T. Kingfisher and the Kingdom of Free Women

T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

Princess Marra of the Harbor Kingdom is a spare daughter, never to inherit, whose only hope for advancement is to wed a prince, someday. Until then, she’s foisted onto a provincial convent while her older sister gets the prestigious marriage. But she discovers the truth: her sister is a political pawn, abused and terrified, reduced to a walking shadow. Naturally, Marra decides to organize a campaign to assassinate the patriarchy.

In the last year, I’ve become a massive fan of T. Kingfisher’s novellas. She channels classic literature and folklore, refashioning the background noise of our dreams into insightful dark fantasy. This is Kingfisher’s first full-length novel I’ve read, and instead of remaking a specific story, she uses images cherry-picked extensively from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The product turns childhood mythology into a grown-up fable of power, resistance, and self-reliance.

Marra’s story begins when she’s already past thirty. She chastises herself for being an adult and still believing the legendry of “happy ever after.” Her sister’s marriage to a handsome prince, solemnized by a literal fairy godmother, has proven disastrous. Perhaps Marra’s awakening comes late, but it nevertheless comes. So she leaves the religious cloister and begins walking, seeking the magical assistance that will help her liberate her family.

Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote that, in the realm of fairytale, the bond between siblings matters more than that between spouses. That certainly applies here. Marra and Kamia had a contentious relationship a children, but as adults, their mutual trust and self-reliance gives them strength when faced with duplicitous adulthood. Kingfisher’s narrative maps so perfectly onto Bettelheim’s Jungian prototype that it’s tempting to psychoanalyze her story.

However, this is a false temptation. Kingfisher creates a dreamlike atmosphere, appropriately devoid of proper nouns. Many characters are identified only by their roles: the king, Sister Apothecary, the dust-wife. When characters merit names, it’s only first names, usually Anglo-Saxon: Marra, Agnes, Fenris, Miss Margaret. Even countries have names like the Harbor Kingdom and the Northern Kingdom. (One country has a name, but it’s distant and half-mythic, like Avalon.)

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Characters and places lack names, here, because they belong only to a stage in Marra’s life. Bettelheim’s map of fairytale describes children transitioning into adulthood, with accompanying adult roles, like marriage and family. But Kingfisher describes a subsequent transition, where adults finally shed the conditioning of childhood storytelling. Princess Marra was first conditioned by the royal court, then by the convent. Now she must at last become herself.

Prince Vorling of the Northern Kingdom, Marra’s brother-in-law, is indeed handsome and charming. He’s also violent, domineering, and jealous. He maintains power, over both his kingdom and his family, through exaggerated displays of male swagger, and he sacrifices all relationships to maintaining the illusion of control. He truly desires to be a fairy-tale prince, and he’ll brook no intrusion on that story from annoying human foibles.

Therefore, Marra literally walks away from her society’s twin institutions of power: the royal court and religion. She spent over thirty years appeasing the dual threats of state violence and eternal judgement. Now she must obey the only instrument more true than either the kingdom or the gods, her own conscience. If that means striking a dagger to the power structures of two kingdoms, well, so be it.

Along the way, she assembles her company: the dust-wife (a vaguely defined sorceress), her mousey fairy godmother, and a massive, gentle-hearted warrior. Oh, and Bonedog, the company mascot, whose name says it all. He’s a dog resurrected from reassembled bones. If this sounds like somebody’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign, I won’t disagree, and the story has the semi-improvisational feel of a dungeon master trying to wrangle the players back on track.

Kingfisher’s product invites comparison to Tolkein, Michael Moorcock, and Andrzej Sapkowski, writers who mix dreamlike whimsy with painful grown-up realizations. Kingfisher’s characters march against the arrayed ceremony of kingdom and state religion, knowing death is likely, simply because it’s right. Princess Marra doubts herself and, without her companions’ support, would probably back out. But together, they form their own morally succinct counterculture, linked by morality and trust.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’ve deployed terminology from psychology and lit-crit, but one could read Kingfisher’s narrative as a rollicking adventure. Like the best literature, though, the story exists on multiple levels. Kingfisher uses playful genre boilerplates to make her message acceptable. But she also reminds us, in this post-MeToo culture, that “happily ever after” relies on the honor system. If Prince Charming lacks honor, then sisters must stand together.

Other reviews of T. Kingfisher books:
Man You Should’ve Seen Them Kicking Edgar Allan Poe
Secrets Buried in the World’s Darkest Corners
The Sleeper and the Beauty of Dreams

The Sleeper and the Beauty of Dreams

T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge

Toadling, a human foundling stolen by evil sprites, has guarded the nameless castle for 200 years, while civilizations rose and fell around her. Hidden behind an impenetrable thorntree wall and a blighted desert, the keep once governed a pastoral kingdom. But through the centuries, Toadling has secured the fortress, and ensured the old stories were soon forgotten. All for one reason: to assure the sleeper within never wakes.

This is my third T. Kingfisher novella, and each retells existing stories from new perspectives. Here, Kingfisher retells “Sleeping Beauty” as a dark fantasy, in which the princess and the fairy who cursed her dwell in a dysfunctional symbiosis. Except that the story which everyone tells has grown distorted by retelling, and there’s a deeper violence sleeping in the tower. But the fairy Toadling has never told her story.

Into the myth rides Halim, an itinerant Muslim knight without a war to fight. Uninterested in tourneys and too amiable for mercenary work, he seeks another avenue to make his name. So he approaches the fabled castle, pursuing the “fair maiden” supposedly immune to time. Instead, Halim finds Toadling, a half-fairy hybrid who, after centuries of isolation, is eager to confess her secrets. Assuming anyone will believe her.

“Sleeping Beauty” has evolved over centuries. Early forms exist in Italian and Catalan folktales, though the version we know comes mainly from Germany by way of France. The story’s development has taken some weird turns, but all share one characteristic: until the later Twentieth Century, the eponymous princess has no autonomy. She’s merely the passive, often nameless battleground between patriarchy and a dark netherworld.

Kingfisher reinvents the princess as Fayette, too young to understand her own unfettered power. But there’s a second princess, Toadling, a human who learned magic while growing up in fairyland. Toadling came to Fayette’s christening with one simple gift—and promptly fumbled it, trapping herself and Fayette inside the king’s castle. Thus begins a battle for power that threatens to become apocalyptic if they slip out of balance.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Mass-media critic Jude Doyle sees, in many stories of feral adolescent girls, a shared fear of our sweet child becoming a woman. There’s something here. But where conventional stories conflate this fear with sexual maturity, Kingfisher finds something else. Catholic theology and the “age of accountability” lingers in the background. As Princess Fayette becomes old enough to answer for her choices, we wonder whether she really has free will.

Doyle dedicates an entire chapter to the changeling myth. The sweet babbling infant learns to walk and talk, and suddenly, the poor harried mother becomes terrified of what she’s created. This being, once part of me, has become willful, greedy, possibly destructive. Why, this must be a monster from a dark netherworld, not a human child anymore! Toadling and Fayette become diametrical forms of this internal conflict, the good and bad daughters, ego and id.

The story unfolds forward and backward. Toadling knows she out to keep Halim away from the sleeping princess in the tower, to fulfill the enchantment that keeps her safe. But after centuries of loneliness, she permits Halim to carve his way through the titular thorn hedge. As he works, she tells her story, which contradicts the centuries of legend that have accrued to her. Halim must decide who he believes.

Kingfisher writes with a plainspoken style that’s become common in genre fantasy lately. Not for her either C.S. Lewis’ playful voice nor Tolkien’s stern epic storytelling. Toadling, her viewpoint character, is definitely a supernatural being who has survived two centuries alone with an onerous responsibility. But she’s also a young woman, stuck for centuries in her early twenties, desperate for someone to talk to.

On one level, we could read this as a grim, grown-up fairy tale. It’s short enough to read in one dedicated evening, builds to a taut double climax, and pays off with a firm resolution. Kingfisher’s characters are sober without being ponderous, and her revision of a well-loved fairy tale takes risks without veering into silliness. Kingfisher hits Sleeping Beauty’s beats without ever feeling beholden to the old story.

But there’s another level. Toadling tries different tactics to control the other, darker princess, but her internal abilities aren’t enough. Only when she trusts another person with the secrets she’s been carrying, will she finally reconcile the conflict between the good and bad daughters. Only then can she walk away from the thorn hedge she built around her childhood home, and venture out into the world.

The Return of the Towers and the Fellowship of the Ordinary King

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 86
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! (Discworld Book 8)

Captain Samuel Vimes, of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, serves an institution that has outlived its purpose. An honest man in cynical times, he performs the actions of police work, knowing the city-state administration doesn’t need or respect police anymore. But deep within the city’s bowels, a movement is festering, with an eye toward overthrowing Ankh-Morpork’s ensconced hierarchy. Soon, Vimes and his men may be the only thing standing against anarchy.

Readers can enjoy this novel in two ways. First, this dry-witted satire of paperback fantasy takes the city guards, who usually exist so our muscular protagonist can kill them like redshirts, and foregrounds their story. In a genre often dominated by “great doings of great men,” author Terry Pratchett reverses the lens, retelling the story from among the people, the pedestrians whose workaday peasant lives fantasists often ignore.

Second, Pratchett directly lampoons the publishing business. In 1989, when Pratchett published this novel, three editors—Donald A. Wollheim, Lester and Judy-Lynne Del Rey, and Betty Ballantine—controlled the fantasy genre. And they largely worked from a beat sheet that Lester Del Rey derived from reading Tolkien, Terry Brooks, and Fritz Lieber. If fantasy felt repetitive in the 1970s and 1980s, that’s exactly why. Pratchett poked the publishing establishment in the eye.

Vimes, and his vestige of men, listlessly repeat the motions of the City Watch, walking the nighttime rounds and proclaiming “all’s well.” But the City Patrician has actively collaborated with the thieves and assassins, giving their guilds a legal status (a nod to Fritz Lieber’s cynical world-building). Therefore, there’s no crime for the City Watch to apprehend, since criminals are now above-board. Law, and law enforcement, have become meaningless ceremonies.

Until a massive dragon, long thought extinct, appears over the city skyline.

The Ankh-Morpork population progresses from denial to paranoia, and finally to acceptance of a world where dragons exist again. Only Vimes somehow keeps his head, managing to wrangle his City Watch comrades to investigate where the dragon came from, and who benefits from its appearance. From the depths of the city’s cesspits to the towers of the royal palace, Vimes determines to root out the truth through old-fashioned gumshoe work.

Sir Terry Pratchett

One can spot the stereotypes Pratchett satirizes. From Tolkien, he spoofs intricate world-building, through his fondness for explanatory footnotes on immaterial topics. He also mentions the restoration of the monarchy, but makes it so silly that the would-be king doesn’t even get a name. From Brooks, he spotlight’s specifically male heroism, which, in Pratchett’s world, inevitably comes to nothing. Heroes, in Ankh-Morpork, are a dime a dozen.

Ankh-Morpork is a city built entirely of shopworn genre stereotypes. Secret wizarding societies proliferate so often, it’s possible to stumble into the wrong one accidentally. Magic artifacts are so ubiquitous, they’re basically litter. Giant dragons that need slain may be extinct, but in the city’s finer quarters, one high-born aristocrat breeds their tiny cousins like champion poodles. Pratchett’s world depicts fantasy when the genre’s components have become banal.

To judge by the word count he dedicates to it, though, Pratchett plainly most enjoys the civic aspect. With assassins and thieves organized into guilds, a beloved Fritz Lieber boilerplate, politics has become the domain of backstabbers and pickpockets. Pratchett envisions a world governed by shifting alliance and skullduggery, that would make the Borgias seem listless and timid. In his luridly described prose, this terrifying edifice becomes hilarious.

Sam Vimes handles heroism diffidently. In a world flush with magic, he uncovers the truth through Poirot-like doggedness. After years on the sidelines, the City Watch must rediscover how to perform investigations. The learning curve is slow, and sometimes descends into slapstick. In the final reveal, however, these very human qualities, not the splendor of wizards or the glory of kings, make Vimes and his men heroic.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw increasing rebellion against the genre style sheet. George R.R. Martin and Gregory Maguire thought, to resist the editors’ dominion, they needed to wallow in violence and sex, glorifying low behavior in high places. But the response, especially in mounting sequels, is cynicism and despair. Pratchett instead chose to present his rebellion through the medium of friendly teasing. The difference is palpable.

This was Pratchett’s eighth Discworld novel (of forty-one), and the first of his City Watch subseries. However, fans agree Pratchett needed several books to find his voice and the setting’s message. This novel makes a good entry point for genre fans and newbies alike, and Pratchett’s voice rings like an old friend.

Reviewer's note: Part 86 of my 1001 Books series used to be Pratchett's novel with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens. In light of the revelation of Gaiman's crimes, I no longer count that book on the list, and hereby completely replace it with this one.

Witches of the World, Unite!

Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

The three Eastwood sisters carry old resentments, and their household witchcraft is fairly lackluster, letting them eke by in 1893 America. But, after seven years of estrangement, they bump into one another in the busiest square in New Salem. Their unexpected reunion corresponds with the emergence of a fortress unseen since the age of myth. The Eastwood sisters must ask themselves: are they the chosen ones to restore American witchcraft?

Alix E. Harrow, who was a professor of American and African American Studies before becoming a full-time novelist, does something similar here to what Susanna Clarke did with her breakout novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. Harrow combines the trappings of modern fantasy with the great, socially engaged novels of the 19^th Century. Harrow’s take is, unsurprisingly, more American in tenor, but it accomplishes the same goals with comparable aplomb.

Harrow creates an alternate America where magic actually exists, and the great witch-hunters of colonial antiquity had a point. (She plays somewhat loose with historical dates, so plan your response accordingly.) The Salem Witch Trials ended in a massacre, the entire village razed to ferret out the relatively small number of actual witches. The survivors hurried to create New Salem, their moral utopia of Christian privilege and mechanized industry.

Into New Salem stumble the Eastwood sisters. Hedge witches from the agrarian hinterlands, they have accepted lives of compromise in New Salem’s patriarchal system. But their forced reunion causes the entire city to glimpse Avalon, the last bastion where the storied St. George purged the last true witches. The sisters attempt to escape what appears to be Fate forcing their hands, but every sidestep draws them closer together.

But a specter looms over New Salem. Gideon Hill, an avaricious political candidate, promises to purge witchcraft, trade unionism, moral decay, and the kitchen sink. His stump speeches combine rhetorical nods to Christianity with a laundry list of grievances for White citizens feeling threatened by rapid change. Taken for himself, Hill is greasy and unpleasant, but not dangerous. Except he’s riding a wave of public umbrage to the mayor’s office.

Alix E. Harrow

In some ways, Harrow writes a standard fantasy narrative. The Eastwood sisters resemble heroes like Frodo Baggins or Geralt of Rivia, true believers who must resist a rising tide of injustice, even when they’ve grown fatigued. Mass-market fantasy loves its beleaguered underdogs. But, removed from Neverland and placed in a milieu American readers will remember from high school history class, the themes become exceptionally poignant for current audiences.

These themes of alienation and moralistic terror could describe 1893 or today. Harrow laces her narrative with allusions to Dickens, Marx, Upton Sinclair, and others, but not fatuously. For Harrow, these writers describe the American experience amid rapid change, an experience that remains unsettled 130 years later. Powerful people resist change because it threatens their authority, and they seek ways to make the populace complicit in their oppression.

Harrow demonstrates that hierarchies of power rely on equal measures of power and deceit. The Eastwood sisters must resist Gideon Hill’s instruments of physical force, but they must also unlearn messages of fear and self-doubt that they’ve internalized throughout their lifetimes. They must fight injustice, even when they’re tired, even when they’re ready to have normal human-scale relationships, because the fight is right, and because there’s nobody else.

We feel for the sisters, in their struggle to liberate Avalon from the patriarchy, because they are human. Yes, the truth of Avalon is vast and metaphysical. But their story is ultimately about people: about the jobs we accept to pay rent, the relationships that make the battle worthwhile. Therefore when the sisters rise up against tyrannical bosses, pietistic politicians, and toxic partners, we undertake that journey with them.

Further, Harrow avoids facile answers to difficult problems. She has at least three moments that, in conventional genre fiction, would’ve signaled the story’s culmination and the sisters’ ultimate triumph. But in Harrow’s telling, there is no grand culmination, no moment of eternal transcendent victory. Instead, the story keeps changing, the conflict evolves to reflect the characters’ complex world evolving with them.

By combining the nostalgia of historical fiction with the splendor of paperback fantasy, Harrow creates a story that readers can immerse ourselves in, with characters who feel like our friends. But she also addresses themes that the great (male) writers of American literature introduced viewed from another angle. We can enjoy this engaging story of complicated characters. Or we can recognize ourselves, and our struggles, amid Harrow’s urgent themes.

The Weird-Enough Wizard of Odds

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 51
Ralph Bakshi (writer/director), Wizards

In a post-nuclear future, humanity has become a visitor on a fairy-covered Earth. But that hardly means everything has become peaceful. The wizard Avatar serves as advisor to the president of Montagar, a bucolic forest nation where citizens teach children to husband the soil and distrust technology. But Avatar’s twin brother Blackwolf rules an autocratic kingdom and yearns to conquer his brother’s lands. He’s discovered a tool which may make that possible: literal Nazi propaganda.

Animator and writer Ralph Bakshi made his name in the 1960s and 1970s creating films that pinched the Disney aesthetic, but were adamantly not intended for children. His 1972 comedy Fritz the Cat became the first animated feature to be rated X. But he always dreamed of returning to the science fiction and fantasy themes which first propelled his interest in drawing. 20^th Century Fox shared his vision, at least hypothetically, but flinched upon release.

Blackwolf sends robots to invade Montagar, causing chaos and destruction throughout the forest. Avatar and his bodyguard, Weehawk, capture one robot and recondition it to serve the interests of peace. Because Montagar has neither army nor weapons, Avatar and Weehawk commence a quest to find and stop Blackwolf inside his own lair. Accompanied by Avatar’s apprentice and love interest Elinore, they must seek an enemy who has learned how to bend masses to his will.

Bakshi worked mostly without support from mainstream studios. Though he regularly got distribution deals with companies like Fox or Warner, he assiduously avoided working for them directly. He especially hated Disney’s influence which, after Walt’s passing, had become ingrown and moribund. (Disney’s decline wouldn’t reverse until the middle 1980s.) This gave him remarkable creative freedom, like fellow indie animator and Disney refugee Don Bluth, but forced him to work within shoestring budgets.

This freedom results in a big, sloppy product which revels in its excesses. Bakshi’s team clearly had oodles of fun creating this movie. Its disco-era morality is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and shows distrust not only of the nuclear weapons looming over the Cold War, but also the technology which made such weapons possible. It also emphasizes that, no matter how enlightened True Believers think their society has become, violence always looms around the horizon.

Perhaps Bakshi’s upbringing contributes to this. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he grew up mostly in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Foggy Bottom, Washington. These East Coast cities were rife with bigotry, including both antisemitism and legal segregation. Though Bakshi’s family made it to America in time to avoid the bloody excesses of World War II, he grew up seeing the ideology that had been crushed in Europe, making its nest and laying its eggs over in America.

left to right: Weehawk, Elinore, Avatar, and the robot Peace in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

Bakshi’s world reeks of moral binaries. He depicts the forests of Montagar as bucolic, lush, and stranger to violence. Blackwolf’s kingdom of Scortch is sooty and industrialized, occupied by orcs and trolls. (If this sounds familiar, well spotted: Bakshi would direct the first big-screen Lord of the Rings adaptation in 1978, a failure upon release.) When Blackwolf’s modernity forces a confrontation with Montagar, only Avatar’s small adventuring party upholds Montagar’s deep anti-modernist conscience.

20^th Century Fox gave Bakshi a distribution deal for this movie at the same time it bankrolled an ambitious young director named George Lucas. Struggling after a string of bad decisions, Fox was willing, post-1975, to support riskier ventures. But it kept both Bakshi and Lucas on tight budgets, forcing both to pay out-of-pocket to complete their projects. Bakshi created fantasy crowd scenes by rotoscoping vintage Swedish historical epics, and intercutting snippets of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

The finished produce horrified Fox and drew lukewarm responses from critics; Fox accorded Wizards a limited release. Unlike Star Wars, Wizards never overcame this limitation, and though it returned a profit, the outcome was small enough to sour Fox’s relationship with Bakshi. This movie never found its real audience until home video, when college-aged audiences started getting high and gawping at the movie’s Technicolor spectacle. It was, in that sense, a product of its time.

Sadly, Bakshi’s lurid adult style never found its mainstream breakthrough. His only big-studio production, Cool World, died so horribly, it ended his career; he mostly does illustrations and comix now. Yet periodically, new audiences discover this forgotten gem, and seemingly admire how unashamed it is. Wizards is overblown, messy, unsubtle, and garish. It’s also dated fun, and audiences apparently never get tired of its unapologetic energy. This movie embodies everything Bakshi ever did right.

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

This essay follows my prior review, Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen. In the review, I attempted to avoid spoilers. In this essay, I make no such effort; if you would like to watch the movie, please do so before reading any further here.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) has had it with your myths, in Damsel

When Prince Henry tosses his bride, Princess Elodie, into the dragon’s chasm, on one level we witness a conventional myth. Like Jesus or Orpheus, Elodie must pass through the grave, defeat the chthonic monster, and return bearing the truth. On another level, we witness an uncomfortable reality that past myths elided: that the truth our hero brings from beyond the grave isn’t what we want to hear. And we don’t know how that truth will change us.

Tolkien and Lewis aggressively embraced fairy tales in a specific context, following the degradations of two world wars. Both fought in World War I before becoming scholars, then sat helplessly through World War II and the Blitz. As Christians, both men believed true morality existed, but they couldn’t see it around them. So they sought moral certitude in distant lands and times, an evasion of the present which Lewis himself acknowledged outright.

Today’s fairy tales, like the movie Damsel, emerge from a different context. Where both Tolkien and Lewis yearned to restore divinely anointed god-kings to their fairylands’ thrones, we live in the backwash of colonial empires, unable to pretend the past we admire consisted of unadulterated goodness. No matter where we live, our land was seized from another people, maybe recently, maybe centuries ago. But literally everyone lives on stolen land.

Damsel enacts this myth in stark realism. Queen Isabelle of Aurea and her superficially charming son, Henry, live on land stolen from the dragon. They admit this during the closing rituals of the marriage ceremony. They must propitiate this distant past through continual sacrifice, through the blood of those descended from the original settlers. Aurea’s continued glittering prosperity relies on someone reënacting that original conquest.

Here we might benefit from consulting prior religious scholars. Émile Durkheim believed that religion begins by extoling the people’s innate virtues; God, Durkheim believed, came late to religion. What Durkheim called “primitive” religion simply preserves the people’s shared virtues by ritualizing them. Mircea Eliade went further, seeing the liturgical calendar as a continuing reënactment of the religion’s founding moments. We walk forever in our prophets’ shoes.

In this regard, Queen Isabelle acts not as her nation’s political leader, but its priest. (No commoners speak in this movie; every character is aristocratic, or an aristocrat’s courtier.) She enacts her nation’s founding sacrifice, preserving peace and stability through blood. Sure, she uses a technicality to weasel out of the actual sacrifice, making beautiful foreigners pay Aurea’s actual blood debt. But the forms matter to national religion, not the spirit.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) and Prince Henry (Nick Robinson)

Passing through the grave, Princess Elodie returns with the capital-T Truth that Aurea’s founding myth is a lie. Aurea’s founding king attacked the dragon, not to preserve his people, but to enlarge his own glory; he slaughtered the land’s original inhabitants, the dragons, purely for spite. The dragon appears monstrous to living humans because mythology has created this terror, but Truth says humans must abandon this belief and confront their own guilt.

The parallels with modernity are so stark, they need acknowledged but not explicated. As an American, I realize my Anglo-Saxon ancestors seized this land from its prior inhabitants. But that’s what Anglo-Saxons do, as they also previously conquered Britain from its Celtic inhabitants. Not that those Celts were innocent, as their mythology describes seizing Britain from Albion, a terrible giant whose exaggerated evil resembles that of Elodie’s dragon.

Every human nation sits on conquered land. Every nation also has founding myths to justify that conquest. Virgil invented a conquest myth to justify Roman military might, and India’s earliest Vedic poetry is a fight song in praise of seizing a neighboring tribe’s women. Only recently has public morality evolved to consider conquest unsavory, mostly after two World Wars, when technology made conquest both visible and grisly in wholly new ways.

Damsel ends with Aurea’s capital in flames. Though the camera lingers on Queen Isabelle’s death, we know nothing of the civilians caught in that conflagration. Because although every myth and fairy tale agrees that exposing the Truth will liberate the oppressed, we don’t know what comes next. The Bible claims that the triumphant Truth will simply conclude this Age. This movie follows the scriptural precedent, burning human kingdoms down and sailing into a vague future.

Lewis and Tolkien loved fairy tales because they believed their mythology could address modern questions without modern moral blurriness. Damsel arguably takes the same tack. However, it proceeds from an assumption that the mythic past wasn’t as pearly as prior generations believed.

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen

Millie Bobby Brown as Princess Elodie in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Damsel

What is it with filmmakers chopping off Millie Bobby Brown’s hair? The haircuts are explicitly gendered, too, or anyway counter-gendered. In her first featured role, Intruders, she gave herself a weirdly genderless half-bob to emphasize the show’s supernatural themes. Stranger Things obviously involved her learning how to be a girl. Now, in Damsel, another self-inflicted haircut signposts her transition from “princess” to “warrior queen.”

Any analysis of Damsel necessarily involves admitting this is a movie for mainly young audiences. Grown-ups will almost obsessively notice the prior media products this movie pinches from. This includes obvious borrowings from LotR and Game of Thrones, and less widely viewed fare, like 2019’s Ready or Not and your nephew’s latest Dungeons & Dragons campaign. There’s even a helpful map carved into a wall, guiding player characters to safety.

Younger viewers, unburdened by prior experience, will probably enjoy this movie, simply for MBB’s character. Princess Elodie spends nearly half the movie onscreen alone, sometimes accompanied by a CGI dragon. She’s dressed inappropriately for the environment, still wearing her wedding dress, and has no tools, weapons, or food. She extemporizes survival gear from whatever comes to hand. Princess Elodie is, admittedly, gripping to watch.

Queen Isabelle tempts Elodie from her icy, impoverished homeland by promising her son, Prince Henry, as a groom. Elodie, though a princess, is reasonably self-reliant, and chops wood herself to provide for her subjects during an unusually bitter winter. But Prince Henry and the Kingdom of Aurea offer Elodie the opportunity to see a larger world and live without constant fear. Despite her youth, Elodie acquiesces to this arranged marriage.

Unfortunately, the movie’s trailer already spoiled the twist that caps Act One: the marriage is a lie. Isabelle and Henry need Elodie as a sacrifice for a nameless dragon whose mountain overshadows the kingdom. Cast headlong into the dragon’s lair, Elodie must struggle not only to escape, but to uncover the long-simmering ancestral lie that makes her sacrifice necessary. Because her survival doesn’t matter if Queen Isabelle sacrifices Elodie’s sister.

Robin Wright, who kick-started her career playing a similarly betrothed ingenue in The Princess Bride, portrays Queen Isabelle with the same oily deceit she probably learned from her co-star, Chris Sarandon. (Yet another cinematic borrowing.) Meanwhile the dragon, voiced by Iranian-American actor Shoreh Agdashloo, seems transplanted from Shrek—yes, seriously. Because Elodie’s and Shrek’s dragons share character motivations entirely female in nature.

Yes, that’s a stereotype, but a useful one.

Robin Wright as Queen Isabelle in Damsel

Elodie’s character arc isn’t new, or even particularly recent. The “Princess Rescues Herself” trope certainly predates my awareness of fantasy literature: almost from the moment Tolkien solidified the genre’s standards, fans began rewriting Arwen-type characters into greater self-reliance. But MBB invests this road-tested story arc with the gravitas she brings to characters like Eleven. Elodie is strong, not because it’s a genre boilerplate, but because she has no other choice.

Brown conveys her internal transformation externally. She’s thrown into the dragon’s pit still wearing her satin wedding dress, without tools or weapons. The more determined Elodie becomes to survive, the more pieces of her elegant gown tear off. She fashions bandages from her skirts, a glowworm lantern from her sleeves, a climbing piton from her corset stays. Piece by piece, the emblems of luxury transform into the tools of survival.

This results in an outcome that may give some parents pause: the more resilient and self-assured Elodie becomes, the more naked she becomes. That’s also where the hair-chopping comes in, as her long, elegant tresses become an impediment to survival. Elodie emerges victorious and muscular, but also showing plenty of skin. She saunters into her triumphant scene reduced to torn, scorched undergarments, looking like a Frank Frazetta splash panel.

Given the movie’s primarily young target audience, this nakedness, coupled with some Game of Thrones-ish violence, will give some parents pause. It doesn’t rely on explicit sex or coarse language, and anyway, most middle-grade viewers have probably seen content more graphic online anymore, so tweens and early teens will undoubtedly enjoy it. If your kids are grade-school-aged, though, maybe consider watching beside them, just in case.

Some prior critics lambasted this movie for unrealistic standards. Eldie outruns fire, survives catastrophic injury, and handles a sword correctly the first time she grabs one. Apparently some people find this implausible in a movie with an immortal fire-breathing dragon. Picky, picky, picky. The movie’s intended audience will have no such qualms; they’ll simply enjoy watching Elodie survive. And parents will enjoy watching their kids enjoy it.

This review continues in Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

Jane Somewheyre

Sharon Lynn Fisher, Salt & Broom

A grim and gruesome spectre haunts the corridors of Northern England’s isolated Thornfield Hall. Edward Rochester, lord of the manor, doesn’t believe in ghosts, but his people do. So he requests the Lowood School, famous for training witches and other spellcasters, send someone to exorcise his home. With some reluctance, the school sends Jane Aire [sic], who is an expert herbologist but has little experience with the outside world.

Veteran classic literature readers will recognize the broad outline of events described. Sharon Lynn Fisher has published several volumes combining science fiction or fantasy with romance; for this volume, she’s chosen to put a fantastic spin on one of the foundational texts from which romance writers frequently draw. Charlote Brontë’s Jane Eyre has captivated audiences for 175 years with its combination of weight and whimsy, and its deep dive into the human psyche.

Fisher’s adaptation omits the portions of Jane’s “autobiography” centered on the Reed and Rivers families, and reduces Lowood School to background. She cares more about Jane’s interactions with Rochester, with the assorted denizens of Thornfield Hall, and with the first Mrs. Rochester—whose story here is aggressively altered. The emphasis lies heaviest on the romance aspects, as the fantastic components are very loosely draw.

Thornfield Hall is the epitome of Gothic intricacy: miles of sprawling corridors and countless disused rooms. Jane finds a household staff plagued by phantoms they can’t easily explain, but which they also haven’t really seen. Unlike in Brontë’s original novel, everyone here is completely forthcoming about the first Mrs. Rochester, and her tragic end. They’re more circumspect about what came before her demise, or why they can’t release her memory.

Rochester himself resembles the original, a private man, cautious in displaying his feelings. His staff of hundreds depend on his wealth, and high-class bachelorettes pursue him, but he has no real friends. Jane struggles to understand: is he still mourning his wife? Did he ever truly love her? Is he even capable of love? Because the longer Jane interacts with Rochester, the more she experiences feeling she’s never known before.

Sharon Lynn Fisher

Before continuing, let me acknowledge: I’m not this book’s target audience. Fisher writes for audiences who consume classic semi-romance literature, like the Brontë sisters or Jane Austen, as casually as paperback novels. Her low-friction storytelling elides the coded language common in 19^th Century literature, and the almost Monty Python-esque humor beneath the sometimes starchy surface. This book feels like Charlotte Brontë retold as beach reading.

Jane practices a lite-beer form of Wicca, one broadly compatible with staid post-Georgian British Christianity (the story includes references to religion, but only in passing). Her witchcraft consists mostly of making talismans, in the broadest sense, and speaking rhymes. Though the magical system matters greatly to Jane, and drives parts of the story, Fisher doesn’t much explicate it. One suspects she cares little for mechanical details.

The romance feels similarly hasty. Jane says she’s approaching thirty, and has spent nearly her entire life at Lowood School. She’s had few interactions with men who aren’t either stern patrician figures or earthy tradesmen. Her sojourn at Thornfield, an unspecified span of months in Brontë’s telling, is herein reduced to days. Yet she feels so passionately for Rochester that she disobeys instructions, exceeds her training, and trusts Rochester completely.

Fisher implies a complex, heady, multisensory world behind her story. Jane, our narrator, expounds on the complexity of Thornfield’s grounds, its multiple gardens for food and herbology, its charming Gothic ruins. She implies the existence of bacchanalian Bonfire Night celebrations, and a world of passions kept secret under decorous Regency-era public morality. Yet all this never quite goes anywhere. Jane introduces evocative themes, but carries few of them forward.

Please don’t misunderstand: this isn’t a bad book. Fisher retells Brontë’s story without the stiff outdated language, the lengthy digressions, or the sometimes moralistic tone. Her addition of witchcraft makes explicit several themes beneath the surface of Brontë’s original. And not everyone shares my belief that characters should face difficulties in achieving their intended ends. Again, this book isn’t bad; it just wasn’t written for me.

Perhaps I set my expectations too high. In combining classic literature with fantasy, I expected Fisher to create something closer to the Lord of the Rings, something dense with adventure and the complexity of human experience. Fisher instead offers something classic literature fans can snuggle under, comforted by the familiarity, and read without having to parse the historical context. It isn’t for me, but some people like that.

Black Afterlives Matter, Part II

Cadwell Turnbull, We Are the Crisis: a Novel

This review follows the book reviewed in Black Afterlives Matter

Two years after werewolves, vampires, and shapeshifters revealed themselves on the streets of Boston, some “monsters” are settling into healthy lives. Others, not so much. A faction of monsters have profited handsomely from their adversarial relationship with humans, and aren’t willing to relinquish their advantage. And some humans resent the changes they didn’t ask for, forming anti-monster vigilante groups in response. Something must give; the only question is what.

Volume Two of Cadwell Turnbull’s Convergence Saga drops two years after the first, which is somewhat awkward, since Turnbull provides few refreshers for veteran readers. I remember liking the first volume, with its blend of literary and genre conventions, its character-driven story structure, and its experimental use of a narrative voice that has come unstuck from the story. But I don’t remember his cast of thousands or their intricate relationships.

Ridley, Laina, and Rebecca have lost their werewolf pack, and someone doesn’t want them to find it. They try investigating the disappearances, and realize they can’t do it alone. So, against the advice of fellow “monsters,” they attempt to organize the monster movement and create a sense of solidarity. Unfortunately, as disfranchised peoples have always discovered, you can’t organize without drawing attention to yourself; the Black Hand starts hunting them.

Teenage Dragon enjoys the freedom he’s encountered since escaping a private collector’s perverted zoo. But the trade-off to freedom is remaining incognito, concealing the fire-breathing force of nature he truly is. The slightest slip means his human allies pay the price—as he learns when his comes home to find his adoptive human parents murdered. His friends scramble to compensate, but Dragon still lives with a target on his back.

Sondra has left public service to protect her secret shapeshifter identity. She attempts to live as a soft-spoken community organizer in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a remote American outpost that offers the opportunity to experiment with revisionist economic models. (Models which Sondra explains volubly.) But she can’t outrun her family’s history as embodiments of the islands’ primordial elements, and someone seems eager to expose her secrets in public.

Cadwell Turnbull

As these sprawling synopses imply, Turnbull doesn’t really write one novel. Basically, he’s written four intersecting novellas around the same theme. As the Convergence Saga title indicates the stories converge toward a unified climax, but for most of the book, Turnbull’s characters occupy their own worlds, with their own conflicts; sometimes, their stories seem to contradict one another. The resolution of that apparent contradiction is part of the payoff.

Consistent with the previous volume, Turnbull doesn’t blush to spotlight his story’s parallels with real-world issues. The previous novel dealt with the collisions between majority-led police power and minority populations. This novel carries these same stories, but not with the same torch-wielding vigor. Turnbull still deals with racial issues, but not necessarily directly; he in fact takes great pains to avoid mentioning his characters’ race, unless they mention it themselves.

Instead, Turnbull mainly inveighs against economic injustice. He repeats the words “cooperative” and “solidarity” heavily, alongside other revolutionary economic buzzwords. One of Turnbull’s protagonists, Sondra, has left public service to organize Mondragon-style worker cooperatives. His other protagonists organize against hatred under the cover of economic solidarity, while his antagonists disguise their bigotry behind claims of economic grievance.

This does require some level of patience. Much as I enjoy Turnbull’s story overall, it nevertheless sometimes feels like he’s lecturing his readers, in passages that expound his themes but don’t advance his story. This volume is fairly average length for a mass-market genre novel in the current market, but probably could’ve been fifty pages shorter without the economic theorizing. Even though it’s a theory I personally find admirable.

That said, Turnbull writes about the forces that turn ordinary people into “monsters” and chronic outsiders, and economics is one of those forces. It’s unlikely he could entirely excise the theorizing without short-changing his themes. Turnbull wants you to think, not only about what happens to these characters, but about why it happens, what forces outside individual control hastened this conflict, even before these characters fell backward into it.

Hovering over everything is the narrator, an enigmatic figure whose relationship to Cadwell Turnbull is, let’s say, vexed. Like the characters, the narrator only wants answers. Unlike the characters, the narrator has become unhitched from the story, and understands himself as a narrator. This forces him to reckon with why, if he’s telling the story, he can’t see where it’s headed. That question remains unresolved, postponed until Volume Three.

The Power Politics of Fairyland

Sarah J. Sover, Faed to Black (Fractured Fae Book Two)

Gwendolyn Evenshine is settling uncomfortably into her role as the fairy kingdom’s first and only licensed private investigator. But a mysterious stranger appears in her office with the magical world’s equivalent of chloroform, and Gwen wakes up trapped inside a box. A little tense log-rolling reveals that Gwen’s been kidnapped by her own family. Because Gwen’s secretly no mere PI; she’s a runaway member of fairyland’s ancient aristocracy.

It’s hard to imagine a second series novel which departs more abruptly from the first. Sarah J. Sover’s first Fractured Fae novel followed the time-honored pattern set by Jim Butcher or Laurel K. Hamilton, a crime novel set against a background of creatures from myth and folktale. But just as protagonists Harry Dresden and Anita Blake have secret birthrights, so does Gwen Evenshine. Sover just skips the several-book buildup.

Exactly who kidnapped Gwen, the mystery that dominates the first few (very short) chapters, gets resolved quickly. The more important question becomes why. Gwen abandoned her aristocratic birthright years ago, and resents getting dragged back. Meanwhile her friend and business partner Chessa, having determined who nabbed Gwen, taps some old allies to mount a rescue mission. She apparently thinks it’ll be easy to spring a prisoner from Avalon.

Yes, that Avalon. Gwen and Chessa’s fairy lineage descends from the enigmatic kingdom that brought King Arthur and Morgan le Fay to power. The first novel occurred in the fairyland corresponding with Boston, and the Revolutionary heritage that city contains, but this second goes back even farther, to the English-speaking world’s pre-Christian heritage. Fae can survive for centuries of nothing kills them, so their grudges can last equally long, apparently.

Sarah J. Sover

Sover’s prior novel was a conventional PI story, like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler wrote. A protagonist with internal scars chases a deeply personal definition of justice, although “justice” doesn’t necessarily correspond with “law.” This novel swerves into Ian Fleming or John le Carré territory. It continues the notion that justice and right are ad hoc creations without conventional morality. But rather than crime, it focuses on politics and world affairs.

Or anyway, the first half does. Sover initially focuses on the enemies of free society, and the lies and backroom deals that society conducts to preserve freedom. How free are we, she asks, if our leaders must engage in skullduggery to conserve that freedom? Then, somewhere around the halfway mark, Sover swerves again. She abandons the pretense of James Bond-ish subterfuge, and pushes her characters into a full-on insurgency.

The parallels with current affairs are inescapable. In the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of fairy, Sover presents the Unseelie as amoral, reveling in cruelty and sacrificing innocent civilians to their power schemes. Yet the Seelie, supposedly just and liberated, are obsessed with forms of order, unaware that the world has changed without them. The Unseelie are evil, but successful; the Seelie are benevolent, but aloof.

On some level, mass-market fiction is always about its audience. Sover shows how the twin idols of power or morality blind authorities to the common suffering outside their doors. Gwen and Chessa serve the Seelie Court, each in their own way, and therefore the forms of order, and they’re shocked by the Unseelie’s casual cruelty. Yet the streets of Avalon teem with fae whose lives are neither cruel nor orderly.

Gwen abandoned the Seelie Court, with their hoity-toity ways and cold politesse, years earlier. Her one regret was that her abandonment forced her to leave her brother, a bright-eyed and optimistic kid. The intervening years have seen Gwen become independent, but poor and plagued with second thoughts. When politics reunites her with her baby brother, she sees that Liam’s gone the opposite direction, becoming a creature of order and bureaucracy.

Any readers who fail to anticipate that Gwen’s reunion with Liam will ultimately result in disappointment, are probably new to paperback fantasy. The only question is what form that disappointment will take. As the stakes continue to increase, and Gwen must relearn the methods of power politics she once rejected, she finds herself willing to countenance many kinds of disappointment.

If anything, this second novel in Sover’s Fractured Fae novel is better than the first. In the prior volume, Sover experimented playfully with the conventions of the urban fantasy genre. Here, Sover throws the conventions into a blender and spreads them around ecstatically, more in love with her characters and story than her marketing niche. The result is fast-paced, breathtaking, and feels much, much shorter than it actually is.

The Wheel of Time After Time After Time

The main ensemble from Amazon's Wheel of Time, season one

The Amazon Studios adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has obtained largely warm reviews, but mostly from critics who haven’t read the novels. A minority of critics have lambasted the adaptation for its lukewarm fealty to the source material; they’ve accused showrunner Rafe Judkins of not so much translating the source, as nesting inside it. I have a different problem. This series demonstrates the greatest problem of media in the streaming era: content bloat.

On one level, the series shows Peter Jackson’s influence on screen-based epic fantasy. Beautiful arboreal landscapes and rushing rivers, frequently viewed from high above with cameras in motion, create not only a sense of intricate world-building, but that real characters occupy this world, moving through space and time. Sprightly theme music underscores the lushly colored visual palette. The young, attractive ensemble cast wears vibrant, prismatic clothes, unsullied by dusty agricultural work or unpaved village roads.

These visuals call attention to themselves. Presumably the creative crew intended this, as they use many long, lingering shots of The Shire Two Rivers, the White Tower, elaborate medieval streetscapes, and primordial terrain. As shots linger, however, making the scenery itself the center of audience engagement, we start paying attention to the design. We start analyzing which shots were created on location, which virtually in 3D modelling, and which are composites, matted together in postproduction?

Like Jackson’s LotR movies, the series premiers with a wizard’s arrival in a bucolic village, followed by a party. This provides an opportunity to introduce characters through dialog and interaction. Lots and lots of dialog and interaction. Again, these scenes are beautifully designed, but they continue interminably. The introductions of character relationships, larded with soap-operatic detail, mount up relentlessly. When the Uruk-Hai Trollocks finally attack the village, we’ve grown bored waiting for something to happen.

Maybe Judkins and the creative team watched Jackson’s “long-expected party” scene and felt they needed one of those, except it occupies the entire first episode. That’s an hour of content. What Jackson completed in twenty minutes, Judkins extends for almost sixty. Each season of The Wheel of Time contains eight one-hour episodes, meaning that together, each season is longer than the theatrical release of the full LotR trilogy. (At this writing, there are two seasons.)

This pattern continues. Having fled the monsters, our ensemble of protagonists journeys with Gandalf and Aragorn Moiraine and Lan to meet destiny. The characters keep demanding explanations, but their self-appointed mentors keep answering: “Now is not the time.” Somehow, despite months of travelling together and long nights spent huddled around the campfire, now is never the time. The characters have identity-building encounters, and make occasional meaningful discoveries, but real exposition remains punted down the field.

Our ensemble remains mostly unified throughout the first season, though briefly separated for… purposes. They then spend the entire second season pursuing side quests, before unifying atop a wizard’s tower. Along the way, they encounter an ageless monarch, a lost nation, and an enemy thought destroyed three thousand years ago. Though the story arc doesn’t slavishly copy Tolkien, it’s nevertheless one giant spider away from matching the beat sheet in his first two LotR novels.

Some of this overgrowth comes from the source material. Full disclosure, I haven’t read Robert Jordan’s original novels; but I have it on authority from friends who have, that his writing often rambled, and later novels particularly suffered lack of firm direction. Yet the transition between media should’ve resolved some of this. Traditional broadcast or cable television would’ve forced the creative team to make hard decisions, because airtime is limited, and advertisers’ patience isn’t infinite.

With no requirement to fit into scarce, valuable airtime (or to empty the cinema for the next showing), Judkins and the creative team apparently feel authorized to keep creating more and longer scenes. Again, in fairness, these scenes are often beautifully designed, and individually, introduce interesting, thoughtful character moments. But as they accumulate, we increasingly see the story as constructed. We desperately wish we could tell the creative team to just make something happen, already!

Streaming distribution removes many limitations forced on traditional television. The one-hour format, advertisers who need appeased, and network Standards & Practices are out; graphic language, sex, and violence are in. But traditional limitations forced creative teams to make choices; what they omitted often mattered as much as what they included. Streaming doesn’t force them to cut anything. As content gets longer, with interminable exposition and vague resolutions, we start wishing someone made them make choices.

The Monster That Lives On the Homestead

Victor LaValle, Lone Women: a Novel

Adelaide Henry carries her family’s oldest secret in a steamer trunk when she hurriedly leaves California’s Lucerne Valley in 1915. Her parents’ sudden deaths leave Adelaide unmarried, Black, and a woman during a time in America’s history when these are among the three worst things a person could be. So she packs only what she can carry and flees to the one place that will take a fugitive like her: the rural northern Montana plains.

This novel began when author and Columbia University professor Victor LaValle discovered that Montana didn’t discriminate in distributing lands under the Homestead Act. Where most states and territories required a male head of household, and usually only accorded land to White people, Montana took anyone who could sign the paperwork. What, LaValle wondered, would drive a woman to Montana’s severe, dry climate? His apparent answer is: everything that’s the opposite of the traditional Western genre.

The Montana which Adelaide encounters doesn’t jibe with the enthusiastic railroad pamphlets that enticed her here. It’s dry, austere, and weatherbeaten. But word gets around quickly about the young Black woman living alone, and allies begin making themselves available. Seems Adelaide isn’t the only “Lone Woman” homesteading these prairies, which have offered a semi-warm welcome to outcasts of all kinds. As long as her deadly secret stays inside her steamer trunk, Adelaide should be fine.

LaValle upends the stereotypes of Western literature. The classic genre authors—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour—praised White, male individualists who didn’t need anybody else, invented their own rules, and survived by violence. Many Westerns, including Wister’s genre-defining The Virginian, feature the protagonist losing their baggage, whether by having it stolen or by abandoning it along the Trails. By contrast, Adelaide’s baggage is the most important treasure she owns, and she’ll die defending it.

Adelaide’s baggage is both literal and metaphorical. She’s terrified of whatever lives inside her steamer trunk, and sings it lullabies to keep it mollified. But she also carries paralyzing guilt. From page one, we know Adelaide feels responsible for her parents’ violent deaths, which she flees in a literal blaze of fear. We don’t know who or what killed them, because she won’t tell us, because she won’t accept what really happened and face up.

Victor LaValle

But underneath Montana’s ceaseless skies, Adelaide discovers she isn’t alone. All the “Lone Women” have secrets they’d rather bury. But they also need each other—another stark reversal from the Western genre, which usually preaches radical self-reliance. Nobody in this Montana can survive alone. But that mutuality takes two different forms. While the homesteading Lone Women learn to trust one another, exactly as they are, the townspeople close ranks against those they regard as outsiders.

Meanwhile, whatever lives inside Adelaide’s steamer trunk dominates her life. Here, LaValle takes on Jungian subtexts, as we increasingly suspect Adelaide is harboring her shadow self. Though we don’t get a glimpse inside the steamer for eighty pages, the Thing We Don’t Talk About becomes larger and larger, until we know, with doomed inevitability, that Adelaide’s big secret will come crashing out. And when it does, it’s guaranteed to hurt everyone she’s dared to trust.

In this, LaValle acknowledges something traditional Westerns ignore: that the people who settled the American West weren’t heroes. They were mostly people without a homeland, often fugitives, who took land stolen from Native peoples because they’d lost everything else. (LaValle addresses the land theft only obliquely, but it’s there.) The West was alienating and lonely, and it destroyed American illusions of class and race. White America celebrated the first settlers only after they were dead.

Traditional Westerns feature protagonists, often nameless (“The Virginian”) or mononymic (“Lassiter”), who never completely tell their stories. The past, to Western heroes, doesn’t matter. By contrast, in LaValle’s Montana, the past is all-important. Adelaide and her allies try to bury their past, but in keeping their secrets, the past becomes all-encompassing, threatening to destroy any present they might have. Their epic becomes a matter of determining who they can trust, and what they can share.

This novel starts out as Adelaide’s story, and early on, hews closely to her. But our ability to see through others’ eyes blossoms outward to the exact extent that Adelaide learns to trust others. As she starts seeing other Montana homesteaders as equals, so do we, and we begin receiving their stories of heartbreak and recovery. We begin seeing how everyone has their own steamer trunk, literal and metaphorical. And we, too, learn to trust.

See also: You Should Be Reading Victor LaValle

At War in the Kingdom of Foodies

Beth Cato, A Thousand Recipes for Revenge

Ada Garland has lived as a fugitive on the kingdom’s periphery for years, surviving by her wits and her cooking skills. She’s a Chef, a form of supernatural guardian whose capabilities combine the roles of cook, general, and priest. Officially, every Chef in the kingdom of Verdania belongs to King Caristo, but Ada’s wits have kept her free for decades—free, but alienated from her lost husband and child. Then an assassin appears in her lodgings.

Author Beth Cato is as famous on the genre convention circuit for her cooking as for her fiction and poetry. This, Cato’s sixth novel, combines her two loves. She creates a world where love of food is a gods-given gift and terrible responsibility. Cato’s writing also shows the influence of George R.R. Martin, particularly his fondness for the impersonal, violent politics of medieval Europe. And nothing provides a richer political target than a wedding.

Princess Solenn knows she doesn’t look or think like other royalty of Braiz. Only when she’s shipped to Verdania for a politically useful marriage does she discover why: she’s a Chef, an ability that supposedly only travels in one’s bloodline. Though lacking training, her innate Chef abilities uncover a plot to assassinate her callow young betrothed. Solenn doesn’t love him, but she definitely loves the peace which Prince Rupert’s assassination would disrupt.

Despite alternating between these two viewpoint characters, Cato hasn’t created a conventional character-driven novel. Both Ada and Solenn are beholden to political forces and old vendettas they might stem, but never completely prevent. Poisonings and regicides are simply extensions of the political horse-trades that make royal court life possible. Cato’s characters want simple, honest lives, but late-medieval politics refuses to let them sleep easily.

Please understand, I don’t make the GRRM comparison lightly. Like Martin, Cato creates a kingdom where magic exists, but isn’t central. Political logrolling matters more than the Chefs’ food-based wizardry. Our characters desire simple, honest lives, but court intrigues keep intruding. This doesn’t stop our viewpoint characters from describing their sensory circumstances in rich detail; Cato’s prose includes multiple lush descriptions of ingredients and the cooking process.

Beth Cato

Though a Chef’s responsibility manifests primarily through food, political exigencies define what that actually means. Ada previously commanded troops in battle, though she lost faith in the corrupt king she served, and deserted to save her soul. (Exactly how food magic translates into strategic command is left implicit.) Now somebody is clearing the ranks of Ada’s fellow disillusioned generals. Ada must apprehend her assassin’s employer before it’s too late.

It spoils nothing to say, since Cato reveals it early, that Solenn is Ada’s long-lost daughter. Though her politically expedient marriage would cement peace between Verdania and Braiz, if her actual parentage ever comes out, the political consequences will be severe. Until then, though, somebody wants to not just assassinate Prince Rupert, but frame Solenn for the crime. Solenn must survive the intrigue in order to prevent the war.

Besides the focus on politics, Cato also shares GRRM’s casual attitude toward historicity. She describes Verdania’s Bronze-age religious rituals and downright Roman attitude toward antiquities, while musketeers with rapiers and flintlock pistols struggle to keep peace within the palace. Like GRRM, Cato cares more about creating the feel of her setting’s historical parallels, than about remaining scrupulously realistic. It’s casual, but it works.

Cato’s two heroines reflect two different approaches to conspiracy and intrigue. Ada, the wanted fugitive, must actively pursue justice through Verdania’s byways, knowing that if she ever lapses in vigilance, her enemies will destroy her and her family. Solenn, by contrast, is trapped by her royal circumstances. Her greatest aspiration is to survive, which isn’t always guaranteed. She occupies a hall of enemies, and must remain forever vigilant.

This novel does require a certain dedication. Though Cato’s characters both act and are acted upon, the forces acting upon them aren’t always clear. Therefore, her storytelling involves occasional breaks where characters explain circumstances to one another, which sometimes slows the momentum. Pushing through these occasional dry breaks, however, rewards audiences with the suspense and drama they expect from similar political novels.

Ultimately, Cato shares GRRM’s interest in politics, but lacks his cynical fatalism. Her characters frequently lack control, but not agency; they aren’t prisoners to circumstance. They want what we all want: liberty and simplicity. But like us, they can’t have it, because they live in a world of humans and their dependencies. Therefore, Cato offers us the ultimate resolution: just stay alive until you find answers.

The Only Path Through the Midnight Woods

Sarah Hollowell, A Dark and Starless Forest

Nine children and their teacher live a cloistered life in a secluded house in northern Indiana, practicing their magic and avoiding the outside world. Though these children, mostly girls (and one enby), will eventually grow into awesome powers, they’re currently too young to defend against a hostile world. Until they learn, they live by a few simple rules. Don’t use magic recklessly; don’t go into the forest; and above all, don’t cross Frank.

This novel’s Shirley Jackson-esque premise drew me in without hesitation. Like Jackson, Hollowell places her characters in a setting that physically isolates them from the larger world, forcing them to rely upon one another. Then she makes them, in different ways, unreliable. Throughout the novel, some oppressive presence looms constantly over the characters. But what is that presence and what does it want?

Derry, our first-person narrator, has a deeply conflicted relationship with her surrogate father, Frank. He’s taught her to control her superpowers since her parents unceremoniously dumped her at his doorstep. Frank is gentle, paternal, and patient, as long as Derry and the other students comply. But he punishes the slightest sign of willfulness strictly. And Derry is a restless teenager, learning to chafe at his authority.

Meanwhile, Derry has a secret: she and a few other students have discovered a secret tunnel leading to the forbidden forest. A tunnel only magically gifted students can access. This liberates them from Frank’s often arbitrary dominion, but at a cost: Derry and her sister Jane saw something in the wood. Derry won’t tell us what, but she believes it’s connected when, one summer midnight, Jane apparently disappears into darkness.

Hollowell creates a world defined by narrowness and constriction. Frank collects his students from parents frightened of their children’s nascent powers. Yet as the story develops, and Frank seems no closer to discovering where Jane went, Derry slowly realizes they only know what Frank tells them. What motivates Frank to teach his students, while protecting him from a putatively hostile world? He won’t tell, and Derry can’t guess.

Sarah Hollowell

To find answers, Derry must improve her supernatural abilities, and use them in ways Frank has never taught her. Though Derry describes her fellow students’ powers as magical, and Frank calls his students “alchemists,” the students don’t learn diverse spells from grimoires. Rather, they have unique powers which Frank helps them cultivate. The school thus looks less like Hogwart’s, more like Xavier’s School for Gifted Children.

Outside Frank’s door, the forbidden forest starts calling Derry. Soon enough, she breaks one of Frank’s inviolable rules and ventures in alone. There she finds a mysterious figure who promises to reveal the truth which Frank has spent years concealing. But how can Derry decide who’s telling the truth? And what must she do when the forest begins demanding more from her than she feels prepared to give?

It’s tempting to seek parallels in Hollowell’s narrative. Derry, our narrator, resembles Hollowell herself: bespectacled, fat (her word, not mine), and gender-nonconforming. The symbolism of the isolated childhood, the authoritative father figure, and the desire to see the outside world, are pretty glaring. On a tenth-grade book report level, Hollowell’s themes of young adulthood and the need to break parental chains loom large.

But such one-to-one interpretations place limits on Hollowell’s gripping, fast-paced story. Derry wants answers, while Frank continues treating her and her foster family as permanent children. One after another, Frank’s students vanish, first under darkness, later in broad daylight. They leave no trace, and Frank’s efforts to maintain order become increasingly Spartan. Derry ultimately wants what everyone wants: to see the world with her own eyes.

Hollowell handles the necessary tone shifts to tell an engaging story. Derry describes the house, the forest, and her foster family with the lush detail you’d expect from Frank’s low-tech curriculum. But when she needs more muscular storytelling force, she has it, and key scenes explode with vigor. The book runs over 350 pages without ever feeling long. And she keeps twelve mononymic characters in constant play without cluttering the story landscape.

This book is marketed as a Young Adult novel, which perhaps isn’t surprising, considering its mainly young cast and coming-of-age themes. But like the best children’s literature, it offers plenty for adults: themes of authority versus independence, for instance, and exactly how terrifying the outside world really is. Hollowell writes with nail-biting tension that keeps readers up past their bedtimes, and she tells a story as timely and pertinent as it is scary and fun.

In Dispraise of Realism

George R.R. Martin

A confession: I have only watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones, and none of its spinoff, House of the Dragon. I tried reading George R.R. Martin’s novels, and couldn’t. Nothing against either Martin’s writing, which has a strong voice and command of nuance, or the adaptation’s execution; I particularly like how they took Peter Jackson’s LotR ethos and made it sootier. Martin and his adapters work well.

Rather, I’ve struggled with the underlying ethic. Martin is probably the foremost proponent of a fantasy subgenre called “grimdark.” This neologism is sloppily defined and, like porn, we know it when we see it. Rather than having parameters, grimdark fantasy has a core interpretation of humanity defined by pessimism, and a petty, captious interpretation of human nature. Grimdark writers read humans as base, vile creatures, and depict this belief luridly.

Martin’s tone isn’t unique. Writers like Genevieve Valentine, Glen Cook, and Joe Abercrombie presume similarly that humans lack core values, honor doesn’t exist, and the best we can expect is to find the least awful antihero. Grimdark often exists in direct rejection to J.R.R. Tolkien, who aggressively rejected religious interpretations of his novels, but who nevertheless wrote from an essentially Catholic belief that justice must ultimately prevail.

This pessimism often gets characterized as “realism.” Both inside and outside literature, many people who pat themselves on the back for their supposed clear-eyed ability to see the truth, actively seek the bleakest, most hopeless interpretation for everything. Recall Tolstoy’s famous thesis statement of realism in Anna Karenena: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Then he sets out to prove it.

Similarly, in politics, “realism” often justifies history’s worst atrocities. Otto von Bismarck pioneered realpolitik, a PoliSci thesis contending that everybody’s a bad actor, and the wisest course is to destroy other nations before they destroy you. It’s easy, with historical hindsight, to draw a straight line between Bismarck and two world wars. Today, American politics is tainted by “race realism,” a primarily conservative principle that race-based conflict is inevitable.

J.R.R. Tolkien

It strikes me, however, that Tolkien and his weird shadow, C.S. Lewis, weren’t ignorant of the worst possible interpretations. Tolkien fought in the trenches at the Somme. Lewis’s allegorical Pevensie family stumbled into Narnia while literally fleeing the London Blitz. Tolkien and Lewis lived through the Twentieth Century’s most ignoble and hideous moments. And despite that, they believed goodness, Christianity, and capital-T Truth still existed.

Lewis himself, in describing Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, noted that Chretien set his stories in a distant land, at a distant time. (Chretien was French, but in the 12th Century, overland travel was ponderous, and undertaken only with great purpose.) Because, Lewis writes, true virtue is always in another land, at another time. Historically, fantasy has shared that belief, whether Tolkien’s iron-age severity, or Lewis’ playful mythic candyland.

Contrasting the sociopolitical forces that steered Tolkien versus Martin, I notice two divergences. First, though both men were baptized and confirmed Catholic, Martin lost his faith moving into adulthood. He stopped believing that capital-T Truth existed, or at least was knowable. But no substitute source of moral confidence took Christianity’s place. Faced with a panoply of philosophical and theological moralities, Martin essentially surrendered to indecision.

Meanwhile, as Martin lacked any moral compass, he also lacked urgency in context. Lewis and Tolkien were shaped by literal war, with fascism, which was itself the final instaur form of imperialism. (America take note.) Martin and his grimdark cohort, by contrast, grew up amid the Cold War. They didn’t have the option to win or die trying. Instead, they lived beholden to powerful governments that were deaf to the people’s entreaties.

Actual violence, actual war, convinced Tolkien and Lewis that truth claims matter, and virtue exists. By contrast, the lingering threat of violence, with the pervasive reality that they could neither join in nor flee, convinced Martin et al. that nothing really matters, and humanity is necessarily execrable. It seems belief in truth and virtue emerges, butterfly-like, from the need to act. But the persistent inability to resist evil starves virtue.

And in both cases, True Believers cast their belief in virtue, or lack thereof, onto a distant land unreachable across countless miles and centuries. Because closer to home, we have to acknowledge that neither virtue nor vice are absolute. Real life is sloppy, and doesn’t move according to theory. In either case, Christian idealism or agnostic pessimism, the truth only exists in a mythic land.