Warren Rochelle's Blog, page 26
December 3, 2012
A Wild Ways, by Tanya Huff
The Wild Ways by Tanya HuffMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
In Enchanted Emporium we first meet the Gales of southern Ontario , a matriarchal clan dominated by the Aunties who could, if they wanted, dominate the world with their magic. Allie Gale, one of a tribe of cousins, inherits a Calgary antique emporium/junk shop, whose clientele include many of the fey, among other strange beings. She and other cousins, her brother, a leprechaun, and Jack, a teenage Dragon prince, wind up saving Calgary . The story of this otherworldly family is continued in Wild Ways. Six months or so later after the events in Emporium, Jack, who is living with Allie and her partner, is booored. So is Charlie— Charlotte —one of the cousins—who also happens to be a member of a country music band and a Wild Power. For a Gale, this means she can’t be bound to a place, and that she has enormous powers.
This unlikely pair, Charlie and Jack, wind up in Halifax, along with the band, and involved with a Celtic music festival, and involved with a family of Selkies fighting to stop an offshore drilling project of the epitome of corporate evil, Carlson Oil, run by Amelia Carson, who is not a nice person. Carlson Oil is being helped by Auntie Catherine, bringing Charlie and her Auntie into direct conflict. To say complications ensue is an understatement. Good is fighting evil, although these terms are grey, not black and white.
GLBT fans won’t be disappointed: gutsy tough heroine, sometime lover of her cousin, and attracted to a ravishing (and, alas, straight) Selkie woman, a 15-year-old Dragon Prince, a band that includes two gay lovers, and various other magical creatures. Huff’s sure and deft style, rich with humor, sustains this story set in a world where who you are matters, not who you love.
View all my reviews
Dark Currents, by Jacqueline Carey
Dark Currents by Jacqueline CareyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Dark Currents, which is, I think, Jacqueline Carey's latest--is a new series, Agent of Hel? In the Midwestern resort town of Pemkowet there lives a "diverse population: eccentric locals, wealthy summer people, and tourists by the busload--not to mention fairies, sprites, vampires, naiads, orgres, and a whole host of eldritch folk, presided over by Hel, a reclusive Norse goddess."
For Daisy Johansseen, our heroine, the daughter of a human woman and incubus, this is home. She is Hel's enforcer and the liaison to the Pemkowet PD. Part f her job is be sure the mundane and the eldritch get along.
Then, a young man from a nearby college drowns--and the eldritch may be involved. This could hurt the paranormal tourist business. She and heh childhood crush, Cody Fairfax, police office and werewolf in the closet (well, den--he is straight), are on the case. Complications ensue ... plus Daisy must never invoke her demonic heritage or all Hell will break loose, or Armageddon.
Funny, light, clever, with some serious moments. A good read.
View all my reviews
November 28, 2012
November 2012: Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Guest Blog: Wrtiers for Whom We are Grateful
In this installment I write of my gratitude for the work of Ursula K. Le Guin.
The first installment for November is up: http://theresacrater.com/944/the-grea...
The first installment for November is up: http://theresacrater.com/944/the-grea...
October 31, 2012
Queer Fish, Volume 2: Givewaway!
Pink Narcissus Press has just published Queer Fish, Volume 2, which includes my story, "The Boy on McGee Street," and lots of other good stories--and they are giving it away here on Goodreads!
Check it out!
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...
Check it out!
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...
October 9, 2012
ROUND TABLE: Animals in Fantasy (Part II)
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
ROUND TABLE: Animals in Fantasy (Part II)
Hello and welcome back for the second part of a fascinating discussion of animals in fantasy.
Valjeanne Jeffers: The Newest Nonhumans on the Block.
My decision to write about shape shifters and animals—especially werewolves— was first met with shock...by me. When I was growing up, and until say the last ten or so years, the cast of animals in science fiction/fantasy was pretty limited. You had your choice of evil and doomed or tragic and doomed. Either way somebody, usually your animal, was doomed. Remember the “salt monster” from the original Star Trek series? It was a beast with no other desire than to assume the shapes of the crew—like a deadly chameleon. All the better to suck the salt from your body until you're dead. That was pretty much the fare of traditional SF films and books.
Whenever I sat down to watch a werewolf film, I already knew the beginning and the end. I already knew the skinny. It definitely wasn't cheerful. Some poor man or woman got bitten or scratched and went through a period of: “I can't believe this is happening to me!” Then eventually, like The American Werewolf In London, they all turned into hairy, psycho killers and proceeded to murder anyone unlucky enough to get in their way—including their own family members. That was the traditional SF nonhuman. That was his or her fate.
So why would I chose such a tragic protagonist? Now the plot, as they say, thickens. There is a nontraditional SF animal, oftentimes also a shape shifter, that has made his/her way into the SF/fantasy genre. These new animals or shape shifters can be loosely grouped into two categories: a thinking being that thwarts the heroine or hero, or one that helps them on their journey.
In The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub, a science fiction/horror odyssey, there is a whole host of supernatural creatures: werewolves, were-goats, lizards... some good, some malevolent, but all with human intellect—a sharp break from the traditional werewolf formula. In fact, “Wolf,” a gentle, werewolf is pivotal to the hero's success. When Wolf runs with the moon, he too becomes a killing machine, losing his human ability to think and reason. Yet Wolf's humanity, unlike that of his literary forefathers, conquers this brutal calling.
But animals such as the talking familiars of A. Jarrell's Detecting Magic With Dick Hunter, and the magical crow of Balogun Ojetade's Once Upon a Time in Afrika showcase animals that completely belong to a new breed of SF/Fantasy animals.
In Detecting Magic... the animals guide and assist the hero in his quest—they in fact are essential to his success.
In Once Upon a Time... a magical bird, or a creature that look s like a bird, the “Crow,” gives the hero and heroine direction. In both cases these are thinking creatures. Gone is the mindless beast controlled by his or her transition into an animal.
Which brings me back to my original question: why would I choose to write about werewolves? Frankly, as I discovered, they fascinate me—always have—along with other shape shifting folk, like vampires. And because historically, in films and books, they've always been the underdogs: the unfortunate man or woman who was infected, suffered, killed and came to a horrible end. The underdog, the oppressed, the abused, the victim, who by the power of their spirit rises to become a heroine, has always been near and dear to my heart.
Another one of my motivations, is that in animals we glimpse one of the most glorious aspects of life. They will fight to death to protect those they love. They never kill for pleasure or greed. And the wolf is among the most noble, and beautiful creatures to walk the earth. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from these “cousins?”
The shape shifters, Karla, Joseph and others, that I've brought to life in my Immortal series, in the alternate world of “Tundra,” are definitely nontraditional. They are humans, whose birthright forces them to become more. Not because they were bitten or scratched, but because they are Immortal Other, entrusted with the survival of their world.
They challenge the power structure of their planet imposed by a sorcerer, who also happens to be a megalomaniac. Not fearlessly (For who among us is fearless?) but with great courage, drawing upon their bestial natures to fight and protect their planet. There is eroticism. What is life without love? Violence, for the Others are nothing if not revolutionary. And growth. If you live you evolve. Or you stagnant and die. There is whole cast of preternatural humans and daemons in the Immortal series—some good, some evil—and all with their own agenda (whether working for themselves or some other entity) for who will rule Tundra.
Indeed, the world of science fiction animals is no longer a realm of star crossed creatures. No longer are werewolves and other meta-humans ruled by harsh literary plots, their bloody death predetermined by their nature. This new world is rich and multi-layered. Shape shifters are free to think, live and love—both as humans and animals—to chose their own path, whether benevolent or evil.
And this brave new world is where I've found my writing home.
Valjeanne Jeffers is an artist, poet and the author of The Immortal and The Switch series. She has been published in numerous anthologies including: The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, 31 Days of Steamy Mocha, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, Griots II: Sisters of the Spear (in press) and Steamfunk!Anthology (in press). Valjeanne's novels can be purchased at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Nubian Bookstore, Morrow GA, and Eljay's Bookstore, Pittsburgh PA.
Preview her novels at: http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com
Sylvia Kelso:
This is one of those grab-bag topics: shake it and a confetti of sub-topics leaps out. Just to start with, especially in high fantasy, there are the normal but mandatory animals that indicate a pre-industrial or agricultural society: cows, pigs, etc., and above all, horses, that necessity of all heroes down from the Round Table knights.
Horses can come with varying degrees of verisimilitude, and for me at least, consequent levels of suspended disbelief for the whole story. Sharon Shinn’s Mystic books, for ex, don’t seem aware that horses on a journey need a lot of feed, water, shelter, grooming – as when chilled through by a snowstorm – and that their likes and dislikes include both rider and equine companions. In total contrast, Aerin’s horse Talat in Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown is a personality in his own right, but a wholly equine personality, and as present a character as Aerin herself.
Equally essential to fantasy are the magical animals. Most often, they are speaking animals: to use a classic example, the Badgers and Reepicheep the cavalier mouse from the Narnia books. There is some discussion over what makes a beast fable as distinct from fantasy: my answer would be, in a beast fable the animals are allegorical, as in Animal Farm. The Badger and Reeepicheep stand for themselves, and are therefore fantasy. So, too, is the presence of animals as povs and purveyors of a wholly non-human society, as with Diane Duane’s felines in The Book of Night and Moon, and of course, Watership Down.
Where horses and cows lend essential verisimilitude to a pre-industrial world, magic animals matter in an entirely different way. Such creatures say very clearly that this is not realism but a genre of Elsewhere: Yeah, Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more.
Such animals often supply the first step toward suspension of disbelief in a fantasy world. Close behind in this role come original invented animals, such as Judith Tarr’s seneldi in the Avaryan books. Riding animals, though not horses, yet differing most clearly in the horns on their heads. More memorable to me are C.J. Cherryh’s “goblin horses.” For Goblin Mirror, they take a starring role on the cover, but inside, their strangeness stops at fiery eyes and three-toed feet. The full Monty comes with the “Night-horses” in Rider at the Gate: linked, like McCaffrey’s dragons, by telepathic rapport to one human, three-toed, omnivorous – happily consuming fish, bacon, small animals and “biscuits”– and with a bouquet of other psychic abilities. The Night-horses and their native companions produce a fascinatingly Other world, where the visible landscape is continually overlaid with a psychic view, “the ambient,” as infra-red vision overlays ordinary sight.
Different again are some of the oldest Elsewhere creatures, the were-animals: the selkie, the lamia, and used almost to overload of late, the werewolf. Definitely of Elsewhere, though since Laurell Hamilton very much at home in contemporary fantasy as well as paranormal romance, timelessly fascinating, to storytellers and readers/hearers both. But with the invented or magic animal, beasthood is in no doubt; the were-creature is another kettle of fish. Is it primarily a beast, or primarily human? The creature, question, and arising dilemmas have been a rich source for imagination from early fairytales on down.
And before and beyond and after all these come the myths and legends: the creatures that never existed, yet which have kindled imagination from times before writing. The chimera, the Pegasus, the griffin, the manticore, the basilisk, the harpy, and the dragon, above all.
Dragons have become a modern fantasy leit-motif that has outlasted even the snowy peaks once endemic on fantasy covers. Dragons above all signal, Elsewhere, and perhaps, if the reader and writer are lucky, that elusive quality, as I’ve said so often, that we may all be seeking in fantasy. I’ll let Tolkien sum it up, here from the famous lecture “On Fairy Stories,” but as so often, with that language which underpins all of Middle-earth.
[As a child,] I had no desire to have either dreams or adventures like Alice … and Treasure Island left me cold. Red Indians were better: there were … strange languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and above all forests … [But] best of all was the nameless North of Sigurd of the Volsungs, and the prince of all dragons … The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Otherworld. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Otherworlds, was the heart of the desire of Faerie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. (OFS 135, “Children” Sub-section).
Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” is in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.
Carole McDonnell:
For me, animals in a fantasy story root me in the real world. There are animals in fantasy and fantastical animals. I tend to like real animals. Oh, I don't mind the odd talking or magical animal but for me the best kind of animal in a fantasy is a horse.
Fantasies come in all kind. Some genres don't use horses at all. Urban fantasy, for instance, generally doesn't need horses. But those of us who learned to love fantasy by reading the old fashioned sword and sorcery tales understand the joy that rises to the spirit when a horse enters the page.
The horse alone -- sans its rider-- is a symbol of strength, nobility, loyalty, restraint, war and the old days. Its strength, its speed, and its nobility is given to the warrior. For me, a horse is a warrior's equipment -- like a sword, like a mantle thrown casually over his shoulder and blown in the wind. A fantasy story without a horse lacks nobility and lacks the Sensawunda Once-upon-a-time age-old quality. Horses are the cavalry: Sword and sorcery is essentially about someone on a great mission who will -- in the long run-- save someone, some great land, some oppressed people. Saviors and avengers as well as villains ride on horses. Even if the horse has no magic power, when the protagonist sits upon it, the reader has confidence that something wonderful is afoot, that the Savior and the True Prince has arrived.
In many western and eastern myths, heroes ride on horses.
In Christianity, when Jesus returns as king, he is depicted as being on a horse.
And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. Revelations 19:11
Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/
Warren Rochelle:
Listening to the Talking Beasts of Narnia
In The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (Back Bay Books, 2008) Laura Miller asserts that Human beings have longed to communicate with the universe since time immemorial—a profound, mystical longing. Tolkien described it as one of the two ‘primordial desires’ behind fairy tales (after the desire to ‘survey the depths of space and time’); we want to ‘hold communion with other living beings (27). But, we are separated from the universe, from the other living beings who share it with us, Miller contends, by words, by language (26-27).
Not so in Narnia. Here, human beings live side by side, and are often friends with, talking animals, “the most cherished creatures in children’s fantasy” (30). As a child, when Miller first read the Chronicles, this was one of the things she most loved about the books. She would have “given anything to join the Pevensie siblings at the round dinner table in Mr. and Mrs. Beaver’s snug house, trading stories about Aslan and eating potatoes and freshly caught trout” (31). She goes on, of course, to say as an adult she appreciates animals as they are.
Well. I first read the Chronicles when I was in third grade, eight-going-on-nine, and I fell in love, and I have never quite fallen out of that love (and I don’t really want to). While not the skeptic reclaiming Narnia from an adult perspective like Miller, I find myself when I reread the series (which I do every year, along with Tolkien, and a few others, such as A Wrinkle in Time) as an old friend spending time with another beloved old friend, whose warts and flaws are visible, but I love this friend no less.
I still long for Narnia. I still wish I could talk with the animals in my life. Here I want to briefly look at what Lewis is doing, beyond wish fulfillment. What do these Talking Beasts have to say to us when we do hold this communion, when we are no longer separated by language? According to Paul Ford in his revised and expanded Companion to Narnia (HarperCollins, 2005), each animal “acts according to its stereotype. Moles dig the apple orchard at Cair Paravel; Mr. Beaver builds Beaversdam; horses carry smaller creatures into battle with the witch. Glimfeather is a wise owl.” But Lewis goes beyond this: he ‘uses animals as hieroglyphs, or ‘pictures’ of certain human attributes; Reepicheep, for instance, is a hieroglyph of courage” (47). Jewel, the Unicorn, is the epitome of friendship. Trufflehunter the Badger is loyal, faithful, and true. Not all are good, of course—although they were created originally as innocents—Shift, the ape, is deceit and evil and betrayal.
The Beasts are “in many ways similar to humans; indeed they are anthropomorphized to a high degree.” Reepicheep remembers his cradle; the Beavers live in a “cozy English home and enjoy proper English meals” (420). Even so, Reepicheep is still a Mouse; the Beavers are beavers—they retain their animal-ness. In The Horse and His Boy, Bree and Hwin are fully realized characters with distinct personalities, who are Horses—who care for and love their humans, and who are the friends of their humans. And eat oats and like to roll in the grass, a habit that causes Bree distress: is this acceptable behavior for a Narnian Horse? Lewis, through his Talking Beasts who are like humans and yet distinctly not human, “reminds us that we are indeed part of the natural world, and not separate from it as modern science and technology might have us believe” (421).
Clearly, when the Talking Beasts speak, we should listen. They tell us that we are not alone—that we are part of the natural world, and indeed, we are responsible for it. . Narnia is not a land just for men, but it is a land that is meant to be ruled by a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve. As Reepicheep reminds Caspian in Voyage of the Dawn Treader: you promised to be good lord to the Talking Beasts. We—humans—must care for the world, and we must pay attention to it—we must see it. The Beasts also remind us that there is more to the world than the visible. The Divine, the Mystery, is present and a part of the world we all live in. Aslan, the Great Lion, the son of the Emperor-over-Sea, is one of the Beasts—he is a lion, like other lions . . .
I could go on with this list of virtues and Beastly lessons, but I think I may have said enough for the moment. Perhaps what the Talking Beasts are reminding us the most of is what it means to be human—and that humans are animals as well.
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and
The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections.
http://warrenrochelle.com
See also:
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/2012...
ROUND TABLE: Animals in Fantasy (Part II)
Hello and welcome back for the second part of a fascinating discussion of animals in fantasy.
Valjeanne Jeffers: The Newest Nonhumans on the Block.
My decision to write about shape shifters and animals—especially werewolves— was first met with shock...by me. When I was growing up, and until say the last ten or so years, the cast of animals in science fiction/fantasy was pretty limited. You had your choice of evil and doomed or tragic and doomed. Either way somebody, usually your animal, was doomed. Remember the “salt monster” from the original Star Trek series? It was a beast with no other desire than to assume the shapes of the crew—like a deadly chameleon. All the better to suck the salt from your body until you're dead. That was pretty much the fare of traditional SF films and books.
Whenever I sat down to watch a werewolf film, I already knew the beginning and the end. I already knew the skinny. It definitely wasn't cheerful. Some poor man or woman got bitten or scratched and went through a period of: “I can't believe this is happening to me!” Then eventually, like The American Werewolf In London, they all turned into hairy, psycho killers and proceeded to murder anyone unlucky enough to get in their way—including their own family members. That was the traditional SF nonhuman. That was his or her fate.
So why would I chose such a tragic protagonist? Now the plot, as they say, thickens. There is a nontraditional SF animal, oftentimes also a shape shifter, that has made his/her way into the SF/fantasy genre. These new animals or shape shifters can be loosely grouped into two categories: a thinking being that thwarts the heroine or hero, or one that helps them on their journey.
In The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub, a science fiction/horror odyssey, there is a whole host of supernatural creatures: werewolves, were-goats, lizards... some good, some malevolent, but all with human intellect—a sharp break from the traditional werewolf formula. In fact, “Wolf,” a gentle, werewolf is pivotal to the hero's success. When Wolf runs with the moon, he too becomes a killing machine, losing his human ability to think and reason. Yet Wolf's humanity, unlike that of his literary forefathers, conquers this brutal calling.
But animals such as the talking familiars of A. Jarrell's Detecting Magic With Dick Hunter, and the magical crow of Balogun Ojetade's Once Upon a Time in Afrika showcase animals that completely belong to a new breed of SF/Fantasy animals.
In Detecting Magic... the animals guide and assist the hero in his quest—they in fact are essential to his success.
In Once Upon a Time... a magical bird, or a creature that look s like a bird, the “Crow,” gives the hero and heroine direction. In both cases these are thinking creatures. Gone is the mindless beast controlled by his or her transition into an animal.
Which brings me back to my original question: why would I choose to write about werewolves? Frankly, as I discovered, they fascinate me—always have—along with other shape shifting folk, like vampires. And because historically, in films and books, they've always been the underdogs: the unfortunate man or woman who was infected, suffered, killed and came to a horrible end. The underdog, the oppressed, the abused, the victim, who by the power of their spirit rises to become a heroine, has always been near and dear to my heart.
Another one of my motivations, is that in animals we glimpse one of the most glorious aspects of life. They will fight to death to protect those they love. They never kill for pleasure or greed. And the wolf is among the most noble, and beautiful creatures to walk the earth. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from these “cousins?”
The shape shifters, Karla, Joseph and others, that I've brought to life in my Immortal series, in the alternate world of “Tundra,” are definitely nontraditional. They are humans, whose birthright forces them to become more. Not because they were bitten or scratched, but because they are Immortal Other, entrusted with the survival of their world.
They challenge the power structure of their planet imposed by a sorcerer, who also happens to be a megalomaniac. Not fearlessly (For who among us is fearless?) but with great courage, drawing upon their bestial natures to fight and protect their planet. There is eroticism. What is life without love? Violence, for the Others are nothing if not revolutionary. And growth. If you live you evolve. Or you stagnant and die. There is whole cast of preternatural humans and daemons in the Immortal series—some good, some evil—and all with their own agenda (whether working for themselves or some other entity) for who will rule Tundra.
Indeed, the world of science fiction animals is no longer a realm of star crossed creatures. No longer are werewolves and other meta-humans ruled by harsh literary plots, their bloody death predetermined by their nature. This new world is rich and multi-layered. Shape shifters are free to think, live and love—both as humans and animals—to chose their own path, whether benevolent or evil.
And this brave new world is where I've found my writing home.
Valjeanne Jeffers is an artist, poet and the author of The Immortal and The Switch series. She has been published in numerous anthologies including: The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, 31 Days of Steamy Mocha, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, Griots II: Sisters of the Spear (in press) and Steamfunk!Anthology (in press). Valjeanne's novels can be purchased at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Nubian Bookstore, Morrow GA, and Eljay's Bookstore, Pittsburgh PA.
Preview her novels at: http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com
Sylvia Kelso:
This is one of those grab-bag topics: shake it and a confetti of sub-topics leaps out. Just to start with, especially in high fantasy, there are the normal but mandatory animals that indicate a pre-industrial or agricultural society: cows, pigs, etc., and above all, horses, that necessity of all heroes down from the Round Table knights.
Horses can come with varying degrees of verisimilitude, and for me at least, consequent levels of suspended disbelief for the whole story. Sharon Shinn’s Mystic books, for ex, don’t seem aware that horses on a journey need a lot of feed, water, shelter, grooming – as when chilled through by a snowstorm – and that their likes and dislikes include both rider and equine companions. In total contrast, Aerin’s horse Talat in Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown is a personality in his own right, but a wholly equine personality, and as present a character as Aerin herself.
Equally essential to fantasy are the magical animals. Most often, they are speaking animals: to use a classic example, the Badgers and Reepicheep the cavalier mouse from the Narnia books. There is some discussion over what makes a beast fable as distinct from fantasy: my answer would be, in a beast fable the animals are allegorical, as in Animal Farm. The Badger and Reeepicheep stand for themselves, and are therefore fantasy. So, too, is the presence of animals as povs and purveyors of a wholly non-human society, as with Diane Duane’s felines in The Book of Night and Moon, and of course, Watership Down.
Where horses and cows lend essential verisimilitude to a pre-industrial world, magic animals matter in an entirely different way. Such creatures say very clearly that this is not realism but a genre of Elsewhere: Yeah, Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more.
Such animals often supply the first step toward suspension of disbelief in a fantasy world. Close behind in this role come original invented animals, such as Judith Tarr’s seneldi in the Avaryan books. Riding animals, though not horses, yet differing most clearly in the horns on their heads. More memorable to me are C.J. Cherryh’s “goblin horses.” For Goblin Mirror, they take a starring role on the cover, but inside, their strangeness stops at fiery eyes and three-toed feet. The full Monty comes with the “Night-horses” in Rider at the Gate: linked, like McCaffrey’s dragons, by telepathic rapport to one human, three-toed, omnivorous – happily consuming fish, bacon, small animals and “biscuits”– and with a bouquet of other psychic abilities. The Night-horses and their native companions produce a fascinatingly Other world, where the visible landscape is continually overlaid with a psychic view, “the ambient,” as infra-red vision overlays ordinary sight.
Different again are some of the oldest Elsewhere creatures, the were-animals: the selkie, the lamia, and used almost to overload of late, the werewolf. Definitely of Elsewhere, though since Laurell Hamilton very much at home in contemporary fantasy as well as paranormal romance, timelessly fascinating, to storytellers and readers/hearers both. But with the invented or magic animal, beasthood is in no doubt; the were-creature is another kettle of fish. Is it primarily a beast, or primarily human? The creature, question, and arising dilemmas have been a rich source for imagination from early fairytales on down.
And before and beyond and after all these come the myths and legends: the creatures that never existed, yet which have kindled imagination from times before writing. The chimera, the Pegasus, the griffin, the manticore, the basilisk, the harpy, and the dragon, above all.
Dragons have become a modern fantasy leit-motif that has outlasted even the snowy peaks once endemic on fantasy covers. Dragons above all signal, Elsewhere, and perhaps, if the reader and writer are lucky, that elusive quality, as I’ve said so often, that we may all be seeking in fantasy. I’ll let Tolkien sum it up, here from the famous lecture “On Fairy Stories,” but as so often, with that language which underpins all of Middle-earth.
[As a child,] I had no desire to have either dreams or adventures like Alice … and Treasure Island left me cold. Red Indians were better: there were … strange languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and above all forests … [But] best of all was the nameless North of Sigurd of the Volsungs, and the prince of all dragons … The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Otherworld. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Otherworlds, was the heart of the desire of Faerie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. (OFS 135, “Children” Sub-section).
Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” is in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.
Carole McDonnell:
For me, animals in a fantasy story root me in the real world. There are animals in fantasy and fantastical animals. I tend to like real animals. Oh, I don't mind the odd talking or magical animal but for me the best kind of animal in a fantasy is a horse.
Fantasies come in all kind. Some genres don't use horses at all. Urban fantasy, for instance, generally doesn't need horses. But those of us who learned to love fantasy by reading the old fashioned sword and sorcery tales understand the joy that rises to the spirit when a horse enters the page.
The horse alone -- sans its rider-- is a symbol of strength, nobility, loyalty, restraint, war and the old days. Its strength, its speed, and its nobility is given to the warrior. For me, a horse is a warrior's equipment -- like a sword, like a mantle thrown casually over his shoulder and blown in the wind. A fantasy story without a horse lacks nobility and lacks the Sensawunda Once-upon-a-time age-old quality. Horses are the cavalry: Sword and sorcery is essentially about someone on a great mission who will -- in the long run-- save someone, some great land, some oppressed people. Saviors and avengers as well as villains ride on horses. Even if the horse has no magic power, when the protagonist sits upon it, the reader has confidence that something wonderful is afoot, that the Savior and the True Prince has arrived.
In many western and eastern myths, heroes ride on horses.
In Christianity, when Jesus returns as king, he is depicted as being on a horse.
And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. Revelations 19:11
Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/
Warren Rochelle:
Listening to the Talking Beasts of Narnia
In The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (Back Bay Books, 2008) Laura Miller asserts that Human beings have longed to communicate with the universe since time immemorial—a profound, mystical longing. Tolkien described it as one of the two ‘primordial desires’ behind fairy tales (after the desire to ‘survey the depths of space and time’); we want to ‘hold communion with other living beings (27). But, we are separated from the universe, from the other living beings who share it with us, Miller contends, by words, by language (26-27).
Not so in Narnia. Here, human beings live side by side, and are often friends with, talking animals, “the most cherished creatures in children’s fantasy” (30). As a child, when Miller first read the Chronicles, this was one of the things she most loved about the books. She would have “given anything to join the Pevensie siblings at the round dinner table in Mr. and Mrs. Beaver’s snug house, trading stories about Aslan and eating potatoes and freshly caught trout” (31). She goes on, of course, to say as an adult she appreciates animals as they are.
Well. I first read the Chronicles when I was in third grade, eight-going-on-nine, and I fell in love, and I have never quite fallen out of that love (and I don’t really want to). While not the skeptic reclaiming Narnia from an adult perspective like Miller, I find myself when I reread the series (which I do every year, along with Tolkien, and a few others, such as A Wrinkle in Time) as an old friend spending time with another beloved old friend, whose warts and flaws are visible, but I love this friend no less.
I still long for Narnia. I still wish I could talk with the animals in my life. Here I want to briefly look at what Lewis is doing, beyond wish fulfillment. What do these Talking Beasts have to say to us when we do hold this communion, when we are no longer separated by language? According to Paul Ford in his revised and expanded Companion to Narnia (HarperCollins, 2005), each animal “acts according to its stereotype. Moles dig the apple orchard at Cair Paravel; Mr. Beaver builds Beaversdam; horses carry smaller creatures into battle with the witch. Glimfeather is a wise owl.” But Lewis goes beyond this: he ‘uses animals as hieroglyphs, or ‘pictures’ of certain human attributes; Reepicheep, for instance, is a hieroglyph of courage” (47). Jewel, the Unicorn, is the epitome of friendship. Trufflehunter the Badger is loyal, faithful, and true. Not all are good, of course—although they were created originally as innocents—Shift, the ape, is deceit and evil and betrayal.
The Beasts are “in many ways similar to humans; indeed they are anthropomorphized to a high degree.” Reepicheep remembers his cradle; the Beavers live in a “cozy English home and enjoy proper English meals” (420). Even so, Reepicheep is still a Mouse; the Beavers are beavers—they retain their animal-ness. In The Horse and His Boy, Bree and Hwin are fully realized characters with distinct personalities, who are Horses—who care for and love their humans, and who are the friends of their humans. And eat oats and like to roll in the grass, a habit that causes Bree distress: is this acceptable behavior for a Narnian Horse? Lewis, through his Talking Beasts who are like humans and yet distinctly not human, “reminds us that we are indeed part of the natural world, and not separate from it as modern science and technology might have us believe” (421).
Clearly, when the Talking Beasts speak, we should listen. They tell us that we are not alone—that we are part of the natural world, and indeed, we are responsible for it. . Narnia is not a land just for men, but it is a land that is meant to be ruled by a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve. As Reepicheep reminds Caspian in Voyage of the Dawn Treader: you promised to be good lord to the Talking Beasts. We—humans—must care for the world, and we must pay attention to it—we must see it. The Beasts also remind us that there is more to the world than the visible. The Divine, the Mystery, is present and a part of the world we all live in. Aslan, the Great Lion, the son of the Emperor-over-Sea, is one of the Beasts—he is a lion, like other lions . . .
I could go on with this list of virtues and Beastly lessons, but I think I may have said enough for the moment. Perhaps what the Talking Beasts are reminding us the most of is what it means to be human—and that humans are animals as well.
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and
The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections.
http://warrenrochelle.com
See also:
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/2012...
September 4, 2012
The Great Travelingn Guest Blog Fantasy Roundtable: August 2012/LGBT Issues in Fantasy
The Great Traveling Guest Blog Fantasy Round Table August 2012: LGBT Issues in Fantasy
Posted by: Warren Rochelle, in Musings
LGBT Issues in Fantasy:
This month the members of the Great Traveling Guest Blog Fantasy Roundtable pondered LGBT issues and themes in fantasy literature. Our ponderings are below and include a wide range of ideas and reactions, from the very personal to the philosophical.
LGBT Sexuality in Fantasy
by Sylvia Kelso
When it comes to word-associations, heterosexual aka straight sexuality gets all the advantages. Synonyms Roget gives for “straight” include:
direct, even, right, true, unbent, undistorted, unturned.
Antonyms however, include:
curved, indirect, twisted, disorganized disordered, disorderly.
And at the best,
different, unconventional, untraditional.
At the worst, deceitful, devious, lying, shady, and underhanded.
Attempts to redress this naming problem haven’t really worked yet. “Queer” is good but still carries tricky associations. “Gay” is omissive, even if better than the hiss-word equivalents. “Lesbian” is a 19thC recycle of Ancient Greece, where the only surviving woman to woman love poems come from Sapho of Lesbos. “Non-straight” plays into the opponents’ court, while “alternate sexuality” leaves the naming field unequal. “GLBT” is inclusive but clumsy, and “same-sex” works OK with “marriages” but “same-sex sexuality?”
Any cursory backward glance affirms the 20th Century arguments that the whole straight/other sexual polarity is relatively young. A love affair between a Pharaoh and one of his generals turns up around 2400-2200 BC in Egypt. In Ancient Greece, a major cultural source of our “civilization,” bisexuality was the male norm, while in Ancient Rome male to male love hardly raised an eyebrow. There were constraints: the thought of a relationship trading active and passive roles never seems to have occurred. Ancient Greek men were supposed to love boys, or extend such an affair to a long-term relationship, but keep the active-passive roles. Ancient Roman citizens had to be the active members, and get involved only with slaves, male prostitutes, or non-citizens. Women, as usual, are poorly documented. Sappho was only one of Nine Female Poets in the major Greek anthology, and who knows what the others wrote? “Lesbians” are actually titled so by Lucian in 2nd CE Rome, but their depictions read like male-constructed butch caricatures.
All the same, Alexander the Great’s long-term relationship with his friend Hephaistion is famous. Less famously, two Roman emperors (Nero and Heligabalus, but emperors all the same) legally married men, in Heligabalus’ case, “amid great rejoicing.” And, shades of the future, Martial and Juvenal note with disapproval that male couples are having traditional marriage ceremonies.
One would think the genres of elsewhere, would have a head start in combating our current sexual polarity, but SF was notoriously slow to admit any sex, and modern fantasy did no better. The exception comes, again, from fanfic, where Theodore Sturgeon’s mild ‘60s depiction of gayness in “Venus Plus X” is rapidly overshadowed by slashfic in the wake of Star Trek. The form hasn’t looked back since. But as Joanna Russ and numbers of irritated gay readers have pointed out, slashfic relationships are heavily marked by contemporary female constructions of sexuality. Waiting is important. UST is (still) important. A lot of anguish and maybe a male pregnancy are common. And not surprisingly, male-male sexuality has been a lot more attractive than female-female versions.
How MIGHT the 21st C fantasy writer deal with same-sex love, life, relationships? Obviously, if you can invent a world where things are NOT like here, you can also invent new names for the whole caboodle. Nevertheless, same-sex falls under the same minefield rubric as race. Depict same sex if you’re “straight” yourself, and get caned for poaching or inaccuracy? Omit same-sex altogether, and get caned too? Include same-sex relationships as general, unremarked? Or highlighted, or as chief narrative parts? Worlds where the entire constructions of sexuality are alienatingly different? Worlds where same-sex becomes a part of alien sex?
My first attempt to include “alternate sexualities” was a would-be multi-racial and otherwise inclusive SF novel for a Creative Writing MA, but there, same-sex people appeared marginally, or, because the secondary world was an ancient Macedonian colony, were already bisexual by culture, and the trend of the story was toward straight central relationships. In the sequel, I wrote a same-sex female relationship for a carried-over major character that made me (and her) much happier. But I only centralized such relationships in the Amberlight books.
In Amberlight itself the emotional focus is a straight love affair, but it happens in a matriarchy – a literal matriarchy, where sexual inequity falls on men. Women rule the city, for a simple practical reason, which inverts Victorian mores: lower class men go out to work. Middleclass shame is needing to have men work. Aristocratic, or House men, live secluded as marriage counters and male odalisques.
In same-sex matters Amberlight reversed Ancient Greece. Women were bisexual, female-female “partnerships” were general. But again, the pace and focus of the central story sidelined such relationships. I do seriously regret being unable to explore the men’s world, particularly that of the “Tower” men.
Amberlight fell, in a pretty straightforward SF trope , matriarchy flattened by a patriarchal invader’s catalyst, though here fuelled by a straight feminist’s opposition to gender inequity. The sequel, Riversend, sent the main characters up country to start again, with the specific goal of leveling the field: in this case, letting all men share both work and privileges. Again, woman-woman relationships ended as givens. But Tellurith, the House-head and female lead, had decided to flout custom by taking the patriarchal invader as a second husband – House men were multiply married to cement alliance, House women took one husband. Since the ménage a trois became a real love triangle, I had not only a Tower man’s viewpoint, but two male povs on same-sex desire. Tellurith’s second husband, learning his way in a woman’s world, was a familiar story. Sarth, with his longings for his cosmetics and face veil and what he regarded as “decent” male behavior, was a very different matter.
At the time I’d been reading Lesbian theorists, one of whom argued that heterosexual love desired the Other, but same-sex love desired the Self. I found it an intriguing concept, and when I had to depict a same-sex pov from the outside, so to speak, it worked powerfully in Riversend, particularly as the patriarchally raised Alkhes struggled to enunciate his desire for Sarth.
The emotional closure of Riversend was the cementing of the tripartite marriage to include both male-male and heterosexual relations. But only the third book, Source, involved Tellurith in a fullscale, firsthand women’s relationship. And with Tellurith, the Black Gang, aka creative component, took the theory literally. Her new female love (she was partnered back before Amberlight), found at the end of a long and epic journey, was physically Tellurith’s doppelganger.
The relationship grew, interestingly, more from common interests and shared sympathies and less than the men’s ties did from physical desire. Later the plot forced me to divide them, so Tellurith got to do the great “love forsaken” scenes, as she chose duty above love – that ancient, usually masculine dilemma. But the Black Gang did not acquiesce in this too traditional plotline. The book closes with Tellurith home, her new society safe after a fierce war, and at last the mother of a daughter. Yet in this traditional scene entered a suggestion that her female lover might not be wholly lost. If, as usual, female same-sex relationships went short on time and attention, the Black Gang set up this tie to become a major presence in the future. I hope it’s an omen for our world as well.
Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies.
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Musings on GLBT themes in Fantasy
by Theresa Crater
I judged the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards for a couple of years, which gives annual awards for the best GLBT content in science fiction and fantasy. The number of books with GLBT characters has grown both in number and complexity. GLBT characters are just an ordinary part of life in many books, being main characters, side-kicks and even villains.
Last year the award went to Kathe Koja’s Under the Poppy. The title of the book is the name of a brothel, owned by Decca. She is in love with Rupert, who helps her run the place, but then her brother Istvan shows up. He’s a puppeteer—of puppets and humans—and a bit of a thief. Rupert and he have been lovers in the past and succumb to their life-long love affair again, with a few liaisons here and there. There was some question about whether this book could truly be called a fantasy, but the judges decided the puppets seem to have a life of their own. Besides, it was a delightful riot of gorgeous language and interesting characters carving out a life for themselves in the margins of prewar Europe.
One of my favorite series was Laurie J. Marks’ elemental series, starting with Fire Logic, then Earth Logic. You get the idea. What I liked best about this series is that it normalized all kinds of sexualities. Karis G’deon rules Shaftal in this series, or she’s supposed to. She doesn’t really want to. Her lover is a woman; her friends have various sexual preferences, which begin to become just a small part of the overall picture of who these people are. Much like Bilbo tells stories or Hermione is very smart. We can see what a world that is sane about the variety of human sexual expression might feel like.
Will we return to a pre-1869 world? It was in that year that homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented. Not the practices, but as identities. Before that, people did have sex, of course, but their identity did not rest in what kind of sex they had. Much like Marks’s work. And even Koja’s.
Theresa Crater has published two contemporary fantasies, Beneath the Hallowed Hill & Under the Stone Paw and several short stories, most recently “White Moon” in Riding the Moon and “Bringing the Waters” in The Aether Age: Helios. She’s also published poetry and a baker’s dozen of literary criticism. Currently, she teaches writing and British lit in Denver. Born in North Carolina, she now lives in Colorado with her Egyptologist partner and their two cats. Visit her website at http://theresacrater.com
Transgender, gay and lesbian characters in fantasy
by Carole McDonnell
In the course of reading, one always encounters folks one would generally not encounter, or folks one would not normally want to meet. Witness the enraged moviegoer racists who had to deal with the fact that Rue in the Hunger Games was Black. So what does a Biblical Christian do when she encounters a fantasy book that contains a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender character?
Many of my stories involve interracial romances and I’ve had experiences where someone reads one of my stories and is unwilling to be pulled into the romance simply because they are disgusted, bothered, or nauseated by seeing two people together who –in their worldview– should not be together. So, I try to understand. On the flip side, because I know how incredibly complex sexuality can be, I get wary of easy answers or easy stories about homosexuality. Too many of my lesbian friends were raped as children, too many of my male gay friends were seduced by older men, and too many of my gay male friends were adopted or were delivered by induced estrogen-laden deliveries for me to say that people were biologically made gay.
I suppose I can read a book about a homosexual character if I don’t feel I’m being subject to propaganda. In my experience, I’ve known people who were born gay or who have had their sexuality affected by sexual molestation, separation/adoption issues, the hormonal chemicals introduced into the womb at induced deliveries, or became gay after some trauma or hospital stay. So I take gay folks in stories and in real life as I find them.
I have never had a gay character show up and want to have me tell his story but I have had tons of conflicted heterosexuals, and I do have some gay characters in some of my stories who aren’t really gay but more characters who are conflicted heterosexuals. I think what bothers me is the vast amount of false history and false biology I would have to accept. In the same way people who study the Druids and the Celts or Native American religions get peeved when they are faced with false “pop factoids” about certain things, I start rolling my eyes when I feel an author is attempting to propagandize.
The definition of “gay” as an exclusive love of people of one’s own sex is relatively new. Back in the day, most homosexuality allowed for loving people of both sexes. It was often supplemental to a heterosexual relationship. Alexander the Great loved his companion but he also loved his wife Roxanne. Oscar Wilde loved Lord Alfred Douglas but he also loved his wife. While there were some rare exceptions, in ancient times, in most cultures (Japan, Greece, Afghanistan, etc), homosexuality was generally frowned upon while pedophilia/pederasty was accepted. One of the most famous Greek tragedies, the curse on the Oedipus clan, –the curse of falling in love with the wrong people (incest, bulls, frigidity, etc) –fell upon the family because Laius would not give up his young lover when the pederasty contract was finished and the boy was fully grown. The gods deemed it so heinous that Laius’ descendants were cursed forever. Most people who speak of homosexuality being accepted by the past don’t talk honestly about the pederasty factor. So for me it depends on how honest I think the author is. . .
I recently read Kari Sperring’s Living With Ghosts, a great book that definitely could trouble the Christian reader. Not only did I have to deal with gigolos, homosexual attraction, and extra-marital sex, I had to deal with someone who dealt Tarot cards.
So what did I do?
Well, I actually read it. My very traditional heart had a few hurdles. For one, although I’m okay with prostitution in stories, I get a bit niggly about adultery. I kept hoping there would be no adulterous encounter I would have to be “on board” for. Generally, I don’t watch movies or read books with adultery in it. (This isn’t a religious issue with me. My father was a serial adulterer so I have a painful spot there.) So if I read a book with adultery, my biggest fear is that I will be asked to be “okay” with it.
True, I was in the POV of a high class courtesan who happened to be bisexual, but Gracielas was such a noble wounded character and the story was so intriguing and the world-building so solid and interesting that I totally got into the story. That said, once again, I didn’t allow myself to feel the homosexual attractions that happened in various characters. First because one of the homosexual pairs was married and I have a problem with being asked to be on the side of adulterers. Plus I’ve seen so many movies and heard so many accounts where some guy discovers he’s gay after being married for twenty years and suddenly divorces his poor wife. So yeah, I kept telling myself “I like these two characters but if I’m asked to go along with adultery I’m not gonna be patient.”
So yeah, with me, the issue with me is wariness of being pulled into understanding anything I don’t morally agree with. Living With Ghosts had a lot my priggish Biblical mind couldn’t deal with but the skill of the author and the beautiful craft of the writing helped me overcome my reluctance. I suppose the best way to make me read a book I don’t want to is to make the book utterly brilliant.
Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower.
http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/
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Gay Characters in Fantasy: A Personal Journey,
by Deborah Ross
In my experience, the community of science fiction and fantasy readers and writers has been one of the most tolerant of, and welcoming to, those who don’t fit into the mainstream. This includes queer (non-strictly-heterosexual) and gender-queer (non-strictly-male-or-female-assigned-gender) folks as well. My own introduction included stimulating discussions of sexuality, gender identification, and sexual orientation. I remember reading Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X (1960, one of the earliest science fiction stories to challenge gender-role stereotypes), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The World Wreckers (1971). Four years later, Marion published The Heritage of Hastur, in which she created a sympathetic and heroic gay protagonist. The World Wreckers impressed me because one of the characters falls in love with a member of a hermaphroditic race and must confront his own feelings about homosexuality and his identity as a man. I had never read anything like it, and it opened my eyes to the question of who we are, apart from our plumbing and hormones. This led the way to the understanding that sexual orientation is not just about which body part fits where, but about the people who are the focus of our hearts: romance as well as hormones.
In general, the works I read during the 60s and 70s were serious and courageous treatments of gender, gender roles, and sexual orientation, well ahead of popular media. But popular media caught up, although perhaps not in the formats its creators intended. I suppose fanfic (fan-written fiction based on established characters, not limited to television and films but primarily so) has always been around, but slash fiction is usually thought to have originated with the original series Star Trek. What’s slash fiction? Beginning in the late 70s, mostly female fans created stories featuring romantic and sexual relationships between various male media characters.
Somewhat to my bemusement, my teenage daughters loved it. I say bemusement because of my dissonance between the in-depth examination-of-issues, coincident with the women’s consciousness-raising movement of the 1970s, with the irreverent, often whimsical character of slashfic. What was this all about? And why were my daughters — who at the time were dating both boys and girls to see which they preferred — so interested in male characters hopping into bed with one another?
Fast forward a bit, with the death of Marion and my continuing her “Darkover” series (the setting for both of her above-referenced novels) plus my own writing career, with numerous portrayals of gay and bisexual characters. In 2004, I attended Gaylaxicon in San Diego, still scratching my head over slashfic and smiling nicely at all the campy humor. During a question and answer period, I put the issue to the audience. No one had a definitive answer, but there was a fascinating discussion about the differences between what appealed to women in slash characters and what appealed to gay men. (I suspect there’s a corollary in what lesbians find attractive in female slash characters versus what turns straight men on.) I came away mulling over the idea that within the slashfic context, readers of both sexes found a nonthreatening place in which to explore their own feelings about relationships, in particular sexuality. This lead to the disturbing question of whether this process objectified gay people, in essence projecting a distorted image of them for a purpose they have nothing to do with — e.g., helping adolescent girls understand male sexuality.
And this led to an even more disturbing question, not meant as a criticism specifically of fanfic but of fiction and media portrayals as a whole: do we see what we want to see, or do we see what’s really there? Can a gay youth, who is struggling to figure out who he is and how he is different and if he’s okay, understand himself through the lens of an essentially heterosexual portrayal of sexuality? Can any of us find ourselves when we’re being defined by someone else’s needs (or stereotypes, positive or negative)?
Do we as writers have a responsibility to create gay characters that make sense in the experience of gay people? Do we have a responsibility to include them at all? Should the sexual orientation of a character even be an issue — aren’t people just people?
I wish it were that simple, that we might live in a world in which gender, race, faith, or sexual orientation do not make some people invisible. Or worse, targets of hatred. I see value in both portraying worlds and cultures of diversity, and in stories about the struggles gays face now, in our imperfect world in their own terms.
Author Kyell Gold writes, “I’d been more and more openly gay for about a decade when I moved in with my then-boyfriend (now husband), but I still kept it private from my co-workers and other casual friends until I got a better sense of how it would be received. What was fueling my writing then was the urge to show gay characters falling in love, the way I was falling in love. [ital mine] … I have gotten many, many e-mails from teenaged boys (mostly) telling me how the book changed their lives, made them realize that it was okay for them to be gay. I have heard from people who said they didn’t realize that gay relationships were about anything other than sex until they read my book. Everyone has these intimate experiences and secrets that they keep close to them. One of the most terrifying things we face as a human is being alone. … And when you read about someone, even a fictional character, going through the same things you did, that can be a revealing, momentous experience.”
One of the most humbling and inspiring projects I have worked on was completing the novel Marion began in the final year of her life, featuring the central character from The Heritage of Hastur. After Hastur Lord came out, I received the following email, used with permission: “As a gay man who has had to live in the closet from much of my early adult life, I wasn’t sure how the [characters] would find their ways to peace, harmony, beauty, and honor. … I always loved the way Marion gave primacy of love and honesty, no matter the culture or the perceived taboo. Those of us … who have lived under the harsh lash of religious zeal, ideological repression, and the resulting personal constraint, cherish your ability to portray living honestly, openly, self confidently, at peace with ourselves. We know the cost, the loss, and the gain. And you have not shied away from the struggles to achieve that peace. It is hard won. But you have shown that the determination of caring people … can make committed lives blend together beautifully, forging a family, while at the same time allowing each to express their own individual truest selves. Thank you for carrying on Marion’s vision and for touching me deeply.”
Hastur Lord was nominated for the 2011 Gaylactic Spectrum Award.
Deborah Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with JAYDIUM and NORTHLIGHT, and short stories in ASIMOV’S, F & SF, REALMS OF FANTASY and STAR WARS: TALES FROM JABBA’S PALACE. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy THE SEVEN-PETALED SHIELD. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She has lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/
***
Coming Out in Fantasy
by Warren Rochelle
I came out relatively late in life, in my 40’s, after much therapy and personal struggle. My therapeutic process included a lot of reflective and introspective writing, mostly in journals, and a fair amount of reading by gay authors about their coming out experiences. And I found myself looking back at my own fiction, beginning with my first novel, The Wild Boy (Golden Gryphon Press, 2001), which was originally written as my MFA thesis while in graduate school at UNC Greensboro.
Coincidentally (or maybe not) my coming out process began shortly after my MFA program, while I was a doctoral student at UNCG. When I began a post-doc teaching fellowship at UNCG I went back and revisited my thesis with the intention of revising the novel and sending it out. I did something that will sound crazy, I am sure: after printing out the entire novel, I erased all my files and then re-entered the novel, revising, rethinking, and reimagining it as I went.
It was during this process that I was finally able to read my own subtext; I was finally able to hear the story I had been telling myself for years. I was coming out in therapy to myself at the same time and I found in the novel that I had been telling myself that very story. The Wild Boy is the story of an alien invasion of Earth that results in humans becoming the pets of the ursinoid invaders. These great quasi-bears had come here seeking to recreate an intense psycho emotional bond they had previously had with a companion species of primates who have become extinct. The ursinoids are convinced that we are the star cousins of their lost companions, and take over the Earth, destroy our civilization, cull billions of us through manufactured plagues, and then began a selective breeding program. They want the lost bond: “heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul.”
But they want the bond for same-sex pairs, human and alien. They seek soul-mates of the same gender. These bears do take opposite-sex mates, but not for love—for reproduction. The true emotional bond is with the same-sex partner.
Red flag, red flag! Ding, ding! Flags not seen, dings not heard.
One of the novel’s plot lines follows one such same-sex pair, Ilox, the human, and Phlarx, the alien. As I reread, revised, and re-entered the novel, the homoeroticism of their relationship was glaringly evident. They share a bed—as many people do with their cat or dog, but I could see the emotional intensity made it more than that. Ilox might be called bisexual by some—he does marry and have children. But his primary emotional relationship, his primary bond, the great love of his life, is originally with Phlarx, and remains so, so much so that it calls him back in the end. Ilox survives the death of his wife. Phlarx’s death kills him.
My own homosexuality, denied and repressed and not wanted, made me an alien in my world. I made my same-sex pair doubly alien to each other and gave them a relationship that was as much about pain as it was about love.
Discovering my own gay subtext was a little less difficult in my second novel, Harvest of Changelings (Golden Gryphon Press, 2007), but it did take more than one draft to hear the story that my subconscious was insistent that I hear and acknowledge. The novel grew out of a traditional heterosexual love story of a human man and a fairy woman that had as its premise the notion that all fairy tales are true. The story ends with Ben, a widower, left alone with Malachi, his half-fairy son to raise. I wanted to know what happened to them.
To answer this question, I wrote Harvest of Changelings, which turned out to be about a lot more than Ben and Malachi. Fairies, it turns out, are either Airs, Waters, Fires or Earths, and form familial units of four, tetrads. They often pair off within the tetrad, thus having primary bonds to (usually) one other person, the secondary bond to the tetrad. Malachi needs to find three others, as they need to find him. The other three are the descendants of all those changelings left here centuries ago. Two of his other three, his Fire and his Water, are boys, Russell and Jeff. The other, his Earth, is a girl, Hazel.
Malachi and Hazel, and … Russell and Jeff. But I had to write the entire first draft and re-enter it to have that Ah ha! Moment: Russell and Jeff are gay. They will grow up to be lovers.
Head smack. But the truth had always been there. Russell and Jeff would have to grow up, just as I was growing up into self-acceptance, but they were gay. They were born that way. I couldn’t edit their sexuality out of them anymore than I could myself. Not and tell the truth.
I started the sequel, The Called, having finally come to terms with my sexuality. Fairy tales are true, of course—and some fairies are fairies. Now, some of my characters are gay and some are straight, but I can hear them telling me this. I have learned how to listen to them.
I have learned how to listen to myself. I grew up. “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11). Metaphor and symbol and allusion, insistent, powerful, but I could only partially hear them. But, through fantasy—and science fiction—I came to be able to hear my own story that I had been telling myself all along. As Virginia Woolf said, “As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”
Now I can hear that ripe pear falling.
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. He is currently at work on anovel about a gay werewolf and a collection of short stories.
http://warrenrochelle.com
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GLBT in Fantasy
by Andrea Hosth
Fantasy novels – Mercedes Lackey, in fact – contained my earliest introduction to GLBT characters. Wider reading brought me to other worlds – such as the work of Melissa Scott, Laurie J Marks, and Lois McMaster Bujold – where I found positive portrayals, and often complete social reengineering to examine and open up different possibilities for sexuality.
At the same time, the vast majority of the fantasy novels I read gave no indication that GLBT people existed. It was an absence which did not appear to be pointed – it was not an attempt to examine the impact of removing all the variations and nuances of human sexuality. At the most (or least) it appeared to be an omission of indifference.
It’s easy to not write about things that aren’t a part of your mental landscape, and I’ve seen pushback against calls for more inclusive representation which run the gamut from “It’s just not what I’m interested in” to “I can’t be expected to include every possible minority and interest group!” Is it “any big deal” to leave green out of your spectrum, when the story you’re telling revolves around red?
The answer, of course, is more complicated than “must”, or derailing talk of quotas. If we look at our world, it’s clear that there is considerably more to the spectrum than heterosexuals (just as there’s a few more skin colours than white), and to create a world in which only heterosexuality is shown to exist, makes for a blander, less true to life creation. Is it worse when it’s an unthinking absence rather than a deliberate choice?
And what of the choices made, once non-heterosexual characters are introduced? Another reason I’ve heard for non-inclusion is fear. Fear of bad portrayals, of backlash, of tokenism, of doing it wrong.
Although I had occasional characters who left the zero point on the Kinsey scale, the work of mine which made me seriously look at my own portrayal of GLBT characters was Champion of the Rose – set in a socially bi-normative world.
In my usual discovery-writer way, I did not set out to write a bi-normative world. I had created a situation where a lost (male) heir returns, threatening to displace the feared/loved (male) heir to the regent. What, I wondered, would be the kingdom’s reaction to this situation?
And the general feel I had from the nebulous, still-forming kingdom was: They should get married!
I’m in two minds about how well I did with my bi-normative world. I enjoyed exploring the social conventions and legal constructs which would form to support a bisexual norm, and I think overall the portrayal is positive, but the novel ends with a man and woman in a relationship, not my two heirs, which would perhaps leave some readers feeling cheated. [Not to mention that, like many of my fantasy novels, it's set in a primarily white kingdom, with no major characters of colour appearing until book two.]
But all the same, I’m proud of that world. Because an unthinking absence is, I believe, worse than a clumsy portrayal.
Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue. See: www.andreakhost.com
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Posted by: Warren Rochelle, in Musings
LGBT Issues in Fantasy:
This month the members of the Great Traveling Guest Blog Fantasy Roundtable pondered LGBT issues and themes in fantasy literature. Our ponderings are below and include a wide range of ideas and reactions, from the very personal to the philosophical.
LGBT Sexuality in Fantasy
by Sylvia Kelso
When it comes to word-associations, heterosexual aka straight sexuality gets all the advantages. Synonyms Roget gives for “straight” include:
direct, even, right, true, unbent, undistorted, unturned.
Antonyms however, include:
curved, indirect, twisted, disorganized disordered, disorderly.
And at the best,
different, unconventional, untraditional.
At the worst, deceitful, devious, lying, shady, and underhanded.
Attempts to redress this naming problem haven’t really worked yet. “Queer” is good but still carries tricky associations. “Gay” is omissive, even if better than the hiss-word equivalents. “Lesbian” is a 19thC recycle of Ancient Greece, where the only surviving woman to woman love poems come from Sapho of Lesbos. “Non-straight” plays into the opponents’ court, while “alternate sexuality” leaves the naming field unequal. “GLBT” is inclusive but clumsy, and “same-sex” works OK with “marriages” but “same-sex sexuality?”
Any cursory backward glance affirms the 20th Century arguments that the whole straight/other sexual polarity is relatively young. A love affair between a Pharaoh and one of his generals turns up around 2400-2200 BC in Egypt. In Ancient Greece, a major cultural source of our “civilization,” bisexuality was the male norm, while in Ancient Rome male to male love hardly raised an eyebrow. There were constraints: the thought of a relationship trading active and passive roles never seems to have occurred. Ancient Greek men were supposed to love boys, or extend such an affair to a long-term relationship, but keep the active-passive roles. Ancient Roman citizens had to be the active members, and get involved only with slaves, male prostitutes, or non-citizens. Women, as usual, are poorly documented. Sappho was only one of Nine Female Poets in the major Greek anthology, and who knows what the others wrote? “Lesbians” are actually titled so by Lucian in 2nd CE Rome, but their depictions read like male-constructed butch caricatures.
All the same, Alexander the Great’s long-term relationship with his friend Hephaistion is famous. Less famously, two Roman emperors (Nero and Heligabalus, but emperors all the same) legally married men, in Heligabalus’ case, “amid great rejoicing.” And, shades of the future, Martial and Juvenal note with disapproval that male couples are having traditional marriage ceremonies.
One would think the genres of elsewhere, would have a head start in combating our current sexual polarity, but SF was notoriously slow to admit any sex, and modern fantasy did no better. The exception comes, again, from fanfic, where Theodore Sturgeon’s mild ‘60s depiction of gayness in “Venus Plus X” is rapidly overshadowed by slashfic in the wake of Star Trek. The form hasn’t looked back since. But as Joanna Russ and numbers of irritated gay readers have pointed out, slashfic relationships are heavily marked by contemporary female constructions of sexuality. Waiting is important. UST is (still) important. A lot of anguish and maybe a male pregnancy are common. And not surprisingly, male-male sexuality has been a lot more attractive than female-female versions.
How MIGHT the 21st C fantasy writer deal with same-sex love, life, relationships? Obviously, if you can invent a world where things are NOT like here, you can also invent new names for the whole caboodle. Nevertheless, same-sex falls under the same minefield rubric as race. Depict same sex if you’re “straight” yourself, and get caned for poaching or inaccuracy? Omit same-sex altogether, and get caned too? Include same-sex relationships as general, unremarked? Or highlighted, or as chief narrative parts? Worlds where the entire constructions of sexuality are alienatingly different? Worlds where same-sex becomes a part of alien sex?
My first attempt to include “alternate sexualities” was a would-be multi-racial and otherwise inclusive SF novel for a Creative Writing MA, but there, same-sex people appeared marginally, or, because the secondary world was an ancient Macedonian colony, were already bisexual by culture, and the trend of the story was toward straight central relationships. In the sequel, I wrote a same-sex female relationship for a carried-over major character that made me (and her) much happier. But I only centralized such relationships in the Amberlight books.
In Amberlight itself the emotional focus is a straight love affair, but it happens in a matriarchy – a literal matriarchy, where sexual inequity falls on men. Women rule the city, for a simple practical reason, which inverts Victorian mores: lower class men go out to work. Middleclass shame is needing to have men work. Aristocratic, or House men, live secluded as marriage counters and male odalisques.
In same-sex matters Amberlight reversed Ancient Greece. Women were bisexual, female-female “partnerships” were general. But again, the pace and focus of the central story sidelined such relationships. I do seriously regret being unable to explore the men’s world, particularly that of the “Tower” men.
Amberlight fell, in a pretty straightforward SF trope , matriarchy flattened by a patriarchal invader’s catalyst, though here fuelled by a straight feminist’s opposition to gender inequity. The sequel, Riversend, sent the main characters up country to start again, with the specific goal of leveling the field: in this case, letting all men share both work and privileges. Again, woman-woman relationships ended as givens. But Tellurith, the House-head and female lead, had decided to flout custom by taking the patriarchal invader as a second husband – House men were multiply married to cement alliance, House women took one husband. Since the ménage a trois became a real love triangle, I had not only a Tower man’s viewpoint, but two male povs on same-sex desire. Tellurith’s second husband, learning his way in a woman’s world, was a familiar story. Sarth, with his longings for his cosmetics and face veil and what he regarded as “decent” male behavior, was a very different matter.
At the time I’d been reading Lesbian theorists, one of whom argued that heterosexual love desired the Other, but same-sex love desired the Self. I found it an intriguing concept, and when I had to depict a same-sex pov from the outside, so to speak, it worked powerfully in Riversend, particularly as the patriarchally raised Alkhes struggled to enunciate his desire for Sarth.
The emotional closure of Riversend was the cementing of the tripartite marriage to include both male-male and heterosexual relations. But only the third book, Source, involved Tellurith in a fullscale, firsthand women’s relationship. And with Tellurith, the Black Gang, aka creative component, took the theory literally. Her new female love (she was partnered back before Amberlight), found at the end of a long and epic journey, was physically Tellurith’s doppelganger.
The relationship grew, interestingly, more from common interests and shared sympathies and less than the men’s ties did from physical desire. Later the plot forced me to divide them, so Tellurith got to do the great “love forsaken” scenes, as she chose duty above love – that ancient, usually masculine dilemma. But the Black Gang did not acquiesce in this too traditional plotline. The book closes with Tellurith home, her new society safe after a fierce war, and at last the mother of a daughter. Yet in this traditional scene entered a suggestion that her female lover might not be wholly lost. If, as usual, female same-sex relationships went short on time and attention, the Black Gang set up this tie to become a major presence in the future. I hope it’s an omen for our world as well.
Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies.
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Musings on GLBT themes in Fantasy
by Theresa Crater
I judged the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards for a couple of years, which gives annual awards for the best GLBT content in science fiction and fantasy. The number of books with GLBT characters has grown both in number and complexity. GLBT characters are just an ordinary part of life in many books, being main characters, side-kicks and even villains.
Last year the award went to Kathe Koja’s Under the Poppy. The title of the book is the name of a brothel, owned by Decca. She is in love with Rupert, who helps her run the place, but then her brother Istvan shows up. He’s a puppeteer—of puppets and humans—and a bit of a thief. Rupert and he have been lovers in the past and succumb to their life-long love affair again, with a few liaisons here and there. There was some question about whether this book could truly be called a fantasy, but the judges decided the puppets seem to have a life of their own. Besides, it was a delightful riot of gorgeous language and interesting characters carving out a life for themselves in the margins of prewar Europe.
One of my favorite series was Laurie J. Marks’ elemental series, starting with Fire Logic, then Earth Logic. You get the idea. What I liked best about this series is that it normalized all kinds of sexualities. Karis G’deon rules Shaftal in this series, or she’s supposed to. She doesn’t really want to. Her lover is a woman; her friends have various sexual preferences, which begin to become just a small part of the overall picture of who these people are. Much like Bilbo tells stories or Hermione is very smart. We can see what a world that is sane about the variety of human sexual expression might feel like.
Will we return to a pre-1869 world? It was in that year that homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented. Not the practices, but as identities. Before that, people did have sex, of course, but their identity did not rest in what kind of sex they had. Much like Marks’s work. And even Koja’s.
Theresa Crater has published two contemporary fantasies, Beneath the Hallowed Hill & Under the Stone Paw and several short stories, most recently “White Moon” in Riding the Moon and “Bringing the Waters” in The Aether Age: Helios. She’s also published poetry and a baker’s dozen of literary criticism. Currently, she teaches writing and British lit in Denver. Born in North Carolina, she now lives in Colorado with her Egyptologist partner and their two cats. Visit her website at http://theresacrater.com
Transgender, gay and lesbian characters in fantasy
by Carole McDonnell
In the course of reading, one always encounters folks one would generally not encounter, or folks one would not normally want to meet. Witness the enraged moviegoer racists who had to deal with the fact that Rue in the Hunger Games was Black. So what does a Biblical Christian do when she encounters a fantasy book that contains a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender character?
Many of my stories involve interracial romances and I’ve had experiences where someone reads one of my stories and is unwilling to be pulled into the romance simply because they are disgusted, bothered, or nauseated by seeing two people together who –in their worldview– should not be together. So, I try to understand. On the flip side, because I know how incredibly complex sexuality can be, I get wary of easy answers or easy stories about homosexuality. Too many of my lesbian friends were raped as children, too many of my male gay friends were seduced by older men, and too many of my gay male friends were adopted or were delivered by induced estrogen-laden deliveries for me to say that people were biologically made gay.
I suppose I can read a book about a homosexual character if I don’t feel I’m being subject to propaganda. In my experience, I’ve known people who were born gay or who have had their sexuality affected by sexual molestation, separation/adoption issues, the hormonal chemicals introduced into the womb at induced deliveries, or became gay after some trauma or hospital stay. So I take gay folks in stories and in real life as I find them.
I have never had a gay character show up and want to have me tell his story but I have had tons of conflicted heterosexuals, and I do have some gay characters in some of my stories who aren’t really gay but more characters who are conflicted heterosexuals. I think what bothers me is the vast amount of false history and false biology I would have to accept. In the same way people who study the Druids and the Celts or Native American religions get peeved when they are faced with false “pop factoids” about certain things, I start rolling my eyes when I feel an author is attempting to propagandize.
The definition of “gay” as an exclusive love of people of one’s own sex is relatively new. Back in the day, most homosexuality allowed for loving people of both sexes. It was often supplemental to a heterosexual relationship. Alexander the Great loved his companion but he also loved his wife Roxanne. Oscar Wilde loved Lord Alfred Douglas but he also loved his wife. While there were some rare exceptions, in ancient times, in most cultures (Japan, Greece, Afghanistan, etc), homosexuality was generally frowned upon while pedophilia/pederasty was accepted. One of the most famous Greek tragedies, the curse on the Oedipus clan, –the curse of falling in love with the wrong people (incest, bulls, frigidity, etc) –fell upon the family because Laius would not give up his young lover when the pederasty contract was finished and the boy was fully grown. The gods deemed it so heinous that Laius’ descendants were cursed forever. Most people who speak of homosexuality being accepted by the past don’t talk honestly about the pederasty factor. So for me it depends on how honest I think the author is. . .
I recently read Kari Sperring’s Living With Ghosts, a great book that definitely could trouble the Christian reader. Not only did I have to deal with gigolos, homosexual attraction, and extra-marital sex, I had to deal with someone who dealt Tarot cards.
So what did I do?
Well, I actually read it. My very traditional heart had a few hurdles. For one, although I’m okay with prostitution in stories, I get a bit niggly about adultery. I kept hoping there would be no adulterous encounter I would have to be “on board” for. Generally, I don’t watch movies or read books with adultery in it. (This isn’t a religious issue with me. My father was a serial adulterer so I have a painful spot there.) So if I read a book with adultery, my biggest fear is that I will be asked to be “okay” with it.
True, I was in the POV of a high class courtesan who happened to be bisexual, but Gracielas was such a noble wounded character and the story was so intriguing and the world-building so solid and interesting that I totally got into the story. That said, once again, I didn’t allow myself to feel the homosexual attractions that happened in various characters. First because one of the homosexual pairs was married and I have a problem with being asked to be on the side of adulterers. Plus I’ve seen so many movies and heard so many accounts where some guy discovers he’s gay after being married for twenty years and suddenly divorces his poor wife. So yeah, I kept telling myself “I like these two characters but if I’m asked to go along with adultery I’m not gonna be patient.”
So yeah, with me, the issue with me is wariness of being pulled into understanding anything I don’t morally agree with. Living With Ghosts had a lot my priggish Biblical mind couldn’t deal with but the skill of the author and the beautiful craft of the writing helped me overcome my reluctance. I suppose the best way to make me read a book I don’t want to is to make the book utterly brilliant.
Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower.
http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/
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Gay Characters in Fantasy: A Personal Journey,
by Deborah Ross
In my experience, the community of science fiction and fantasy readers and writers has been one of the most tolerant of, and welcoming to, those who don’t fit into the mainstream. This includes queer (non-strictly-heterosexual) and gender-queer (non-strictly-male-or-female-assigned-gender) folks as well. My own introduction included stimulating discussions of sexuality, gender identification, and sexual orientation. I remember reading Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X (1960, one of the earliest science fiction stories to challenge gender-role stereotypes), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The World Wreckers (1971). Four years later, Marion published The Heritage of Hastur, in which she created a sympathetic and heroic gay protagonist. The World Wreckers impressed me because one of the characters falls in love with a member of a hermaphroditic race and must confront his own feelings about homosexuality and his identity as a man. I had never read anything like it, and it opened my eyes to the question of who we are, apart from our plumbing and hormones. This led the way to the understanding that sexual orientation is not just about which body part fits where, but about the people who are the focus of our hearts: romance as well as hormones.
In general, the works I read during the 60s and 70s were serious and courageous treatments of gender, gender roles, and sexual orientation, well ahead of popular media. But popular media caught up, although perhaps not in the formats its creators intended. I suppose fanfic (fan-written fiction based on established characters, not limited to television and films but primarily so) has always been around, but slash fiction is usually thought to have originated with the original series Star Trek. What’s slash fiction? Beginning in the late 70s, mostly female fans created stories featuring romantic and sexual relationships between various male media characters.
Somewhat to my bemusement, my teenage daughters loved it. I say bemusement because of my dissonance between the in-depth examination-of-issues, coincident with the women’s consciousness-raising movement of the 1970s, with the irreverent, often whimsical character of slashfic. What was this all about? And why were my daughters — who at the time were dating both boys and girls to see which they preferred — so interested in male characters hopping into bed with one another?
Fast forward a bit, with the death of Marion and my continuing her “Darkover” series (the setting for both of her above-referenced novels) plus my own writing career, with numerous portrayals of gay and bisexual characters. In 2004, I attended Gaylaxicon in San Diego, still scratching my head over slashfic and smiling nicely at all the campy humor. During a question and answer period, I put the issue to the audience. No one had a definitive answer, but there was a fascinating discussion about the differences between what appealed to women in slash characters and what appealed to gay men. (I suspect there’s a corollary in what lesbians find attractive in female slash characters versus what turns straight men on.) I came away mulling over the idea that within the slashfic context, readers of both sexes found a nonthreatening place in which to explore their own feelings about relationships, in particular sexuality. This lead to the disturbing question of whether this process objectified gay people, in essence projecting a distorted image of them for a purpose they have nothing to do with — e.g., helping adolescent girls understand male sexuality.
And this led to an even more disturbing question, not meant as a criticism specifically of fanfic but of fiction and media portrayals as a whole: do we see what we want to see, or do we see what’s really there? Can a gay youth, who is struggling to figure out who he is and how he is different and if he’s okay, understand himself through the lens of an essentially heterosexual portrayal of sexuality? Can any of us find ourselves when we’re being defined by someone else’s needs (or stereotypes, positive or negative)?
Do we as writers have a responsibility to create gay characters that make sense in the experience of gay people? Do we have a responsibility to include them at all? Should the sexual orientation of a character even be an issue — aren’t people just people?
I wish it were that simple, that we might live in a world in which gender, race, faith, or sexual orientation do not make some people invisible. Or worse, targets of hatred. I see value in both portraying worlds and cultures of diversity, and in stories about the struggles gays face now, in our imperfect world in their own terms.
Author Kyell Gold writes, “I’d been more and more openly gay for about a decade when I moved in with my then-boyfriend (now husband), but I still kept it private from my co-workers and other casual friends until I got a better sense of how it would be received. What was fueling my writing then was the urge to show gay characters falling in love, the way I was falling in love. [ital mine] … I have gotten many, many e-mails from teenaged boys (mostly) telling me how the book changed their lives, made them realize that it was okay for them to be gay. I have heard from people who said they didn’t realize that gay relationships were about anything other than sex until they read my book. Everyone has these intimate experiences and secrets that they keep close to them. One of the most terrifying things we face as a human is being alone. … And when you read about someone, even a fictional character, going through the same things you did, that can be a revealing, momentous experience.”
One of the most humbling and inspiring projects I have worked on was completing the novel Marion began in the final year of her life, featuring the central character from The Heritage of Hastur. After Hastur Lord came out, I received the following email, used with permission: “As a gay man who has had to live in the closet from much of my early adult life, I wasn’t sure how the [characters] would find their ways to peace, harmony, beauty, and honor. … I always loved the way Marion gave primacy of love and honesty, no matter the culture or the perceived taboo. Those of us … who have lived under the harsh lash of religious zeal, ideological repression, and the resulting personal constraint, cherish your ability to portray living honestly, openly, self confidently, at peace with ourselves. We know the cost, the loss, and the gain. And you have not shied away from the struggles to achieve that peace. It is hard won. But you have shown that the determination of caring people … can make committed lives blend together beautifully, forging a family, while at the same time allowing each to express their own individual truest selves. Thank you for carrying on Marion’s vision and for touching me deeply.”
Hastur Lord was nominated for the 2011 Gaylactic Spectrum Award.
Deborah Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with JAYDIUM and NORTHLIGHT, and short stories in ASIMOV’S, F & SF, REALMS OF FANTASY and STAR WARS: TALES FROM JABBA’S PALACE. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy THE SEVEN-PETALED SHIELD. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She has lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/
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Coming Out in Fantasy
by Warren Rochelle
I came out relatively late in life, in my 40’s, after much therapy and personal struggle. My therapeutic process included a lot of reflective and introspective writing, mostly in journals, and a fair amount of reading by gay authors about their coming out experiences. And I found myself looking back at my own fiction, beginning with my first novel, The Wild Boy (Golden Gryphon Press, 2001), which was originally written as my MFA thesis while in graduate school at UNC Greensboro.
Coincidentally (or maybe not) my coming out process began shortly after my MFA program, while I was a doctoral student at UNCG. When I began a post-doc teaching fellowship at UNCG I went back and revisited my thesis with the intention of revising the novel and sending it out. I did something that will sound crazy, I am sure: after printing out the entire novel, I erased all my files and then re-entered the novel, revising, rethinking, and reimagining it as I went.
It was during this process that I was finally able to read my own subtext; I was finally able to hear the story I had been telling myself for years. I was coming out in therapy to myself at the same time and I found in the novel that I had been telling myself that very story. The Wild Boy is the story of an alien invasion of Earth that results in humans becoming the pets of the ursinoid invaders. These great quasi-bears had come here seeking to recreate an intense psycho emotional bond they had previously had with a companion species of primates who have become extinct. The ursinoids are convinced that we are the star cousins of their lost companions, and take over the Earth, destroy our civilization, cull billions of us through manufactured plagues, and then began a selective breeding program. They want the lost bond: “heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul.”
But they want the bond for same-sex pairs, human and alien. They seek soul-mates of the same gender. These bears do take opposite-sex mates, but not for love—for reproduction. The true emotional bond is with the same-sex partner.
Red flag, red flag! Ding, ding! Flags not seen, dings not heard.
One of the novel’s plot lines follows one such same-sex pair, Ilox, the human, and Phlarx, the alien. As I reread, revised, and re-entered the novel, the homoeroticism of their relationship was glaringly evident. They share a bed—as many people do with their cat or dog, but I could see the emotional intensity made it more than that. Ilox might be called bisexual by some—he does marry and have children. But his primary emotional relationship, his primary bond, the great love of his life, is originally with Phlarx, and remains so, so much so that it calls him back in the end. Ilox survives the death of his wife. Phlarx’s death kills him.
My own homosexuality, denied and repressed and not wanted, made me an alien in my world. I made my same-sex pair doubly alien to each other and gave them a relationship that was as much about pain as it was about love.
Discovering my own gay subtext was a little less difficult in my second novel, Harvest of Changelings (Golden Gryphon Press, 2007), but it did take more than one draft to hear the story that my subconscious was insistent that I hear and acknowledge. The novel grew out of a traditional heterosexual love story of a human man and a fairy woman that had as its premise the notion that all fairy tales are true. The story ends with Ben, a widower, left alone with Malachi, his half-fairy son to raise. I wanted to know what happened to them.
To answer this question, I wrote Harvest of Changelings, which turned out to be about a lot more than Ben and Malachi. Fairies, it turns out, are either Airs, Waters, Fires or Earths, and form familial units of four, tetrads. They often pair off within the tetrad, thus having primary bonds to (usually) one other person, the secondary bond to the tetrad. Malachi needs to find three others, as they need to find him. The other three are the descendants of all those changelings left here centuries ago. Two of his other three, his Fire and his Water, are boys, Russell and Jeff. The other, his Earth, is a girl, Hazel.
Malachi and Hazel, and … Russell and Jeff. But I had to write the entire first draft and re-enter it to have that Ah ha! Moment: Russell and Jeff are gay. They will grow up to be lovers.
Head smack. But the truth had always been there. Russell and Jeff would have to grow up, just as I was growing up into self-acceptance, but they were gay. They were born that way. I couldn’t edit their sexuality out of them anymore than I could myself. Not and tell the truth.
I started the sequel, The Called, having finally come to terms with my sexuality. Fairy tales are true, of course—and some fairies are fairies. Now, some of my characters are gay and some are straight, but I can hear them telling me this. I have learned how to listen to them.
I have learned how to listen to myself. I grew up. “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11). Metaphor and symbol and allusion, insistent, powerful, but I could only partially hear them. But, through fantasy—and science fiction—I came to be able to hear my own story that I had been telling myself all along. As Virginia Woolf said, “As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”
Now I can hear that ripe pear falling.
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. He is currently at work on anovel about a gay werewolf and a collection of short stories.
http://warrenrochelle.com
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GLBT in Fantasy
by Andrea Hosth
Fantasy novels – Mercedes Lackey, in fact – contained my earliest introduction to GLBT characters. Wider reading brought me to other worlds – such as the work of Melissa Scott, Laurie J Marks, and Lois McMaster Bujold – where I found positive portrayals, and often complete social reengineering to examine and open up different possibilities for sexuality.
At the same time, the vast majority of the fantasy novels I read gave no indication that GLBT people existed. It was an absence which did not appear to be pointed – it was not an attempt to examine the impact of removing all the variations and nuances of human sexuality. At the most (or least) it appeared to be an omission of indifference.
It’s easy to not write about things that aren’t a part of your mental landscape, and I’ve seen pushback against calls for more inclusive representation which run the gamut from “It’s just not what I’m interested in” to “I can’t be expected to include every possible minority and interest group!” Is it “any big deal” to leave green out of your spectrum, when the story you’re telling revolves around red?
The answer, of course, is more complicated than “must”, or derailing talk of quotas. If we look at our world, it’s clear that there is considerably more to the spectrum than heterosexuals (just as there’s a few more skin colours than white), and to create a world in which only heterosexuality is shown to exist, makes for a blander, less true to life creation. Is it worse when it’s an unthinking absence rather than a deliberate choice?
And what of the choices made, once non-heterosexual characters are introduced? Another reason I’ve heard for non-inclusion is fear. Fear of bad portrayals, of backlash, of tokenism, of doing it wrong.
Although I had occasional characters who left the zero point on the Kinsey scale, the work of mine which made me seriously look at my own portrayal of GLBT characters was Champion of the Rose – set in a socially bi-normative world.
In my usual discovery-writer way, I did not set out to write a bi-normative world. I had created a situation where a lost (male) heir returns, threatening to displace the feared/loved (male) heir to the regent. What, I wondered, would be the kingdom’s reaction to this situation?
And the general feel I had from the nebulous, still-forming kingdom was: They should get married!
I’m in two minds about how well I did with my bi-normative world. I enjoyed exploring the social conventions and legal constructs which would form to support a bisexual norm, and I think overall the portrayal is positive, but the novel ends with a man and woman in a relationship, not my two heirs, which would perhaps leave some readers feeling cheated. [Not to mention that, like many of my fantasy novels, it's set in a primarily white kingdom, with no major characters of colour appearing until book two.]
But all the same, I’m proud of that world. Because an unthinking absence is, I believe, worse than a clumsy portrayal.
Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue. See: www.andreakhost.com
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July 18, 2012
A Review of The Time Seam, by Sylvia Kelso
The Time Seam by Sylvia KelsoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Previously in this universe, in The Solitaire Ghost: Blackston Gold, Book One:
Dorian Wild had a pretty good life: a nice place to live in Ibisville, North Queensland, a junior partnership in a law firm, good friends, and things with Chris Keogh, her geologist boyfriend, were going well. Then, one day, going up the elevator at work, a ghost--or so it seems--appears. That changes things, to say the least--for Dorian, for Chris, and her friends and fellow law partners, Laura and Anne.
The ghost, with a glorious red beard, and in the garb of a 19th-century prospector, appears again--and again. Something fishy is going on at the Ben Morar gold mine, near the old goldfield town of Blackston, where Chris has found a rich new goldfield with new cutting-edge mining technology he has developed. Not to mention the firm is under threat of takeover by the American mining megacorporation, Pan-Auric.
Then, Chris is killed in a car wreck that can only be called suspicious--after he has resigned in protest of the plans for the new goldfield by Pan-Auric--plans which will cause irreparable damage. Chris's last message to Dorian: find a good environmental lawyer.
Threats, and more threats. And Dorian keeps falling through a "fold in time," the one that seems to keep bringing the so-called ghost into the present. Eventually, the ghost appears in the daytime and, it seems he is here for good. But a ghost, he isn't: this ghost is Jimmy Keenighan, from Northern Ireland and an activist for land rights and unions and a reporter for The North Queensland Miner--and he is very much alive ....
The adventure continues in The Time Seam, the conclusion to the Blackston Gold saga, and Kelso again delivers in a tale no less compelling than Book One. Dorian has to confront corporate evil at its worst, the huge American mining corporation, Pan-Auric, the epitome of American capitalist greed gone very bad, complete with evil goons who do very bad things. Pan-Auric will stop at nothing for control of Chris's technology and this new mine. These goons are told to do what they have to stop Dorian, and her legal threats, including kidnapping and holding children hostage and, evidently, murder. This new mine Chris's technology has discovered happens to right under the town of Blackston, which means Pan-Auric will have to destroy the town to get to the gold. To Pan-Auric, this is clearly a small matter, and incidental to the potential profits. Dorian's friends are the ones kidnapped and Dorian finds herself and Jimmy involved in a tense confrontation with the goon kidnappers which kept me on the edge of my seat.
This is a classic David-and-Goliath struggle and its outcome is by no means assured.
Dorian also finds herself, as things get darker and even more dangerous, falling in love with Jimmy, the man from the 19th century. Can he stay? How do you finagle the paperwork for a man who was born too many years ago? He has "no British passport. He has no Australian passport. He has no known address in the British Isles . .. no known address in Australia. No bank accounts, credit cards, driver's license . . . He has no visa or record of entry into Australia" (271).
Staying in the present won't be easy. Should he even try? Will he? Would his staying change the past he is from? Has his being in the 21st century already changed the past--and the present? Or is there a paradox that will make your head hurt to figure out? Is she even ready for this romance--it hasn't been that long since Chris's death.
The Time Seam is no less a page turner than The Solitaire Ghost, and no less dramatic and compelling. There are shootouts at the mine, legal drama, the evolving relationship between a 21st-century woman and a 19th-century man--there is a lot of territory of sexual mores and customs to be negotiated before Dorian and Jimmy find each other on common ground. Never mind the legal issues!
I read this book, as I did the last one, at a fast clip. I wanted to find out what was going to happen, if the David/little good guys were going to beat the evil Goliath/megacorporation or not and just how were they going to do it, and Dorian and Jimmy--will they have a happy ending?
No, I am not going to tell you how all it turns out--read the book. But I will say this: the ending is satisfying; it works. Kelso's talent as a writer and a storyteller and a wordsmith shines in this well-told sequel as much as it did in The Solitaire Ghost.
Highly recommended.
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July 17, 2012
The Solitaire Ghost, by Sylvia Kelso
The Solitaire Ghost by Sylvia KelsoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Dorian is the junior partner of an Ibisville, North Queensland law firm and she has a good life: a good apartment, close friends, and a strong relationship with a great guy. Then, one day she, while “[juggling] a trio of lunch bags” in the elevator in her building, on the way to her law firm’s office on the eighth floor, Dorian sees a ghost. A tall man, he walks out of the elevator floor. He has a beard like a Victorian patriarch, “dark, the rich bronzed dark of a red-cedar wood. A young man’s beard, live and thick as a bush” (9), and he balances a miner’s panning dish on her head.
Things change pretty quickly after that. Dorian finds herself facing danger, tragedy, one mystery after another, break-ins, spectral and not so spectral, an evil American megacorporation up to no good at all, and somehow, some way or another, she has to adjust her idea of how things are to accommodate her ghost—who, it seems, really isn’t, but rather a 19th-century Irish activist, Jimmy Keenighan, who has wound up in Dorian’s time and place. Or rather the time streams of the past and present are somehow intersecting.
This multilayered, multifaceted novel, and its sequel, The Time Seam: Blackston Gold, Book Two, are among Kelso’s best. Yes, as the book jacket says, “Solitaire Ghost is a fast-moving combination of suspense and time-romance, played out in an Australian setting.” True enough, but that falls short of all that Kelso has got going on here—(and let me say for the record I am a Kelso fan). The novel is a love story—and yes, one eventual couple has the added complication of being from different centuries—and it is a ghost story. To suspense, I would add mystery and legal thriller: the novel is fast-moving and a page turner. Once I started, I kept going. Solitaire Ghost is also about language and voices, and history and storytelling, as well as about geology and gold mines—the Solitaire is an old gold mine—and Australia. Add to that heady mix, The Solitaire Ghost is about good and evil and corporate power and greed. The result is a rich and compelling novel. The bad guys are really bad, yet still human—as are the flawed, engaging and likeable heroes.
All these seemingly disparate elements are skillfully and gracefully woven together and work together into a well-crafted, and detailed world—both and present. Kelso’s talent as a writer and a storyteller and a wordsmith shines in this well-told tale.
Highly recommended.
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July 6, 2012
A Review of Silver Moon, by Catherine Lundoff
Silver Moon by Catherine LundoffMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Becca Thornton is turning fifty and the face that stares back at her from her mirror looks “perfectly ordinary. It was a face like that of any other woman of a certain age in a one-horse town like Wolf’s Point” (1). The hot flashes have started; she is beginning menopause and she’s divorced. Her husband has traded her in for a “twenty-something blonde bimbo and a sports car.” And she works in a hardware store. Perfectly ordinary. Or is she? Along with the first hot flash, “suddenly and unexpectedly, superheating Becca Thornton’s body from head to toe,” there was “something new in her reflection, a flickering of golden eyes and fur, visible for the blink of an eye. Something feral and wild . . .” (1).
Something feral and wild indeed.
Becca Thornton is becoming a werewolf—something of a surprise, to say the least. The old, old magic that persists in this town has found her, as it has other women of “a certain age” in Wolf’s Point. To say her life will be completely changed probably qualifies as one of the understatements of the year.
So begins the debut novel of award-winning author, Catherine Lundoff. This tale is one of the supernatural, and the magical, and the human—how does a fifty-year-old woman negotiate such a transformation, literally, when she becomes a wolf amongst the other women of the Club, and metaphorically, as she crosses a certain boundary that all women must cross, into maturity, into a somewhat different imagining of self. But this well-told, and often funny, tale is about more than werewolves. It is a coming out story and a love story, as Becca finds herself attracted to her neighbor, Erin, she of the “slow, lazy smile.”
Ultimately, Silver Moon is a story about identity. Becca has been asking herself who is she? Not Ed’s wife, anymore? No longer young? Attracted to women—not to men, the way things are supposed to be? Add to all that being a werewolf and all that means, including a newly powerful sense of smell, which clues her in on such things as people just smelling wrong.
It’s a lot to handle for a gal.
Oh, yes, Becca has to learn about being a hero, too. It turns out things in Wolf’s Point aren’t so placid and small-town-y as one might think. Oya, formerly known as Sarah and former Club menber, is the leader of the Slayer’s Nest, a paramilitary group that want to do away with werewolves by curing them of this disease that is “disgusting and wrong.” Oya, it seems, is motivated by revenge, blaming the Club for the death of her parents, and she is motivated by a mistaken desire to rid the world of evil. When Oya and her Nesters come into direct conflict with the Club, things get interesting—and dangerous—for Becca, Erin, and the other women. Things become a matter of survival—and life and death.
In Lundoff’s skilled hands both the familiar coming out story and the story of falling in love, becomes a sometimes dark, sometimes light, fantasy of good vs. evil, of werewolves who know themselves fighting those who can’t accept themselves. That the werewolves are middle-aged menopausal women, and not the proverbial beautiful young heroines, is one of the novel’s strengths. The beauty and grace of maturity is recognized for what it is. As a young woman deputy tells Becca, “To be one of the guardian grandmothers, to protect the land and the people. It’s a great honor, you know. Not many are called” (33).
The element of mystery also adds to the novel’s strength as well. Oya, the leader of the Nesters, says she is motivated by revenge, but is that it? How did she convince this strange Dr. Anderson to come up with a cure? Where is the money to build a secret lab in the woods coming from? Does Oya’s fear and hatred of werewolves have something else behind it? The language she uses, disgusting, wrong, a disease, is clearly parallel to the language used in anti-gay rhetoric. Some might argue that Lundoff is inserting a little social commentary here. Maybe so. Silver Moon is a novel about self-acceptance, with Becca the focus of this interior conflict. It is also about acceptance of others—and here is a place, Wolf’s Point, where maturity as well as youth is celebrated, men and women are both strong, and who you love is your business. But this is not utopia. Not everybody agrees. Things do get messy and dangerous. The course of true love doesn’t run smooth.
After all, Silver Moon is a novel about human beings, with all their ambiguities and frailties and weaknesses and strengths, loves and hates, some of whom happen to be werewolves.
Clearly there is more story to be told.
But, fear not, a sequel, Blood Moon, is in the works.
Recommended.
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May 8, 2012
A Review of The Quarry, by Mark Allan Gunnells
The Quarry by Mark Allan GunnellsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I now consider myself a Mark Allan Gunnells fan, even if I am not quite a horror fan. The Quarry is a "tale of ancient evil" set on the campus of a small private school, Limestone College, in Gaffney, SC, where there IS an old limestone quarry, now filled with water. These are places Gunnells knows well. He grew up in Gaffney and went to Limestone College, and he uses this intimate knowledge to make this a richer, a more textured tale.
The Quarry, as locals call Lake Limestone, is a character itself, with secrets hidden in its watery depths. They say when the mine closed in 1951 an underground spring filled the Quarry in days, forming Lake Limestone. But some locals know otherwise and they aren't telling. When some thirty years a chunk of land falls into the lake, these men remember the secret hidden below, and are glad that "swimming, fishing, and even boating are prohibited on the lake."
Flashforward to 2010. And we know that what lurks down below is still there. But Emilio Gambell, a Limestone student doesn't, nor does his best friend, Dale Sierra--Dale who decides to break a few rules and go scuba diving into the Quarry at 1 a.m. in the morning. Dale is one of those who likes to not only push the envelope, but break through it on occasion. When two hours pass, the amount of air in Dale's tanks, Emilio panics and starts pulling his friend back up. When Dale finally surfaces, something is wrong: "somehow he's lost his tanks and mouthpiece and even his LED light. He had only one flipper, and there was a tear in the left arm of his wetsuit" (24). Dale is weeping and muttering, "It kissed me." He shrugs off Emilio's help, refuses to talk about whatever trouble he had run into down below and goes home to sleep. Emilio watches as "the darkness slowly swallowed Dale, and Emilo was left alone by the lake" (25).
And so this dark tale begins and darkness continues to swallow the innocent and the damned. Emilio knows things aren't right with Dale, and enlists the aid of Dale's girl friend, Connie, for help. Dale's violent repulsion of their help confirms this, but he was tired, he was injured--he'll get better, right? Emilio becomes desperate to help his friend and at the same time, continue to live his student life of classes and work, and deal with his alcoholic mother and come to terms with his homosexuality. Connie wants to believe Dale is better, that he is still her lover. Dale knows better: something is happening to him, he is missing hours of time, and the Quarry keeps drawing him back. Then a student disappears. And another. Things get more complicated for Emilio when he meets and falls in love with a campus security guard as Dale's behavior gets worse--breaking things off with his girlfriend, telling, then begging Emilio to stay away.
Darkness has come out of the depths for this small little college in a small South Carolina town. Gunnells skillfully and gracefully weaves together these different narrative threads of friendship, love, coming out, growing up, and a malign and old evil into a compelling and layered story. Emilio's drunk mother blames him for her ruined life and humiliates him time and again. Norman, the guard who becomes Emilio's boyfriend, is trying to work at a job that is getting increasingly dangerous and go to school. Dale, whom Emilio describes as a "sweet guy who went out of his way to make everybody feel included," becomes suspect number one for murder and kidnapping. These layers--the back story, the tangential narratives--make this a rich novel and the horror all the more terrifying. The mundane, the normal craziness of life, coupled with an evil that is almost beyond comprehension, that has waited centuries to be set free. Events, mundane, ordinary, sweet, and dark and light, culminate in a terrifying climax. Does evil win--or lose--and what price must be paid, what sacrifices will have to be made?
This is a compelling novel by an up-and-coming novelist. I hear there is a sequel coming. I can't wait to read it.
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