Digital Domains

Between 1996 and 2005, leading speculative fiction editor Ellen Datlow selected original fiction for three different online-only publications: OMNI Online, Event Horizon, and SCIFICTION. In Digital Domains, Datlow reprints fifteen stories, many of them award winners or nominees, culled from those outlets. As the anthology's theme is place of publication rather than content, the stories are remarkably diverse, from near-future science fiction to mythic fantasy to a very modern ghost story. I could say that these stories, uniformly well-written and often excellent, prove that great fiction can be published online, but I think that in 2011 most people know that, even if they would prefer to read that fiction in paper formats. So I'll make a broader and equally accurate statement: these stories demonstrate the strength and range of turn-of-the-century speculative fiction, period. That's why the subtitle is "A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy," full stop.

With contributors like Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford, and Kim Newman, Digital Domains doesn't lack for big names, but the stories by less familiar writers are just as good, from the inimitable Howard Waldrop's "Mr. Goober's Show," an eerie tale about the dangers of nostalgia and the history of very early television technology, to Simon Ings' "Russian Vine," a quietly poetic piece of science fiction that meditates on the mechanisms of imperialism. A fine companion piece to "Russian Vine" is M. K. Hobson's "Daughter of the Monkey God," in which an unusual form of outsourcing is the basis for a moving demonstration of the power of forgiveness and emotional catharsis. And then there's Severna Park's "Harbingers," where the instability and violence of contemporary Africa is the backdrop for a mind-bending story about two young women caught up in events beyond their comprehension, involving aliens, time travel, and more disturbing things. These are the elements of science fiction, but Park uses them in an eerie, suggestive manner that gives the story a welcome flavor of dark fantasy.

Some stories speak directly to the concerns of the modern world; others have timeless, unearthly settings. Almost a prose poem, Jeffrey Ford's "Pansolapia" echoes the Odyssey, providing a sense of the epic and the numinous in only three pages. Kelly Link's "The Girl Detective" is an unclassifiable, difficult to describe melding of elements from myth, fairy tale, and twentieth-century juvenile fiction into a surreal, strangely evocative story about the search for meaning and emotional connection. Plus it's pretty funny. Actually, there are a few funny stories in the mix here, like Paul Park's "Get a Grip," the concept of which has aged in the years since its publication, but which remains a pleasure because of the ironic sharpness with which Park imagines its details. Or Kim Newman's "Tomorrow Town," in which a utopian society based on the ideas of classic science fiction turns out not to be quite what was hoped for.

Although Datlow has edited and enjoys all types of speculative fiction, she's most strongly associated with horror, not least because of her long career identifying the genre's best stories, which will hit the quarter-century mark with the 2012 volume of The Best Horror of the Year. Unsurprisingly, several of the stories in Digital Domains are dark enough to be called horror. Most striking to me were Nathan Ballingrud's "You Go Where It Takes You," with its potent, upsetting metaphor for the flight from responsibility, and Richard Bowes' "There's a Hole in the City," a story about the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks that demonstrates the author's ability to write fondly but unsentimentally about New York City, and to evoke the tragic force of memory and regret.

Although there were a few stories that resonated less for me, like James P. Blaylock's "Thirteen Phantasms," a World Fantasy Award winner that I thought was well-crafted but driven by hollow, unconsidered nostalgia, there was nothing I thought was so outright bad it brought down the total grade for the anthology. I'll admit that I bought Digital Domains on a whim at a bookstore liquidation sale, and didn't expect to enjoy it all that much. But as is so often the case, a retrospective covering a longish span of time turned out to offer the cream of the crop. As Datlow's dedication mentions, there was a time when online publication was seen as a risky, vaguely unprofessional proposition. But a group of great writers took the risk, and the positive results, of which this book is just one, are all around us.

There's Nothing in Why: Robert Aickman's "The View"

"The View," Robert Aickman's third contribution to We Are for the Dark, is the first of four of his "strange stories" that have very similar narrative outlines. A man goes on holiday, where he meets an attractive and mysterious woman with whom he forms a brief, blissful physical relationship before some disaster separates them, bringing his happiness to an end. This might be "The View," or "The Wine-Dark Sea" (where there are three essentially interchangeable women rather than one), or "Never Visit Venice," or "The Stains." To point out this similarity is not to suggest that the stories are repetitive; indeed they are not, for the specificities, of character and setting and supernatural phenomenon, render them quite distinct. One common feature, however, makes them difficult to write about within the framework of these essays: there is little about them to explain. Both in terms of broad narrative meaning and of wide-ranging theme, they seem to me fairly straightforward. (If I can be forgiven a digression, this may be why they have never struck me as among Aickman's finest tales; the air of unsettling ambiguity, though present in all of them, is not as strong or as all-pervading. In this, and in most other ways, I think "The View" is the best of the four.)

One could, of course, dig deeper, searching for a hidden level of meaning, a key to unlock the story and make every bewildering detail relevant. But I'm not sure that's a helpful approach. Both Aickman's theory of the ghost story as an artifact of the unconscious, "akin to poetry," and his philosophical stance that the modern over-reliance on reason and the scientific method represents a "wrong turning" for the human race, suggest that past a certain point the search for meaning is fruitless or even dangerous. "The View," though not the first Aickman story to hint at his criticism of the modern world-- there are intimations of that perspective in both "The Trains" and "The Insufficient Answer"-- is the first to move it into the foreground, contrasting the over-explained, dreary, unhappy world of contemporary England with the baffling, beautiful, fascinating Island and its lovely inhabitant, Ariel.

The critique of modernity begins with the description of the protagonist's temperament in the second paragraph. "Carfax always saw all good in terms of 'emancipation': all beauty, all duty. Others had seen the vision, but the slave selves of their past had intervened, making the gorgeous tawdry, the building in strange materials as rapidly failing in beauty, use, and esteem as the human body itself." (In the same vein is his later remark that "There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices." Note, by the way, that Carfax's own brief escape from his "slave self" is followed by the rapid aging of his own body.) Shortly afterward comes a glimpse of several such slave selves, in the array of overheard comments on the deck of the boat, which captures in a few brief paragraphs the depressing, faintly absurd quality of daily life and the various unsatisfactory bulwarks built against it.

"She has no idea how plain she is and of course you can't tell her," observed a conspicuously unattractive woman of about forty-five to a replica of herself.

"Communism gives the workers something to work for," vehemently asserted a man in a raincoat. His wispy colorless hair appeared on his prematurely obtruding scalp-line like the last vegetation in the dust bowl.

"So I said I'd give it to her if she promised to have it dyed green," remarked a round matron to her bored and miserable-looking husband.

"If you'll bring in the orders, I'll look after production. You can leave that to me. I know how to handle the ruddy Government."

"In the end I had to drag the clothes off her, and she tried to turn quite nasty." The speaker looked away from the other man and laughed gloatingly before resuming his former confidential manner.

"There's no hope for the world but a big revival of real Christianity," said the serious-minded, rather important-looking man. He was apparently addressing a large popular audience. "Real Christianity," he said again with emphasis.

"Look, Roland! A porpoise!" said a woman of thirty to her offspring, in the tone of one anxious to guide rather than dominate the child's formative years.

The pessimistic tone set by this passage and by the disagreeable boat journey is disrupted by the arrival of the woman known as Ariel, Aickman's first real femme fatale and the voice in this story of the rejection of modern communal values. There is her dismissal of her real names as "hideous commonplaces names of schoolgirls and young brides, and elderly lonely pensioners, and pure women in books. Godparents' names. Goodly names. Useful names which people in shops can spell." There is her description of Carfax's usual existence:

You live surrounded by the claims of other people: to your labor when they call it peace, to your life when they call it war; to your celibacy when they call you a bachelor, your body when they call you a husband. They tell you where you shall live, what you shall do, and what thoughts are dangerous. Does not some modern Frenchman, exhausted by it all and very naturally, say 'Hell is other people'?

The complaints she invokes are at once sweeping-- describing life in England as lived "entirely among madmen"-- and exact-- references to the absence of British taxes on the Island and to eating a lot of butter with breakfast. And finally there is the couplet written in her hand, reiterating her rejection of the pursuit of explanation: "There's nothing in why/The question is How?/Whatever you learnt/From the golden bough."

Faced with a story that itself seems to abrogate exegesis, one might simply throw up one's hands and enjoy it as an encounter with the irrational and beautiful and disturbing world that exists, or might exist, or ought rightly to exist, under and around the common one. But the details of that world, while not fitting into a reductive schematic explanation, do contribute to its resonance in ways that may not be obvious. "The View" is one of Aickman's more profusely allusive stories, rich in reference to the worlds of myth and art, and the remainder of this essay will track down some of those allusions for the benefit of readers who don't wish to do so themselves, suggesting in places how they relate to the larger theme of the story. Such a process does, of course, leave one at risk of "fancying absurd resemblances" and "making quite false identifications," but when analyzing Aickman, such risk is never far away.

Carfax: the name of Dracula's home in England in the Stoker novel, but I doubt that matters much. Its origin is in the Latin word for a crossroads, which would certainly fit the character's status, but it may just be the sort of British name Aickman was drawn to: at once vaguely aristocratic and faintly ridiculous (cf. Wendley Roper, Laming Gatestead).

Ariel: Shakespeare's air spirit from The Tempest, obviously, perhaps with reference also to the Biblical angel of the same name. Considering the gender ambiguity surrounding the Shakespearean character, which is explicitly mentioned in the story, the Aickman character's habit of dressing as a man is striking, if only as a suggestion of a more than human quality or of a duality comparable to a simultaneously human and non-human nature.

Fleet: Time is fleeting, indeed.

the Island: wherever it is. That it is left unnamed is surely the point. The Isle of Man is located in the right general area, and is likewise something of a tax haven, but I don't detect specific reference to that or any other place.

The Last of England: a Ford Madox Brown painting, shown here along with an accompanying sonnet by the author. The poem is, in tone if not in details, suggestive of Carfax's ambivalence about his holiday.

the Pastoral Symphony: Beethoven's Sixth,  intended to suggest the pleasures of travel in the countryside, with movements labeled "Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country," "Scene at the brook," "Happy gathering of country folk," "Thunderstorm, storm," and "Shepherds' song, cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm." The association with Carfax's pastoral recollections and reflections is obvious.

Voltaire: his freethinking tolerance is, of course, quite fitting for Ariel.


the carpet: Possibly with an echo of Henry James' "The Figure in the Carpet," where a writer's great and secret intention is compared to "a complex figure in a Persian carpet," though one hardly needs to have read James to use carpet patterns as a metaphor for pointless meaning-seeking.

a huge and burly man: "one of the Island gods" according to Ariel, and therefore perhaps with some reference to giants of Celtic myth. It's worth mentioning that, with its mysterious woman, its strange and magical landscape, and its unexpected time dilation, "The View" has an underlying similarity to very old stories about visits to faerie lands.

Ariel's verse: This is a translation of a Sappho fragment by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of a pair of fragments he combined into a poem variously known as "One Girl" and "Beauty." Aickman's ellipsis at the end covers his omission of the final words "till now." The second fragment as translated by Rossetti is "Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,/Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,/Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground." Sappho has already been mentioned as part of Carfax's train of thought that was interrupted by Ariel-- that drew her into being near him, if one wants to interpret the story in that way. Critics have observed that Rossetti's use of these fragments has mythic significance, reflecting on love and death with reference to underworld myths like those of Orpheus and Persephone. But that observation postdates the writing of this story, and the general resonance of these images of the desired, the unattainable, and the destroyed for "The View" is a simpler matter given Ariel's own fleeting quality.


Così è se vi pare: Literally means "You're right if you think you're right." The title of a Pirandello play dealing with the fragility of truth and the relentless search for meaning.

Beddoes: Thomas Lovell Beddoes' work demonstrates an ongoing obsession with death, which would seem to make it a poor, or perhaps a telling, choice for Carfax's musical endeavor.

Dahlmeier's collection of Judaeo-Arabic fables: I assume this is a real book, though I can find no information about it. I have no idea about the relevance, if any, of the first fable to Carfax's situation, unless to suggest he has made or will make a wrong choice, but both the second, with its tradeoff between lifespan and pleasure, and the third, with its "pleasurable but dangerous activities... of some visitor from another world" are certainly suggestive.

"Dover Beach": I imagine the relevance of the poem to Carfax's situation is obvious from the section quoted by Aickman, but for those who somehow got through school without reading it the whole thing is here.

the golden bough: As the text suggests, Sir James Frazer's book was The Golden Bough, a rationalist, non-theological study of myth and religion, and as such a logical target for Ariel's (and Aickman's) criticism of scientific analysis at the expense of metaphysical significance. The absence of capitals, if it means anything, may also be meant to bring to mind the specific "golden bough" out of which Frazer's book grew. This was a ritual associated with the goddess Diana Nemorensis in which a runaway slave could pull down a bough from a special tree and fight the priest-king to the death; if he was successful, he became the new priest-king, at least until someone successfully challenged him. Frazer linked this practice to a perceived worldwide myth about a sacred king, married to a goddess, who died and was reborn as part of a cycle associated with fertility.

Without forcing a tempting but imprudent one-to-one comparison (Carfax as runaway slave, the impossibly tall figure as dominant god), one can see this legend and others reflected in "The View," a story that, for all its distinctive Aickmanesque touches, has something classically mythological about it. Whether a conscious product of revision or a result of the unconscious workings to which Aickman attributed the success of all true ghost stories, this air of myth produces that juxtaposition of the quotidian and the uncanny on which Aickman and so many other great writers of the supernatural have drawn.

Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One)

One of the pleasures of reading widely is that you can achieve enough distance from an author's work to make you forget how brilliant it is, so that when you return to that author, the rediscovery is almost as powerful as the initial encounter. Caitlín R. Kiernan is such a talent, and her latest collection, Two Worlds and In Between, is ideal both for discovery and rediscovery. It's a "best-of" volume spanning 1993-2004, and like all great retrospectives it demonstrates at once the range of which its author is capable and the recurring themes, images, and stylistic features that make her work distinctive. At about 200,000 words and nearly 600 pages, it's a generous selection, including 25 short stories and novelettes and a long novella, each followed by a brief author's note on its genesis or its place in Kiernan's oeuvre. But enough of facts and generalities: on to the stories.

Lucy has been at the window again, her sharp nails tap-tapping on the glass, scratching out there in the rain like an animal begging to be let in. Poor Lucy, alone in the storm. Mina reaches to ring for the nurse, stops halfway, forcing herself to believe that all she's hearing is the rasping limbs of the crape myrtle, whipped by the wind, winter-bare twigs scritching like fingernails on the rain-slick glass. She forces her hand back down onto the warm blanket. And she knows well enough that this simple action says so much. Retreat, pulling back from the cold risks; windows kept shut against night and chill and the thunder.

The tricky thing about retrospectives is that they're usually arranged chronologically, putting the weakest work in front. Kiernan herself observes of two of the first three stories in the collection that they seem to her more ambitious than successful. But the ambitions themselves are enough to make these stories basically satisfying, especially given Kiernan's style, which even in her earliest work lacks any hint of awkwardness and has the darkly propulsive intensity that has become one of her hallmarks. The prose has been touched up over the years, but a look back at the original versions shows that this was only a honing of already-polished language.

"Emptiness Spoke Eloquent," quoted above, follows the long decline of Mina Murray in the aftermath of Dracula, and by interweaving her personal tragedies into the sweep of the century (world war, influenza, interwar Paris, war again, psychoanalysis in 1950s Manhattan), impresses even as it fails to compel on an emotional level. "To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)" has a few extraordinary evocations of a storm, but likewise lacks the psychological force that would be necessary to guide the reader through its careful tangles of prose.

But with the very next story, "Tears Seven Times Salt," that force arrives, and is instantly overwhelming. This story was recently chosen for the mammoth Century's Best Horror Fiction, and its invocation of displacement, dissatisfaction with identity, despair easily earns the distinction. The great genius of Kiernan's early writing is its depiction of the lives of outsiders and isolates; as Neil Gaiman put it, she is "the poet and bard of the wasted and the lost." Addicts, prostitutes, blocked artists, those who can't or don't want to find a place in what is sometimes called the adult world: Kiernan's gift is to write about them so sympathetically that even those who dismiss them as lazy or twisted can be made to understand how their lives feel, how the "unnatural" becomes the only natural thing.

Three very small rooms and each of them filled with his books and newspapers, his files and clippings and folders. The things he has written directly on the walls with Magic Marker because there wasn't time to find a sheet of paper before he forgot. Mountains of magazines slumped like glossy landslides to bury silverfish and roaches, Fate and Fortean Times, journals for modern alchemists and cryptozoological societies and ufology cults. Exactly 1,348 index cards thumbtacked or stapled to plaster the fragile, drained color of dirty eggshells and coffee-ground stains. Testaments uncorrelated, data uncollated, and someday the concordance and cross-reference alone will be a hundred thousand pages long.

That's from "Rats Live on No Evil Star," a portrait of something like schizophrenia, of pattern-making and the desperate search for truth, and the portrait of eccentricity, the evocation of a decayed yet strangely attractive place, are found throughout these early pieces. The settings, from the heat of a New Orleans summer to the chill solitude of a millionaire's estate on the Hudson, are as vividly captured as the flawed, obsessive, volative characters who populate them. But there's more at work than human yearning and despair; these are, after all, fantasy stories, dark and disturbing ones. Kiernan's supernaturalism, enhanced by her knowledge of geology and paleontology, of things so ancient or unrecognizable that to the common imagination they might as well be monsters, is, in its very different way, as reserved and elusive as that of the classic ghost story; it's unsurprising that the producer who wanted to turn the marvelous "Onion" into a screenplay should have mistaken it for only the first half of a story. Her work may not offer the expected answers, but as Kiernan writes, "one good mystery is worth a thousand solutions," and it is the awe brought on by the inscrutability of the phenomena she writes about that gives them their staying power. Without answers, there are only the images, which tap into the terror that comes when our fragile sense of order is disrupted.

But Frank didn't run away, and when he pressed his face to the crack in the wall, he could see that the fields stretched away for miles and miles, crimson meadows beneath a sky the yellow-green of an old bruise. The white trees that writhed and rustled in the choking, spicy breeze, and far, far away, the black enormous thing striding slowly through the grass on bandy, stilt-long legs.

As Kiernan's style develops over the course of the collection, another gift becomes evident, a mastery of narrative structure comparable to H. P. Lovecraft's. Stories told out of chronological order, further flashbacks within those disordered sections, dreams that echo the unrevealed past or foreshadow the future, excerpts from books whose banality is belied by the reader's knowledge of their true significance: Kiernan has mastered every device, gradually pulling back the curtain to reveal as much as she's ever going to. Small masterpieces like "Andromeda Among the Stones" and "La Peau Verte" use this non-linearity to great effect, building up to their defining moments so that those moments have the grandeur, the terrible and long-lasting reverb, for readers that they do for the characters.  Eventually Kiernan begins to experiment with the first-person point-of-view, which she had long resisted, and the narrator's struggle with ordering events, with describing the indescribable and focusing on the horrific, further increases the brilliant structural complexity out of which fleeting and sinister knowledge emerges. For readers expecting the straightforward, the double whammy of elaborate structure and elusive meaning will be frustrating, but for those who prefer carefully-orchestrated and suggestive cosmic dread, there are few greater pleasures.

I wish I could convey what makes each of the stories in this collection excellent, but I don't know how to do so without bogging down in plot summary, which is beside the point. So let me mention only a few favorites. "The Road of Pins," a werewolf story except that it isn't one at all, in which profound unease grows out of the work of a contemporary artist, a mysterious film, and the writer's block and fragile romance of the protagonist. "The Dead and the Moonstruck," which shows the unexpected ease with which Kiernan's decidedly adult vision can be adapted for a satisfying young-adult story. I especially admired the few science fiction stories mixed in with the fantasy. Science fiction allows the weirdness that exists in the shadows of Kiernan's fantasies to emerge into the light and define her universe, which makes the element of cosmic terror all the more potent. In "Riding the White Bull" and "The Dry Salvages," the aliens are truly alien, but they're only a part of the strangeness of space-- vast, dangerous, beautiful-- and human society itself has or might become a nightmare scenario.

I give up. That paragraph feels hopelessly false, exactly what I might say about half a dozen writers I admire, nothing specific to Kiernan's talent. All I can think to do is quote more, the stopgap of throwing out the author's words when my own prove insufficient. And in the end, it's perhaps the way an author uses words that matters most. Themes, motifs, structural devices: they're common coin, accessible to anyone, but the flow of sentences is nearly impossible to imitate.

And all the world goes white, a suffocating white where there is no sky and no earth, nothing to divide the one from the other, and the Arctic wind shrieks in her ears, and snow stings her bare skin. Not the top of the world, but somewhere very near it, a rocky scrap of land spanning a freezing sea, connecting continents in a far-off time of glaciers. Dancy wants to shut her eyes. Then, at least, there would only be black, not this appalling, endless white, and she thinks about going to sleep, drifting down to someplace farther inside herself, the final still point in this implosion, down beyond the cold. But she knows that would mean death, in this place, this when, some mute instinct to keep her moving, answering to her empty belly when she only wants to be still.

A simple paragraph in some ways, picked more or less at random, but what I respond to in Caitlín R. Kiernan's fiction is there as much as it is anywhere else. It's not representative of her style-- no one paragraph could be-- but it has a compelling rhythm, captures the sense of being tossed into the deep end, somewhere you can't catch your breath, can only hold it in as you navigate the marvelous, malevolent landscape while looking for the way out. An easy experience? No. Never crude, Kiernan's work is nonetheless raw, likely to upset certain readers in ways they aren't looking for. But anything worth reading is going to upset someone, and if you want fiction that juxtaposes emotional frailty with the magnitude of the universe, fantasy that leads you someplace else and makes that place as real as here and now, Kiernan should be at the very top of your reading list.

Fantasy, Lite

At the risk of becoming one of those people who gets sniffy every time Tolkien is mentioned in the mainstream media, I'm going to take a minute to look at this New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik. Which isn't actually about Tolkien; as far as I can tell, it's an attempt to explain the popularity of Christopher Paolini, into which Tolkien is awkwardly interjected. Of course Paolini is influenced by Tolkien; he is, as you would expect from a writer who began his series as a teenager, influenced by virtually every piece of fantasy and science fiction he ever read. But, superficial points aside, is there an actual basis for comparison? Paolini has the same relationship to Tolkien that caffeine-free diet soda has to the caffeinated, sugared variety: everything that makes it what it is has been taken out. Considering Tolkien through the lens of his imitators is inevitably going to diminish what makes his work different. Focusing on Paolini, and to a lesser extent Stephenie Meyer, also means the article flirts with treating The Lord of the Rings as a similar young-adult saga, even though it manifestly isn't.

Considering which, the key thing about the article is that it isn't too bad. There are problems, of course, or we wouldn't be here. We're told that The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin are early works, which is of course an oversimplification: depending on which texts you're looking at, they're early, they're late, they're contemporaneous with The Lord of the Rings. The context in which they're called early is the interesting part; they're distinguished from The Lord of the Rings because they lack "Hobbits and humors and pipe-smoking wizards" and are "as dull as dishwater in consequence." The irony is that the earliest version of The Silmarillion has a frame story that, while hardly a counter-balancing social comedy like Hobbiton, is more immediate and human than the later approach that of necessity won out in constructing the published text. That both The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin are, despite the existence of editorially-managed continuous versions, incomplete is also something Gopnik doesn't mention or consider.

But none of that really matters, and one can hardly argue the general point that for a lot of readers The Silmarillion as it stands is less interesting than The Lord of the Rings because of the absence of "lovable local detail." (One might, however, demur from the notion that J. K. Rowling's invented world is anything like "Tolkien's sword-and-sorcery realm," or that Tolkien's realm has anything to do with what's usually called sword-and-sorcery. All fantasy is not pretty much the same thing.) More important is this:

Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien—the good people are very good, the bad people very bad, and though occasionally a character may be tossed between good and evil, like Gollum, it is self-interest, rather than conscience, that makes him tip back and forth. Betrayal and temptation happen; inner doubts do not. Gandalf and Aragorn never say, as even the most patriotic real-world general might, “I don’t know which side I should be on, or, indeed, if any side is worth taking.” Nor does any Mordor general stop to reflect, as even many German officers did, on the tension between duty and morality: there are no Hectors, bad guys we come to admire, or Agamemnons, good guys we come to deplore. (Comic-book moralities, despite their reputation, are craftier; the “X-Men” series is powerful partly because it’s clear that, if you and I were mutants, we would quite possibly side with the evil Magneto.)

That's a little better than an absolute denial of moral depth, but not much so; in the fundamentals it's no different from the usual response you get when readers of psychologically realistic fiction bounce off Tolkien's epic morality. Several things might be said in response: that in a novel about the seductive nature of power, self-interest is not readily separable from conscience; that Frodo's failure, a vital part of the novel's moral structure and not reducible to "self-interest," hasn't even been mentioned; that talk about who "we" do or don't come to admire or deplore is an act of projection. The underlying problem is that some readers confuse the style by which moral complexity is conveyed in twentieth-century literary fiction with the substance of that complexity. That the tragedy of Boromir is not described in interior monologue doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it isn't part of the appeal of the novel. The absence of a debate about the morality of takings sides in a particular invented war is not the absence of morality.

Eventually, after some mockery of the Inheritance Saga, we get the explanation of the appeal of fantasy:

And the truth is that most actual mythologies and epics and sacred books are dull. Nothing is more wearying, for readers whose tastes have been formed by the realist novel, than the Elder Edda. Yet the spell such works cast on their audience wasn’t diminished by what we find tedious. The incantation of names is, on its own, a powerful literary style. The enchantment the Eragon series projects is not that of a story well told but that of an alternative world fully entered. You sense that when you hear a twelve-year-old describe the books. The gratification comes from the kid’s ability to master the symbols and myths of the saga, as with those eighty-level video games, rather than from the simple absorption of narrative.

 It's not so much that that's objectionable, although there are young adult fantasies that don't deserve to be treated as mere exercises in world-building, or that it's inaccurate, although I'm not inclined to take someone who writes with such anthropological distance as an expert on how kids read. It's that, as an explanation, it's utterly banal. Fantasy is unrealistic but people respond to the depth of the mythology-- this is an insight worthy of four pages in The New Yorker? It's like writing an article on Cubism whose big insight is that Picasso actually meant his paintings to look that way. The young-adult spin, that books like Eragon and Twilight provide typical adolescent struggles plus a light gloss of magical wish fulfillment, is equally unprofound. This, I suppose, is what gets on my nerves: that in 2011 the audience of a putatively intellectual magazine still needs to be told that fantasy isn't purely juvenile escapism, that it has some connection to the real world. An article like this should be an elaboration of the complicated appeal of fantasy, not a basic look at how the other half reads. The argument Gopnik makes ought to go without saying.

(By the way, is Huckleberry Finn really "a narrative whose purpose is to push the hero toward a moment of moral crisis?" I rather doubt it.)

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

In 2003 there was The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, in which a group of roughly fifty authors described bizarre, humorous, or downright disturbing illness the mainstream medical community refused to acknowledge. That anthology built on the work of the brilliant, eccentric, and entirely fictional Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead. Now it transpires that the doctor, who died in 2003 at the age of 103, was also a great collector of artifacts, inventions, found objects, and miscellaneous junk, and an even larger group of authors and artists has undertaken to describe the highlights of his collection. The result is a quirky blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror that ranges from the comical to the creepy and back again.

After an introduction that elaborates the fiction of Dr. Lambshead, perhaps excessively so, the first of several themed sections is "Holy Devices and Infernal Duds: The Broadmore Exhibits," which features four unusual pieces of steampunk tech, from "The Electrical Neurheographiton," an unusual electroshock device invented by Nikola Tesla and described by Minister Faust, to "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny," the ultimate in high-tech child-reading as explained by Ted Chiang. An excerpt from the former will suggest the particular note of weirdness much of the book strikes:

On January 12, 1943, Mr. Tesla was claimed to have died, although reports were conflicting. Many in Hollywood conjectured immediately that assassins in the pay of Big Cinema had done in the Serbian genius for selling them "exclusive" rights to a device whose blueprints contained, in tiny print, the phrase "I have omitted an explanation only for the motive unit which makes the entire machine work, in fear that the alchemists of celluloid might enthrall their nation and the world with ludicrous tales of vacuous lives." Others believed that Mr. Tesla's madness finally claimed him, infecting him with a Jovian "brain burst" that produced not Minerva but rather a puddle of bloodied grey matter upon Tesla's hotel room floor. Among the modern-day Fraternal Society of Teslic Scientific Investigators, there remains the belief that Tesla's "corpse" was an electrophantasmic discharge that had merged with organic materials in the hotel room to produce a permanent simulacrum of Tesla, while the "real" man departed from this world to explore the Universe, unhindered by the constraints of mortals.

Next up is "Honoring Lambshead: Stories Inspired by the Cabinet," six fictions based on artifacts from the cabinet. From Garth Nix's "Ambrose and the Ancient Spirits of East and West," about a British government operative with a gift for magic, to Holly Black's "Lot 8: Shadow of My Nephew by Wells, Charlotte," about the fate of a bear raised as a human, all the stories are good, but several lack the peculiar charm of the rest of the cabinet. Only "Relic" by Jeffrey Ford, with its lonely church and surreal parishioners, is as disarmingly funny, strange, and sad as the catalog entries. Tad Williams' "A Short History of Dunkelblau's Meistergarten" is also great, but it's not really a story, and but for a superficial similarity to Chiang's piece, it would be more at home among "The Broadmore Exhibits."

The next two sections are built around artists: four pieces illustrated by Mike Mignola ("The Mignola Exhibits") and two by China Miéville ("The Miéville Anomalies"). As it happens, one of the Mignola illustrations is for Miéville's "Pulvadmonitor: The Dust's Warning," one of the eerier entries. Although it's found, whimsically enough, in the attic of British Dental Association Museum, the Pulvadmonitor is no joke, but an unsettling reflection of the human search for meaning. Lev Grossman's "Sir Ranulph Wykeham Rackham, GBE, a.k.a. Roboticus the All-Knowing" is funnier, but its account of a British nobleman whose fame in artistic circles is enhanced rather than diminished by his prosthetic lower body and head has an edge of pessimistic melancholy that runs throughout the Cabinet of Curiosities, making it more than an extended steampunk gag. Another example: the second Miéville Anomaly, "The Gallows-horse," is at once a satire on contemporary philosophy and academic theory and a series of unpleasantly pessimistic variations on a memorable image.

The final section of exhibits is simply titled "Further Oddities," and lives up to that title. There's "The Thing in the Jar," in which Michael Cisco recounts Dr. Lambshead's seven attempts to explain the origins of "an anthropic creature" that might be an aborted minotaur, an Olmec carving come to life, or the offspring of a man and a volcano. And Caitlín R. Kiernan's "A Key to the Castleblakeney Key," an epistolary horror story about an impossible bog artifact and the terrible dreams it brings, suffused with its author's gift for balancing historical and archaeological erudition and portrayals of the fraying human mind. And Alan Moore's "Objects Discovered in a Novel Under Construction," which uses elements from his unfinished novel Jerusalem, envisioned as an enormous but unfinished building:

Making a considerable contribution to the already unsettling ambiance is the anomalous (and even dangerous) approach to architecture that is evident in the unfinished work: the lowest floor, responsible for bearing the immense load of the weightier passages and chambers overhead, seems to be built entirely of distressed red brick and grey slate roofing tiles with much of it already derelict or in a state of imminent collapse. Resting on this, the massive second tier would seem to be constructed mostly out of wood and has been brightly decorated with painted motifs that would appear to be more suited to a nursery or school environment, contrasted with the bleak and even brutal social realism that's suggested by the weathered brickwork and decrepit terraces immediately below.

Following these oddities are personal accounts of visits to the collection, dating from 1929, when N. K. Jemisin studies Dr. Lambshead's supply of kitchen implements to acquire the awesome power of "The Singular Taffy Puller," to 2003, when, as recounted to Gio Clairval, Dr. Lambshead's housekeeper sealed the collection's fate by trying against orders to clean "The Pea." That might seem an ideal conclusion for the book, but there's one more thing for those who just can't get enough of Lambshead's collection: "A Brief Catalog of Other Items," paragraph-long descriptions of such curiosities as the Bear Gun (it fires bears), the box of Reversed Commas, and St. Blaise's Toad (a miraculous relic).

With a contributor list featuring some of the biggest names in several varieties of imaginative fiction and art (in addition to those mentioned above, there's Aeron Alfrey, J. K. Potter, Michael Moorcock, Holly Black, Brian Evenson... I could go on), The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is a treasure trove of the weird. The playful metafictional conceit and some of the more tongue-in-cheek items may lead some readers to expect a wearyingly cutesy volume, but there's more than that going on here, and the total effect of the varied items is all the more powerful precisely because they don't adhere to one easily-described style. Beautifully designed and laid out, this is one curio that any reader of non-mimetic fiction should at least flip through, and many will want to own.

Three Creatures and a Castle: Robert Aickman's "The Insufficient Answer"

After much consideration, it seems to me that the best approach to an explanatory analysis of "The Insufficient Answer" is three mini-essays on the story's central characters, each of whom appears to be a supernatural being of one sort or another.

Felicity: The Ghost

That Felicity is a ghost now seems so overwhelmingly obvious that I have no idea how I ever missed it. She has a tomb, for heaven's sake, even if housekeeping standards at the Schloss Marcantonio are so eccentric that it might just be an unusual bed. And Cust considers the possibility that she might be a ghost, which is, in an Aickman story, the equivalent of a large neon sign spelling out "SHE'S A GHOST!" in violent green letters. Her ability to move among the locked rooms of the schloss is another clue. But I didn't quite put it all together when I read the story a few months ago. That's the thing about Aickman; his stories are so rich in detail and implication that they become overwhelming, creating an impression of inscrutability so profound that even obvious connections can be overlooked. For that reason, I'll deal briefly with Felicity's two appearances in the narrative, highlighting the hints of her ghostly nature, some of which may not be noticed even by those who know a ghost when they see one.

Felicity died when, in her desperation to escape the schloss, she threw herself from its only large window, the one Cust finds and wonders about. As a ghost, she relives those moments over and over again. This is why, in her first conversation with Cust, she begins to fade as the sounds from the hall are overheard; the sounds are her, weeping as she runs down the corridor toward the window, and disappearing from the room altogether as she and the fallen iron shutter, which Cust sees at the end of the story, on the ground outside and covered with years' worth of vegetation, strike the ground below, setting up the enormous clattering that is either the source of Mrs Hastings' aversion to noise or an especially ironic mockery of it. That there is, despite the comparatively new glass Cust notices, no sound of its breaking when he sees the figure fall from the window, is another indication that the fall is spectral rather than physical.

A few aspects of Felicity's dialogue, which is, like Beech's at the end of "The Trains," a model of the suggestive yet opaque manner of certain Aickman characters, also allude to her status, of which she seems at least partially aware. (If that's so, there's a chilling pathos to her description of being imprisoned and looked in on and getting out.) The statement that Cust wouldn't believe how long she has been at the schloss implies her death was so long ago that, if she were aging normally, she'd be much older than she appears. The concern about whether women still say "bloody" in London also reflects the passage of time. Her reference to "the goose who lays the golden eggs" is presumably about herself as Mrs Hastings' model, killed like the goose by another's cruel greed. And finally there's the remark that Poppy is always ill "at these times," a sign that she knows there is some unnatural cycle involved in her escapes.

But how did that cycle begin? Why was Felicity imprisoned, and what need of Mrs Hastings' did she fulfill?

Mrs Hastings: The Vampire

Just as "The Trains" brought Aickman's distinctive devices to certain horror tropes, so too does "The Insufficient Answer" seem to be his variation on two great nineteenth-century tales of vampirism: Stoker's Dracula and Le Fanu's "Carmilla." As "Carmilla" was itself an influence on Dracula, the specific source of some of these similarities can't be pinned down. All three works have English characters in Central European castles, with an emphasis on secrecy, locked doors, and emergence late in the day. All three feature mysterious, powerful characters whose effusive and learned conversation is emphasized. Dracula and Mrs Hastings are both unexpectedly robust and both are shown sleeping in chapels deep inside their castles (though for very different reasons); both castles are without mirrors. Even Miss Franklin's delirious mutterings about Whitby may be an allusion to Stoker's novel, in which that city was the site of Dracula's first landing in England. There's also the mention at both the beginning and the end of the story of the Irving statue near which Benson's gallery is located. That would be Henry Irving, whose friend and biographer Bram Stoker used the actor-manager as an inspiration for Dracula. The most salient direct parallel between "The Insufficient Answer" and "Carmilla" is that in both stories the dominant figure and her victim are female.

Given the absence of explicitly monstrous behavior in the Aickman canon, the question these similarities raise is not so much whether Mrs Hastings is a blood-drinking vampire as it is what subtler form her victimization might take. One need not assume any supernatural manifestation at all; it might be that she is simply a cruel, controlling woman whose behavior drives people to despair. One certainly doesn't know what she might have done to cause her husband's plane crash, or exactly what (if anything) happened to Miss Franklin's sister Lilian, whose belongings are for some reason stored in the castle. But in the case of Felicity, we have a little more to go on.

In the first place, there is something off about Felicity's willingness to travel halfway across Europe to stay at a ruined castle with an older woman she's only just met.  It's perhaps not insignificant that one of the subtexts of "Carmilla," and many other female vampire stories, is lesbianism. The reference to unspecified "talk" about Mrs Hastings could support such a reading (or any number of others, of course), and even the mention of "just a phase" could be so interpreted if one wished. Most interesting in this context is Miss Franklin's explanation of why Mrs Hastings came to Slovenia: "I should say it was simply to get away from the world of men." This, like several of her explanations, appears to be consciously disingenuous, trading on the difference between "men" as a species and "men" as a gender; it is at the very least suggestive. But in any case a sexual reading is hardly necessary, as the strongest intimations of strangeness around Mrs Hastings are not about love but about art.

If Felicity is to be believed, Mrs Hastings imprisons her simply to use her as a model. That could be motivation enough; she has great hopes for the work she does with Felicity's image, and it is, in Cust's judgment, "curious" and "astonishing;" he "had never seen anything like it." The tomb sculpture in her shape is "brilliantly suggestive" and a "masterpiece." More is involved than beauty, though; in one of the story's more bizarre moments, Mrs Hastings' statement that she is learning to paint in the dark "seemed perceptibly to shake the previously assured Miss Franklin." Is there something dangerous about her talent? A now-obscure allusion may be significant here.

When studying Mrs Hastings' library, Cust pulls out a book at random, Chris Massie's Corridor with Mirrors. This is a real novel, published in 1941 and therefore fairly recent at the 1951 publication of We Are for the Dark, but both it and its author are so poorly-known today as to have left little mark on the Internet. Any readers of this essay who are familiar with the book or the author are encouraged to leave a comment, but in the interim I must rely on this summary of a 1948 film version. If it's at all representative of the novel's plot, Aickman's allusion to the story of a woman shaped by an eccentric figure into the ideal female of his imagination may be a hint of how intense, ominous, and possibly supernatural is Mrs Hastings' interest in Felicity. Or it might just be that the title of that novel allows Aickman to bring up the absence of mirrors in the schloss.

Whatever her precise nature, Mrs Hastings is certainly a powerful personality. But by the end of the story one suspects she is not the most powerful woman in the castle. That dubious honor must go to the third member of the story's peculiar triad.

Miss Franklin: The Witch

I've suggested that Miss Franklin's answers to Cust's questions are sometimes dishonest. Three times she pauses before replying to him: when asked about the loud noise, when asked about Mrs Hastings' reason for leaving England, and when asked if she has any control over Felicity's appearances.  In the first instance, her answer is a lie with a hint of the truth; in the second, it's so ambiguous as to be meaningless. I would argue that the third answer is also dishonest: that Miss Franklin is in fact the source of the apparition of Felicity, and since that apparition is (savor the irony of her name) the reason the older women "must absent ourselves from that felicity [of leaving the schloss] a while," she has therefore imprisoned Mrs Hastings as thoroughly as Mrs Hastings once imprisoned Felicity. Cust himself, remembering Felicity's "fear and hatred" and "constant references to her rather than the sculptress," is on the verge of a similar conclusion, and back aways from it only out of fear.

Before going over the evidence for this proposition, it's worth looking at the relationship between the two older women. Felicity says, "They hate each other, of course," and Mrs Hastings' indifference to Miss Franklin's potentially fatal illness ("It's very tiresome of her and quite unnecessary") backs up that contention on one side. On the other, Miss Franklin shows no sign of warmth toward or about anything or anyone. It's unlikely such enmity was there from the beginning; Miss Franklin would hardly have taken so solitary a job with a woman she despised. One might speculate, then, that the mutual hatred began when Miss Franklin saw what Mrs Hastings was capable of, what she did to Felicity, to her husband, or to Miss Franklin's sister Lilian. Possessed of that knowledge, Miss Franklin apparently armed herself against becoming the next victim. As she says to Cust, after inexplicably unlocking her door without a key, "I have no intention of being trapped."

There are a few signs that she is linked to Felicity's appearances. It's Felicity herself who observes that Miss Franklin is always ill at these times, and Miss Franklin is said to have woken suddenly in the middle of the night, presumably around the time Felicity appeared or disappeared. But the largest clue is her amusement when Cust suggests a mundane cause for her illness, and the exchange that follows.

"Pneumonia?" Cust might have said rabies.

"I recollected your cold when we last met."

"Oh yes. That." Miss Franklin laughed. "I followed my sister Lilian's remedy."

"Your sister Lilian?"

"Two heaping tablespoonsfull of salt in a tumbler of water piping hot and drink it down."

"I see. It certainly seems to work like a charm."

"Well, it works, Mr Cust. Charms often don't and when they do you oftener wish they hadn't." She still looked extraordinarily ill and her hair was a disorganized heap; but she was fully dressed in an ugly brick-coloured frock.

"You know about charms?" inquired Cust lightly but, all recent events considered, fearing for the answer.

"I've been asleep for goodness knows how long. That's something I'm not used to at all. I think there must have been magic in the air." The sentimental cliche sounded ludicrously sinister.

Magic indeed. In this light, Miss Franklin's unflappable calm (I think especially of her "neat ladylike figure" and amused laughter during Mrs Hastings' fitful response to Felicity's appearance), and the statement that she loves her job, make a grim sense, as does her fear of Mrs Hastings' ability to paint in the dark: if the two women are in some way dueling forces, an unexpected advance on the part of one might endanger the other. And their relationship is psychologically rich as well; one hardly need invoke the supernatural to imagine dangerous power games, driven by secrets, in the dynamic between a servant and her mistress. Possible sexual interpretations of Mrs Hastings' behavior become interesting again here: Miss Franklin as abandoned lover, Miss Franklin as willing or unwilling procuress.

But whether one prefers a reading that involves sex or one that emphasizes other deep, mysterious drives, the psychological element is a constant. It's often true of Aickman that even when the narrative details of a story remain obscure, the philosophical and psychological weight is clear. Whatever the specific connections and secrets that were involved, all three of the story's female characters are trapped in the Schloss Marcantonio by networks of mutual need and loathing, and each is, despite evident flaws, tragic or pathetic in her own way. There is, as Miss Franklin suggests, no end in sight to their suffering, and Cust, who only spends a week with them, loses his job as a result of the contact. Not all Robert Aickman's stories are bleak, but the world of this one does seem to be an inescapable and permanent hell.

Open Questions

1. As mentioned above: how similar is Massie's novel to that film version? What further connections might be made by one who had read the book?

2. Names are important in Aickman. "Cust" is probably related to constancy and perseverance, which is rather funny in the circumstances, and the irony of "Felicity" has already been mentioned, but what about Lola Hastings and Poppy Franklin? Is there anything there? And why is it called the Schloss Marcantonio? A reference to the engraver? The composer? Someone else? My guess would be the first, but what would be the reason? Is there a specific work of his that might be relevant?

3. Is something particular meant by that bit about painting in the dark?


As ever, comments on these or any other aspects of the story are welcome.

The Secret Books of Paradys

This four-book series is linked by the milieu of Paradys, a city that's not so much a fictional analogue of Paris as a distillation of the Decadent, Gothic, and romantic aspects of its image. Populated by vain noblemen with decaying mansions, unappreciated poets drinking in darkened taverns, and lunatics locked into cruel asylums, Paradys is a perfect setting for the brand of lush, ornate horror that is, I think, the most distinctive of the many modes in which Tanith Lee writes. In both style and substance writing of this type can seem exaggerated, ludicrous, but for those on the right wavelength it captures something of the glittering intensity of obsession, a state of mind in which the exaggerated and the ludicrous seem natural, are in fact the only way to express one's heightened awareness.

Darkness closed on Paradys. But the night City was no worse, no more impenetrable, than a night in the country. This too had its own strange sounds, its own pitfalls, and generally the City gave more light than the forests, hills and fields, which were lit only by fire-flies, fungus, stars and moon. The City moon was made of dull plate, but lower down other luminosities shone out. High round windows in various towers of a college where the students pored late over huge books and parchments, dim bars of light behind iron grills and panes of sheep-skin. Sometimes, at the gates of a fine house, or along the river and its bridges, torches flashed on poles. But on the lower bank the hovels crowded to each other in sympathy, darkling, though here and there an occasional fire bloomed on stones in the street.

The Book of the Damned is made up of two short novels and a novella, unlinked in narrative terms but sharing recurrent motifs of duality, mutable gender, and romantic obsession. In "Stained with Crimson," the poet Andre St. Jean becomes infatuated with a mysterious noblewoman, but as you might expect the consummation of his desire comes at a terrible price, trapping Andre in a cycle of lust, violence, and revenge from which escape may take a very long time. In "Empires of Azure," Louis de Jenier, who makes a living and finds an obscure satisfaction in imitating women on the stage, rents a house in Paradys that proves already occupied, by a ghostly female presence to which he is fatally drawn.

These are fine stories, but the highlight of the first volume is "Malice in Saffron," an especially dark and disturbing meditation on such ambiguous distinctions as male/female and good/evil. Jehanine escapes a physically and sexually abusive stepfather to join her half-brother Pierre, the only remotely good person in her life, in Paradys. But her reception is not what she expects, and Jehanine soon carries out a cruel revenge whose consequences will come to haunt her. With nowhere else to go, she finds a bifurcated life in Paradys: by day the female Jhane, novice of the convent called the Nunnery of the Angel, and by night the male Jehan, leader of a band of thieves that terrorizes the city. Her existence has the febrile quality of a dream or a delusion, as pregnant with meaning as an allegory yet more potent in its fearsome strangeness than flatly symbolic fiction. Plague, satanic mysticism, festival, and a horrifying sacrifice are some of the components of this harrowing short novel.

He had of course lost himself on emerging from his apartment. There were no lights anywhere, only the worm-runs of windowless corridors on which the occasional door obtruded. Now and then, from perversity, he had tried these doors. Three gave access to barren chambers, empty of nearly anything. One had a shuttered window, another a candle-branch standing on the floor. (The branch was of iron, worth little. The candle-stubs had long ago been devoured by vermin.) A few other doors resisted his impulse. He fancied they were stuck rather than locked. Presently he reached an ascending stair he was certain he had not seen on entry with the hag. He paused in irritated perplexity, wondering if it would be worthwhile to climb. Just then a woman appeared and went across the stair-top, evidently negotiating the corridor which ran parallel to that below.

 She did not carry a candle, and that he saw her at all was due to his own light, and the pallor of her hair and skin which caught it. Her gown was of some sombre stuff, high-waisted as was now not always the fashion, and she held her hands joined under her breast. A stiff silver net contained her hair; it glittered sharply once as she glided by. That was all. She was gone literally in that flash. Her face he did not really see, yet her slightness, something about her, made him think her girlish.

Come to Paradys to pursue his education, Raoulin finds himself more interested in this woman-- this ghost, as he suspects-- of the ancient, decrepit house where he has taken a room. A disturbing experience with a local prostitute only increases his certainty that there is a story to be discovered, and eventually, he finds the woman and encourages her to tell it. Once she was Helise la Valle, daughter of one noble house and promised to marry into another, the d'Uscarets. Ignorant of what will come on her wedding night and overhearing whispers of some terrible rumor about her new husband's family, Helise waits in fear. But what happens after the ceremony, and what she does to stop it, are not quite the Gothic cliche one might be expecting.

It's true, though, that a curse haunts the d'Uscaret line, a curse the novel eventually traces back to Roman times, when the city was known as Par Dis, and a soldier called Vusca received a strange gift. Following the story of The Book of the Beast back in time has its fascinations, even though the core of it, once revealed, is not terribly complicated. Vusca's story is especially evocative. When the narrative returns to the present for its resolution, the thread of interest is lost, but the luxuriant, slightly antiquated flow of Lee's language carries it through to a satisfying conclusion.

Paradys too has its cemeteries, its little graveyards tucked out of sight, its greater yards of death that hug the churches, the cathedral that is called a Temple. It has its places of graves, between the houses in sudden alleys. Between the paving stones, here and there you may look down and see a name that paves the way, a date of beginning and the other of surcease. Even under the house floors now and then they will raise a carpet and a board and point you a grave: Sylvie sleeps here, or Marcelin. Paradys is a city of the dead as she is a city of the live, the half-live, the undead, and perhaps the deathless.

The Book of the Dead is a short story collection, its tales of the city linked by the cemetery in which the characters have been laid to rest. Generally I'm a great fan of Lee's short fiction, so it was a surprise to find this the weakest of the four Paradys books. None of the stories are bad, but without the elaborate structure of the longer works set in the city, they aren't particularly atmospheric, and too often the resolutions are disappointingly simple. "The Weasel Bride" carefully builds up a mystery about the tragic events of a wedding night, but its solution is a familiar, and rather crude, piece of folk mythology. "The Nightmare's Tale" is nicely written, but the Haitian voodoo on which it builds is too lodged in the popular imagination to become truly threatening.

Despite their limitations, a few of the stories make for pleasant minor reading. "Beautiful Lady" offers a nice, if ultimately irrelevant, twist on a basic concept, and the interplay between the eccentric, unsettling siblings who explain the history of "Morcara's Room" is far more interesting than the history itself. Perhaps the ultimate failing of the collection is that it doesn't consistently capture the particular mixture of eroticism, fantasy, and horror that makes Paradys a fascinating place to read about.

It was early afternoon, but as ever the daytime City was enveloped in gray mist. The sun had been invisible for years. The architecture of the City itself-- decayed, ruinous, romantic, and depressing by turns-- was visible in shifting patches, or regularly to a distance of seven meters. So that, as Felion climbed the long stair of a hundred steps, his world sank away into a sea of fog from which a few ghostly towers poked. And above, the Terrace of Birds began to form around a single dot of light-- which would be Smara's lamp. That is, he doubted anyone else would have climbed up here. The unhinged citizens of Paradise were also sluggish and indifferent, obsessed with rituals and trivia.

Felion and Smara are residents of a city called Paradise. But their inheritance from their late uncle includes a house with an icy labyrinth that leads to another city, called Paradis. That city, in turn, is ambiguously connected to Paradys itself. Is it one place at three different times, or three parallel realities? Who can say? What matters is that the distance between them is not insurmountable. In Paradise, Felion and Smara are as mad as any of the city's residents, but in a different way, and they hunger for something new. A second inheritance awaits them in Paradis, if they can handle the "cousin" who holds it for them. But Leocadia has troubles of her own.

Framed, as she sees it, for the murder of a lover, she is held in Paradis' asylum, given every luxury but certain that those luxuries are a ruse to cover poisons that will make her as mad as they claim she already is. Her art may be the only thing that can save her, but how will it be affected by what she discovers in the ruins of a former asylum, whose warders were killed and whose prisoners disappeared in a mysterious event many years ago? Meanwhile, in Paradys, a lovestruck young woman initiates a sequence of events that will lead to her imprisonment in a medieval madhouse, far harsher than the one in Paradis. Only the kindness of some of her fellow inmates might save her from the stupidity of the guards and the indifference of the sole doctor.

Subtle interactions among these storylines emphasize their parallels, but for the most part they function separately as stories of the tragic dignity of insanity. The interlocking structure gives a sense of great scope to a comparatively short novel whose stories are, taken individually, not all that complicated, and the sympathetic treatment of madness provides an appropriately moving conclusion to a series that has dealt with overwhelming emotion in all its wonderful and terrible forms. Paradys is as much a state of mind as a city, and we all go there from time to time. The Secret Books of Paradys is an excellent dark fantasy series, and an example of Tanith Lee's most striking and passionate work.