sort of girl those boys usually end up rescuing. But Mariska’s desires are different from theirs, and rather colder; in some ways, the chilly shadow of Andersen’s “Snow Queen” falls across her, although this story’s purple prose mostly lacks that tale’s simple strength. Our protagonist’s strange and brittle coming of age as an outsider in her hometown is annoyingly familiar. Her plight as a “poor little pretty girl,” despised by uglier and less ambitious women in her village, is somehow hard to care about, particularly as she seems to take her fate (if not the insults of her peers) with such equanimity that she’s hard to care about. The transformation and nature of her inhuman lover make the story rather more interesting than it would have been otherwise, however.

Nick Mamatas’s “Fire-Bringer” is fascinating and maddening. It feels as if several crucial pieces are missing and moves so quickly that it leaves this reader a bit disoriented, and although that may be an artistic strategy, the piece ends up seeming cryptic and breathless. Cryptic or not, I’d like to see what I’ve missed; it isn’t every day that the evil eye strikes a nine-thousand ton aircraft carrier. A few of his grammatical dislocations, such as “A red wall of fire trucks through which threaded bored-looking police officers, barred the way” are a bit jarring. That said, he also made me laugh out loud. Hopefully, style and substance will come to a truce in his future work.

In “Petrella,” on the other hand, admittedly sensual purple prose slows Charlene Brusso’s dark, interesting, yet ultimately frustrating exploration of a strange sort of concupiscence…and what may be nature’s frightening answer to human morality. The imagery is interesting, but the setting isn’t convincing, and the priest rings as a rather stock character. The wooden woman herself, however, is creepy, ambivalent, and as nurturing and amoral as a thunderstorm. Almost as soon as she’s alone with the man who fears her most, the rest of the story practically tells itself. What frustrates me is that he and his village fold like cardboard, while Petrella herself is as lovingly worked and whittled in her quietness as her adversary is when he’s voluble. Logic tells me this is intentional, but that doesn’t make it itch any less. Nonetheless, this dark fantasy is a shining candidate for inclusion in the sort of intelligent, well-crafted fantastical (and sfnal) curiosa Circlet Press produces. Ultimately, the ideas at the heart of this story, while explored in a way that might be faulted for its rhetoric and execution, fascinate; where style falters, substance resolutely triumphs.