Curtis Edmonds's Blog, page 4

Seven Things I Think About NaNoWriMo

I tried doing National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) once. It was in November 2001. I was working on a cheap PC in a tiny apartment in Austin, just off Airport Boulevard. I was using the desk my parents bought me when I was twelve. I didn’t finish that novel for another three years. It never got published. Neither did the next one. The next one got self-published. None of them were NaNoWriMo projects, for the simple reason that it takes me longer than that to write a novel. RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY (which was published in March 2013) was written in two sections, the first half in the summer of 2010 and the second half (after a New Year’s resolution) from January to March 2011. That doesn’t include two years of querying, interspersed with substantial and painful bouts of editing.

I have a very narrow amount of time (from about 10:30 to 11:30 at night, on nights when I’m home) to write anything. That means that my output (which includes blog posts like this one and short stories and making fun of people on Twitter) is, necessarily, narrow. I started my current work-in-progress in (I think) June of this year, and I’ve written only twenty-five thousand words from then to now–more if you count short stories. (This includes two separate vacations where I didn’t write anything except my name on credit card slips.)

Could I ramp up my production, just for November? I mean, sure, I suppose so. I could crank out fifty thousand words, in thirty days, at least in theory. In theory, I could learn to do that thing where you drive your motorcycle off a high ramp and leave your seat while still holding on to the handlebars. In theory, I could think of a better joke than the one where you list all of the silly and impossible things you could do in theory.

Seven things I think about NaNoWriMo:

If NaNoWriMo works for you, let it work for you. If it doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t work and you shouldn’t worry about it. If you want to try it one time and see if it works for you, it doesn’t hurt.NaNoWriMo won’t make you a better writer. Only failure and rejection can do that.NaNoWriMo may make you a more disciplined writer, at least in terms of forcing yourself to sit in your chair and write. But it’s not magic. Like most things involving self-discipline, “it works if you work it.”NaNoWriMo won’t get you published, especially if you’ve never written a novel before. If you don’t understand that, down deep inside, don’t do it.I went to Baylor, and one of the sports team slogans they’ve had at Baylor in the past few years is “pressure makes diamonds.” That’s true as far as it goes. Pressure and heat and time make diamonds. Too much pressure, applied the wrong way, makes coal dust. You don’t want coal dust. If you are like me (God help you) you already put a huge amount of pressure on yourself to succeed with your writing. If all NaNoWriMo is going to do is make you put more pressure on yourself for no good reason, then don’t attempt it.NaNoWriMo is a commitment. There’s nothing wrong with making a commitment, and if you’re able not only to make it but to carry it through, that’s a real positive. But your real commitment is not just to write, not just to finish, but to see the project all the way through until you have your own book in your hands, however that happens. NaNoWriMo is an independent step, not an end in and of itself.

Thor Slaymaster’s Breaking Point

Thor Slaymaster sat quietly in the dark room. He had been there for three days, more or less. In that time, he had determined that the floor and walls were constructed of hard, durable, seamless plastic, probably overlaid on solid concrete or stone. Temperature and humidity were controlled, which suggested some kind of ventilation port, somewhere above his reach. He had not been provided with any sort of food or water or anything that even pretended at being a toilet, and had therefore determined that the room did not have a drain built into the floor.

The good news was that there weren’t any zombies in the room. Thor Slaymaster could handle being in a dark, stinking, escape-proof cell as long as there weren’t any zombies in there making life difficult for him. So he slept when he could, and sat quietly when he couldn’t sleep, conserving as much energy as possible against the time when his situation changed enough that escape and bloody vengeance were possible.

Twenty feet above Thor Slaymaster, an eight-foot tall alien in a brown robe impassively watched a monitor showing Thor Slaymaster impassively sitting in his cell. “This one is not reacting as the others have,” he said.

A human in a filthy lab coat nodded. “He is taking longer to reach his breaking point. But he will. All men reach their breaking point, sooner or later.”

“As you have said, Dr. Slaughter. What else can you do?” the alien asked. His squirming mouth-tentacles were the only outward sign of impatience.

“I can introduce pain,” the doctor said. “This specimen is very large and very tough, and probably not very smart.”

“He could be smarter than he looks,” the alien said.

“I don’t think so. He’s probably survived much worse privation than this in the wilderness where we picked him up. It will be difficult to break him using our standard tactics.”

The alien’s mouth-tentacles spasmed and went slack. “We have discussed this, Dr. Slaughter. Our race does not believe in violence. We intend to subjugate Earth through persuasion and logic, not force. There is no need to cause this man any more pain.”

“But we must break him,” Dr. Slaughter said.

“Yes,” the alien said. “Do you remember how we broke you?”

Dr. Slaughter went pale. He repressed a violent shudder, then went to the control panel next to the monitor. He paused for a long moment, considering a large red button that read “NICKELBACK,” but thought better of it. He opened a plastic cover and pushed a smaller, black button, to be used only in emergencies. It read “LANA DEL REY.”

Thor Slaymaster heard the opening strains of “Young and Beautiful” and smiled. Up until this moment, he had only known one thing about his captors. Now he knew several things. He knew that they used some sort of power source to power the hidden speakers above his cell. He knew that they were at least conversant with some elements of human culture, even if they might not be human themselves. He knew that they were wholly irredeemable and therefore not entitled to anything even approaching mercy.

And he knew they would come for him, eventually, and try to subject him to something worse. He would be ready.

About sixteen hours into the musical torture, a bright light came down from the darkened ceiling. Thor Slaymaster was caught in its beam. He was unsurprised to find that he was immobilized, and that he was drifting upwards.

“It’s a stasis field,” Dr. Slaughter explained. “The sensation will pass in a few minutes. You’ll be taken to our recovery room for analysis.”

The recovery room proved to be brightly lit and quiet, without a hint of twenty-first century torch music. The bed was nice and comfortable. The restraints were well-padded. A small medical robot crawled up Thor Slaymaster’s arm and injected an IV saline solution. A larger robot held out a bedpan.

The alien in the brown robe glided over to the foot of the bed. “Welcome,” it said. “Are you ready to accept my unquestioned authority?”

Thor Slaymaster stayed silent.

“He must have survived his ordeal only through his brute strength,” the alien said. “He does not appear to have much in the way of reasoning function.”

“It may be a lingering aftereffect of the stasis field,” Dr. Slaughter explained. “More likely, he’s just too stupid to understand.”

“Maybe a different question, one that’s easier for him to answer?”

“You can try. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Well, then. Do you have any questions of us?” the alien asked Thor Slaymaster. “Who we are? Why we’re doing this to you? What do we hope to accomplish?”

“Why do you want to die?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“A metaphysical question,” the alien said. “See, Doctor, he is smarter than he looks. And to answer your question, what I want is to rule this planet, and end its plague of violence, and I cannot do that if I die. So your premise is invalid.”

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said. “You kidnapped and tortured a Slaymaster, so you must want to die. If I know why, I can kill you more efficiently.”

“Clearly,” the alien said, “this one is not at his breaking point.”

Dr. Slaughter started to say something about the limits of operational conditioning, and then started to say something about the padded restraint on Thor Slaymaster’s left arm being loose, and then didn’t say anything at all because Thor Slaymaster had yanked on his cheap polyester tie and had fractured his windpipe.

“Violence,” the alien said. “Is it all you humans know?”

Thor Slaymaster grabbed hold of a medical robot that was trying to refasten his restraints. “Pretty much,” he said, as he threw the robot in the general direction of the alien’s head.

As the alien screamed in unaccustomed pain, Thor Slaymaster removed the rest of his restraints and his IV. Unfortunately, the alien recovery room did not seem to have anything in the way of usable weapons. “I have one more question for you,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Do you like your justice swift, or poetic?”

“I thought you were smarter than you looked,” the alien said.

“Poetic, then,” Thor Slaymaster said. He picked up the IV stand and whacked the alien in the midsection. The alien doubled over, and it was easy work for Thor Slaymaster to push him down into the cell below.

“Get me out of here,” the alien said. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

Thor Slaymaster smiled. He had what he wanted. He had his freedom, a new race of aliens to fight, and fellow human beings to rescue. Thor Slaymaster had a breaking point, but it would take a lot more than nonviolent aliens, turncoat doctors, and cheesy twenty-first century popular music for anyone to get anywhere near it.

Thor Slaymaster’s Exit Strategy

“This was supposed to be a very short budget meeting,” Alvy said.

Thor Slaymaster didn’t say anything. He was trying to figure out the readings on the controls of the spacecraft. The changing green figures on the center display looked to be a proximity range of some sort. Whether the figures represented the proximity to the Alphabet ship or to the firm, flat, unyielding, deadly surface of the Earth was a matter of some current concern for Thor Slaymaster.

“You’d canceled it three times,” Alvy said. “Killbot invasion last Monday, helicopter malfunction last Thursday, and I don’t remember your last excuse.”

“Hangover,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“That’s not what you told me.”

“At the moment,” Thor Slaymaster said, “it is not that important.”

Thor Slaymaster was uncomfortable in spacecraft, the way he was uncomfortable in formal wear or chairs with armrests. Thor Slaymaster’s skillset did not encompass orbital dynamics or ballistic navigation or any of the approximately seventeen other specific knowledge bases that one would need to guide a damaged, pilotless spacecraft to either a convenient local space station or the surface of the large, blue planet below. Since neither the spaceship or the inconveniently deceased pilot was of human origin, this made Thor Slaymaster’s task of keeping himself alive unreasonably difficult.

“What you told me was that you were taking a quick trip up to the Alphabet ship to see Charlie, and that I could ride along, and we could go over the budget figures on the way up. That doesn’t seem to be working out so far.”

Thor Slaymaster briefly considered whether a controlled experiment involving throwing Alvy out the nearest airlock to reduce the ship’s drag coefficient would be beneficial. He concluded that it might be, but that other matters took precedence and that good combat accountants did not grow on trees.

“Do you know what is wrong with the pilot?” Alvy asked. “If we could wake him up, maybe he could tell us what to do.”

“Unlikely,” Thor Slaymaster said. While Thor Slaymaster had substantial experience with the anatomy of the aliens commonly known as “Alphabets,” his knowledge was mostly confined to the female of the species. However, he had every reason to think that the crack in the rear skull carapace that the pilot had experienced was as fatal as injuries get.

“Maybe I could do CPR,” Alvy said.

“They don’t have hearts,” Thor Slaymaster explained. “You’re an accountant. Do you know what the numbers there mean?”

“I think that one that looks like a saxophone might be a twelve.”

Thor Slaymaster considered the situation. He and Alvy were trapped on a small, not to say claustrophobic, spacecraft with a damaged communication system and a dead pilot, which, depending on just how you looked at the controls, was either hurtling out of control towards the oblivion of the asteroid belt or headed straight on a collision course with what looked to be Madagascar.

Thor Slaymaster knew his limitations. No man alive could do more damage to an oncoming zombie horde. But here, in deep space, most of what he knew was working against him. He needed help, but the only member of Team Slaymaster around for several hundred cubic miles of deep vacuum was not being very helpful right at the moment.

“Alvy,” Thor Slaymaster asked, “what exactly is it that you specialize in?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Slaymaster?”

“Well, I mean, we have you on Team Slaymaster for a reason. What are you good at? It can’t be just accounting. For both of our sakes.”

“You mean like Excel? Data mining?”

“You misunderstand. I mean like, skills that can help us get out of this spacecraft and somewhere safer.”

“You mean like an exit strategy?”

“Precisely,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Okay,” Alvy said. “Exit strategy. What most people do is assess where they are and how they get out of it. Unfortunately, that’s counterproductive, because it focuses all your attention on where you are. What you want to do is figure out where you want to go, and work backwards from there to get to where you are.”

Thor looked out the pilot’s window at the blue mass of Earth. “How about there?”

“You’re not getting it,” Alvy said. “Your exit strategy has to be fixed on a specific goal. The Earth, for example, is a good place to go, but it is also a very big place. It’s mostly ocean, and if you land in the ocean there needs to be a ship around that can pick you up. I also think the prospect of landing a spacecraft in the uncharted ocean would frighten me just a little bit.”

“Slaymaster HQ, then.”

“Better. Now you just have to figure out how to find it after you decelerate from orbit. You know how to decelerate from orbit, right?”

“It is not my strong suit,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“If landing on Earth is not realistic, then what else do you have?”

Thor Slaymaster considered his options. “Shapeshifter mothership is a no-go. The moon is two days away, and I didn’t bring any snacks. I don’t want to go to the International Space Station if I can avoid it.”

“Why not?” Alvy asked.

“Their coffee is lousy. The Alphabet ship is probably our best option. They can probably get us back home faster than anywhere else.”

“Do you know the name of the ship, by any chance?”

“I think it’s called the EXPHARLABLIGZWOOZLEBLORGLE.” Every word in the native language of the Alphabet aliens had at least twenty-six letters.

“Because there’s a button on the left there that says that, and under that there’s another button that says WOOLERBLINGLEQUABBLEBLONGER, which I think means something like ‘autopilot’.”

Thor Slaymaster pushed the WOOLERBLINGLEQUABBLEBLONGER button, and the ship automatically fired its retro-rockets and slowed to a more survivable speed. He pushed the button for the Alphabet ship, and the spacecraft made a gentle turn until it was within the range of the ship’s tractor beams.

“Well done, Alvy,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Thank you, Mr. Slaymaster. Now, if you could just take a quick look at the third quarter ammunition spending. What we’re seeing here is a trend…”

Mark Helprin: The Gates to the City

Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites and blues — wild and free — that stopped at the city walls. In time, the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery. To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, divides, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts upon which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of the desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had only imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever.

Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

Do not expect me to explain here why I’m writing about Mark Helprin’s work. If you’ve read his three great novels, Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, and Memoir from Antproof Case, or even his sharp, crisp editorials for the Wall Street Journal, you know why. If you haven’t, the hope is that you will, and soon. My goal here is to illustrate certain recurring themes in his novels, themes that are best explicated by the passage quoted above.

The East Gate: Acceptance of Responsibility

In A Soldier of the Great War, Helprin deals with (among many other things) the collapse of the WWI Italian front described by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Guaraglia, a Roman harness-maker, deserts through no fault of his own after the conclusion of a doomed secret mission. He returns to his home and family in Rome, which is full of deserters and is full of soldiers trying to capture them. The deserters are hiding out in the catacombs, but Guaraglia knows he must protect his family, must continue to earn a living. In a desperate and painful act of sacrifice, he saws off his own leg so that he can pass as a wounded veteran. The ruse does not work, and he dies in prison with one prayer, “God protect my children.”

The narrator of Memoir from Antproof Case accepts the responsibility of protection as well, and understands that the first person you have to protect is yourself, which, as he says, “was my sole responsibility from an early age.” Moreover, after his parents die, he assumes the responsibility of protecting them, because they no longer have the capacity to protect themselves. After years of misdirected effort, he finally identifies the culprit in their murders, his elderly, wealthy employer. He confronts the tycoon in his room, resulting in a confession and a plea for forgiveness that cannot be answered.

In Helprin’s world, accepting responsibility is, well, a gateway, rather than a destination. Accepting responsibility means accepting and welcoming the ordeals that go along with that responsibility. Helprin characters are always undertaking ordeals, from the protagonist of the short story The Schreuderspitze, who climbs (or does he?) an immense Alpine peak with no training or experience, to the unlikely and positively hilarious catapult that’s built in Winter’s Tale to the gold robbery that provides the spine of Memoir from Antproof Case. And they’re not simple ordeals, either, but immensely complicated tests of character, perseverance, and planning.

The flip side of the gate is in the occasional characters that are totally, gleefully irresponsible. The old order scribe, Orfeo, from A Soldier of the Great War is the best example. Orfeo is similar to nothing in literature save Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, except that Orfeo is small where Reilly is gargantuan. Orfeo is a humble, pathetic little man whose career has gone the way of the buggy whip, until the Great War places him in a Godlike position to dispense chaos and trouble by making nonsense of all the Italian military orders. Orfeo, the “fount of all chaos.” symbolizes every insane impulse from Higher Up that sends brave soldiers on the ordeals I talked about a second ago.

The South Gate: Desire to Explore

This is mostly covered by the nameless protagonist in Memoir from Antproof Case, who is an adventurer at heart in the body of a bank executive. (Antproof Case starts off with one of the best riffs on Melville ever; “Call me Oscar Progresso. Or, for that matter, call me anything you want, as Oscar Progresso is not my name.”) Antproof Case is a hilarious, picaresque journey through the life of a well-traveled rogue. It’s a novel that trips back and forth among New York, North Africa, Europe and Brazil with the same amazing speed that it lurches back and forth through the decades of the twentieth century. However, here, the spectacular travel and the offbeat humor and the long, meandering story are combined with writing of amazing insight. Here, Helprin tells us about horseback riding in the Rockies, switching from a traveler’s tale to a profound metaphor:

The way to cross fences was to cut the two upper wires and step the horses over the one that remained. Then you used six inches to a foot of the wire you carried (depending on the tension of the wire you cut) to mend the damage, and you went on. You did it as carefully as you could, out of respect and courtesy, and as the toll for crossing land not your own. We took a little lesson in how to do it properly, and the cuts we left behind were put back together with many more than the required twists, which is more or less what I wanted to do with my life and what I have not been able to do, but what I may do yet.

The West Gate: Devotion to Beauty

At this point, it is best to illustrate Helprin’s devotion to beauty by quoting an indefinably beautiful passage. You can find them anywhere you look, because no one transmits the shining beauty of language like Helprin. This is one I picked almost at random, from Winter’s Tale, about the great white horse Athansor and his journey, early in the book, from Brooklyn to Manhattan:

A thousand streets lay before him, silent but for the sound of the gemlike wind. Driven with snow, white, and empty, they were a maze for his delight as the newly arisen wind whistled across still untouched drifts and rills. He passed empty theaters, counting-houses, and forested wharves where the snow-lined spars looked like long black groves of pine. He passed dark factories and deserted parks, and rows of little houses where wood just fired filled the air with sweet reassurance. He passed the frightening common cellars full of ragpickers and men without limbs. The door of a market bar was flung open momentarily for a torrent of boiling water that splashed all over the street in a cloud of steam. He passed (and shied from) dead men lying in the round ragged coffins of their own frozen bodies… And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city’s hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.

Here’s another one from Winter’s Tale, where Helprin finds beauty in words that aren’t even words:

“You see this oscillating slotted bar that’s rubbing up too close to the powl and ratchet of this here elliptic trammel? That, my friends, distorts the impact load on the second hobbing, up there, which is applied to that helical gear. But the trouble is, it isn’t. Without that little helical gear, the antiparallel linkage on the friction drive won’t disengage, and the wormwheeled pantograph can’t come into play. Clear so far?”

Of course, I could keep quoting passages like this forever. Helprin’s work is so consistently beautiful and amazingly precise that it’s a temptation just to let his work speak for itself. But “devotion to beauty” refers to much more than Helprin’s style; it’s the hallmark of his best characters. Alessandro Giuliani, the protagonist of A Soldier of the Great War is the best example. Growing up in a lovely garden (graced with the presence of the lovely Lia Bellati), he becomes a professor of aesthetics, and then must spend the rest of his life arguing with peons over whether aesthetics is necessary or useful, or so it seems.

After two and a half years on the front lines of the Great War in the 19th River Guard (Alessandro having enlisted in the Navy in the hopeful — but utterly wrong — assumption that he’d be safe from the infantry in the Navy), he is all but incarcerated in a naval base near Venice. He’s been away from beauty for what seems like two lifetimes, and is hungry for it, hungry to see Venice for just one hour before death. He steals an officer’s hat and dispatch bag and, disguised as a courier, heads into the city, knowing he could be shot as a deserter if discovered:

As he crossed the Grand Canal he greedily began to take in all things not military. His eye seized on every tendril on every plant, every curve or flute in iron or stone work, the most faded patches of color, women in clothes with sweeping lines, restaurant kitchens going full blast, and children, some of whom he picked up and kissed, for he had not seen a child in more than a year.

He knew Venice. A thousand places came back to him as he walked through the streets. Them he remembered that he was allowed to eat… Alessandro ate, and as he ate he sang and talked to himself. The waiter cleared his table and brought a plate of smoked salmon, a grilled filet mignon, and a portion of funghi porcini, along with another carafe of wine and a bottle of sparkling mineral water.

“Things still exist,” Alessandro said.

“Yes yes yes,” the waiter said.

There’s devotion to beauty for you.

The North Gate: Selfless Love

To keep your love alive, you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith. Without this, you will live like a beast and have nothing but an aching heart. With it, your heart, although broken, will be full, and you will stay in the fight until the very last.

– Memoir from Antproof Case

There are two great love stories at the heart of the magical Winter’s Tale, a century-skipping tale of the rise and fall and rebirth of New York. (An eerily prophetic book it is, too.) There are several passionate love stories in Memoir from Antproof Case, as the narrator describes his life and passions. But for my money, the most beautiful is Alessandro Giuliani’s, as he searches Italy for the woman he thought he lost in battle. Alessandro falls blindly in love – literally – with a hospital nurse who he believes was killed in the bombing of a hospital. He finds that, miraculously, the nurse has survived but believes him to be dead. With the smallest of clues and the barest of hopes, he watches and waits for her by a fountain, where his infant son once sailed a boat playfully. He finds her, they are reunited, and married:

She wore a very simple wedding dress; we could afford nothing more. The ring was so thin that it looked like wire. She had no other jewelry, but her hair crowned her face, and through the front of the dress you could see the top of her chest, which was always so beautiful, especially when she blushed. Underneath the satin lace, it looked like a bed or roses. Just to think about her makes me happy. When I die, no one will think about her ever again, which is why I’ve been holding on. On the other hand, if they’ve all gone somewhere, should I not be delighted to join them, even if it means nothing except to be extinguished? At least I’ll have the knowledge, as I slip into the dark, that I’m following, and that I have been loyal in my devotions.

I encourage you to develop a devotion for the works of Mark Helprin. I can guarantee that your loyalty will be repaid in full.

Lord Voldemort Makes Some Basic Mistakes

Now that the Harry Potter series is over, it may be instructive to go back and see, exactly, how and why Lord Voldemort…

SPOILER ALERT: The following contains serious, massive spoilers for the book and the movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and maybe the other books if you haven’t read those. You have been warned. Read no farther!

As I was saying, to see exactly how and why Lord Voldemort failed to follow the simple rules set forth in the epochal “Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became an Evil Overlord” list. The following is inspired by that list (and hopefully doesn’t infringe on it in any way, or at least I hope not). This is the Top Things I’d Do If I Were Lord Voldemort.

I will stop calling myself “Lord Voldemort.” I will pick a name that is equally evil, of course, but less obvious, like “Lord Simon Cowell” or “Lord Scott Boras.”
When I pick a new name, it will not be an anagram of my real name. My enemies have the same access to the Internet Anagram Server that I do.
I will stop calling my loyal minions the “Death Eaters.” Instead, I will call them “The Funky Bunch.”
The next time I have a chance to kill Harry Potter, I will not use the killing spell that has backfired on me four different times. I will shoot him with a gun.
If one of my Horcruxes is kept in the vault of Gringotts, I will take special care not to torture any goblin who may have access to said vault.
If I have only one Horcrux left, and it is in my pet snake, I will not take that pet snake into battle with me. I will entrust the snake to the care of my local zoo or herpetological association during the course of the battle.
I will not insist that I alone be able to kill Harry Potter myself. If one of my Funky Bunch has the chance to kill him, I will allow him to do so. Then I will kill that person and take credit for killing Harry Potter anyway. It’s not like anyone would ever be able to contradict me.
If I announce that Harry Potter should give himself up, and come into the Forbidden Forest alone, unarmed, and he does so, I will not immediately kill him. I will wonder why he did something so foolish, and ask him so.
If I come up with a great idea like giving one of my Funky Bunch a silver hand that strangles them the second they betray me, I will insist that all of my Funky Bunch get the same silver hand and not just one person.
If I do manage to kill Harry Potter, I will check to see that he is dead myself, and not let one of my Funky Bunch do it if I have threatened the child of that person in the last few days. Then I will shoot Harry Potter with my gun, just in case.
If I acquire a wand that is rumored to have unstoppable killing power, I will try it out on one of my Funky Bunch first before using it on Harry Potter.
If I am interrogating a prisoner with vital information, and one of my Funky Bunch signals me that they have captured Harry Potter, I will pay attention to the signal instead of continuing to interrogate the prisoner. I am the Dark Lord, and I ought to be able to multitask.
I will not let Severus Snape become headmaster of Hogwarts just because he asks me to. Double agents cannot be trusted. Instead, I will send him out to kill Harry Potter and let one of my Funky Bunch take the job.
I will not leave my diadem Horcrux lying around the Room of Requirement where anyone can find it. I will donate it to the British Museum, and chances are that they’ll just store it in a vault somewhere, which is fine by me.
I will not have all my Horcruxes be completely obvious magical heirlooms. At least one of them will be something that you would never think would be a Horcrux, like Nelson’s Column, or Tony Blair’s hairpiece.

You know, it’s a wonder that Voldemort got through seven books, when you think about it.

Thor Slaymaster’s National Treasure

“No,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“It’s an important mission, Mr. Slaymaster. The President knows you’re the best person to handle it.”

Thor Slaymaster stayed silent. He knew if he did this long enough, the little man with the neatly parted hair, the horn-rimmed glasses, and the briefcase would go away, allowing Thor Slaymaster to recalibrate his air-defense system.

“Satellite imagery says the National Gallery is still intact. We know the Matisse was being stored in the sub-basement. We have the security codes. What we need now is someone to retrieve it, and you’re the best qualified person to do that.”

The State Department official was correct, but only because Washington, D.C. was the largest zombie population cluster in North America. Although the zombie outbreak had been largely confined to the Southeast, the hardiest zombie tribes had made their way to Washington and had settled there. Determined opposition had kept the zombies contained within the Beltway, but penetrating deep within Washington itself was a challenge for even the most determined zombie hunter.

“Look, Mr. Slaymaster. The President owes the French Premier a big favor after the incident with the Omega Box. Returning this painting to France is a matter of national honor. He has instructed me to give you whatever you need to accomplish this mission.”

Charlie stuck her head out from the ordnance room. “Does that include a new helicopter? Mil-spec?”

“I can have one here within the hour,” the State Department representative said.

“He’ll go,” Charlie said.

“Charlie,” Thor Slaymaster said. “This is not your decision.”

“If I have to hear you complain about your old helicopter one more time, you will have a different decision to make, one that you won’t like.”

Thor Slaymaster didn’t like being cornered by his girlfriend, the way that he didn’t like movies with subtitles or plain-cake donuts. But there are times when every man has to bow to the inevitable.

“Make sure you get them to fill up the fuel tank on the helicopter first,” Thor Slaymaster said. “You. Tell me about this painting.”

“It is called Pot of Geraniums,” the State Department representative said. “It shows a pink flower with a large green stem in, well, a pot.”

“This is a national treasure?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“For the French.”

“Remind me never to go there.”

The stretch of open grass between the National Gallery and the Air and Space Museum would have been a perfect place to land a new, mil-spec helicopter, if it wasn’t for the teeming hordes of zombies milling around.

“What do you think?” Charlie asked.

“I think this is a suicide mission,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“You like those.”

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I do not like suicide missions. Sometimes, they are necessary. This mission is about retrieving a picture of a flower in a pot. It is not necessary.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Charlie asked. “You want to try going through the roof?”

“Cause a distraction,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Pick the ugliest building you see and blast it.”

“Is that one ugly enough?” Richie the helicopter pilot asked, pointing towards a large pile of crumbling concrete just to the north.

“That’ll do.”

Most of the zombie horde around the Gallery moved towards the smoking rubble of the nearby Hoover Building, but there were still a few stragglers. Charlie fired her chain guns into the remaining zombies, clearing enough open space for a quick landing. From there, it was a straightforward march into the Gallery, interrupted by shotgun blasts and the dying moans of zombies.

Generations of thieves and looters had taken every scrap of artwork out of the Gallery long ago. Thor dashed through the Rotunda, taking care not to step on the few remaining shards of sculpture. A few zombies lingered in the corridors, and Thor dispatched them with his shotgun. He found a stairwell that looked clear of zombies, and jammed the door behind him shut, taking a moment to reload.

To Thor’s surprise, the sub-basement was well-lit. The room where the painting was supposed to be kept opened with a touch. The Matisse was there, sitting on an easel, in plain view.

Thor Slaymaster activated his wireless headset. “It’s a trap, Charlie,” he said.

“Isn’t it usually? Who is this time?”

“One way to find out,” Thor Slaymaster said.

Thor Slaymaster pulled a handgun out of a shoulder holster and took careful aim at the painting. He fired, and the painting toppled off its easel. He waited a long moment for a net to fall from the ceiling, or a cloud of toxic gas to be released, or an explosion. The explosion took a few seconds longer than he expected, and came from a different direction.

“God damn it, Slaymaster,” a very loud voice shouted. “You weren’t supposed to do that!”

Thor Slaymaster turned and found a very large, angry man in the remnants of an Air Force general’s uniform screaming at him.

“I was careful,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I made a tiny hole in the corner. Easy to fix.”

“You were supposed to return that to the god-damned French Ambassador! That was a priceless work of art! A national treasure! The President will be furious!”

“I did not vote for him,” Thor Slaymaster said.

The general’s red face clashed horribly with his ragged blue uniform. “We brought you down here to recruit you. To see if you had what it took to help us reclaim this city from the zombies.”

“This is how you recruit? No wonder the military is losing people.”

“But you’re a loose cannon, Thor Slaymaster. You’re a menace to everyone and everything around you.”

“I was designed that way,” Thor Slaymaster said. “What’s your excuse?”

“You listen to me, Slaymaster,” the general said.

“Why? You haven’t said anything interesting yet.”

“You think you’re tough? I have spent my whole career crawling down the tunnels and subways of this fair city, killing every zombie I saw, just to try to keep some semblance of a national security apparatus up and running. I don’t need you to come down here and tell me jack-squat, Slaymaster.”

“There is no national security, General. There is no nation. All we are is a collection of problems. And most of those problems accumulated right here, in this city, because people refused to face up to their responsibilities.”

“Fancy talk,” the general said, “coming from someone with no real responsibilities.”

Thor Slaymaster smiled a smile fierce enough to cause even a dedicated zombie-hunter to take a step back and reconsider his lifestyle choices. “I am responsible, General. I am responsible to my team. And right now, they are waiting for me. Do you have the real painting?”

The general reached into a nearby file drawer and extracted a hard, cylindrical plastic case. “Here it is. How did you know?”

“You would not have endangered the mission by leaving the real painting in a vulnerable location.”

“Just so,” the general said. He handed the painting to Thor. “You shouldn’t keep your team waiting.”

“Thank you, General. And… good luck, with the whole national-security thing.”

“Good luck to you, Thor Slaymaster, with the whole zombie-killing thing.”

Thor Slaymaster headed back up the stairwell and fired a small rocket into the jammed door at the top of the stairs. When the echoes faded, he reactivated his wireless headset and stepped over a pile of charred zombie corpses. “Coming up, Charlie. Hot LZ. Be ready for pickup.”

Thor Slaymaster’s Dark Angel

Thor Slaymaster hated after-action reports, the way that he hated light beer and heavy body armor. But they were a necessary part of his profession. More than once, he had made it through a narrow scrape because of some piece of information that had been written down in an after-action report. So the first thing that Thor Slaymaster did after he got back to Team Slaymaster headquarters was to ask Andy to bring the recording equipment for the AAR. Then he asked Charlie to bring disinfectant and bandages.

“You’re a mess,” Charlie said. Thor Slaymaster’s alien girlfriend examined the mass of scratches and scrapes that covered Thor Slaymaster’s upper body. “And here I thought that you were out there on business. What was her name?”

“I do not know,” Thor Slaymaster said. “But I am going to find out.”

“I was teasing you, sweetheart,” Charlie said.

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said.

The city was rebuilding the ancient subway system, which was good news for commuters but bad news for the mutants. The city had offered to relocate all mutants affected by the expansion to Baltimore, but quite a few of them refused, for the obvious reason. The city contracted Team Slaymaster to remove the remaining mutants with as little bloodshed as possible. “As little bloodshed as possible” wasn’t really in Thor Slaymaster’s wheelhouse, but it was a good opportunity to try diplomacy for a change.

Thor Slaymaster asked the subway conductor to hold the train for him at the end of the line, and when you’re a subway conductor on a subway line populated by rebellious mutants, and Thor Slaymaster asks you to wait for him, you wait for him. Thor walked down the tracks to the largest of the mutant settlements. There, he met with the mutant leadership, and explained the (admittedly, relative) advantages of moving to Baltimore, and the disadvantages of facing Team Slaymaster in a small, enclosed space.

“We will discuss what you have said, Thor Slaymaster, and give you our answer tomorrow,” the mutant spokesman said, out of one of his three mouths. Thor Slaymaster shook the less scaly of the mutant’s hands and headed back to the subway, confident that he had done a good day’s work and had earned a big plate of General Tso’s chicken, two or three cold beers, and a deep-tissue tentacle massage from Charlie.

There was one other person on the subway, and she was waiting for Thor Slaymaster. She was tall. That’s the first thing that Thor Slaymaster noticed, because he didn’t notice it all that often. She was tall, and she was wearing a dead-white mask, high black-leather boots, and a long, black dress with huge bat wings at the back.

“How did it go?” she asked.

Thor Slaymaster didn’t answer random questions from strangers on public transportation conveyances.

“Are you going to slaughter the mutants?” she asked.

Thor Slaymaster shrugged.

“Is that supposed to be an answer?”

“Yes,” Thor Slaymaster said.

The winged woman with the white mask whipped out a whip, which wrapped around Thor Slaymaster’s chest.

“That was uncalled for,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“So is the senseless murder of innocent victims,” the woman said. “Now, tell me, what are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” Thor Slaymaster said. “They must choose. If they will live, they will live. If they will die, they will be killed. All men choose their own path.”

“What path will you choose?”

“The one that gets you to take your whip back, before I wrap it around your neck.”

“You disappoint me, Thor Slaymaster. I did not think that you were given to idle threats.”

“You will find out if it’s an idle threat,” Thor Slaymaster said.

The subway car went around an unexpected curve, which threw Thor Slaymaster’s balance off, just enough that the winged woman was able to push Thor Slaymaster back a step. “You’ve been riding high for a long time, Thor Slaymaster,” she said. “But you’ve made some powerful enemies.”

“Like who?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

She didn’t answer. Thor Slaymaster looked at her eyes, behind her mask, and saw a deep, bright well of anger, and then a flash of radiant energy which flooded the car. The force of the energy shattered the door, and pushed Thor Slaymaster back towards the edge.

“You’re no match for me, Thor Slaymaster,” she said.

“I haven’t laid a finger on you,” Thor Slaymaster said. “That can change.”

The winged woman laid a finger on Thor Slaymaster, and it felt like a hammer blow. Thor fell out of the back of the subway. He was dragged along the tracks by the whip.

“What happened next?” Andy asked.

“She let go,” Thor Slaymaster said. “A full-grown Slaymaster is a hard thing to tow. I unwrapped the whip, walked to the next station, and took a cab over here.”

“You poor baby,” Charlie said. “I think you may have a broken rib or two. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I have never been defeated before.”

“You weren’t defeated,” Charlie said. “You were caught off guard. If you had been properly armed, you would have destroyed her. It could have happened to anyone.”

“It has never happened to me before,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Up until today, the only reason I was still alive was that I had never been caught off guard. Now, the only reason I am still alive was because the dark angel did not kill me. I don’t know what to do with that knowledge.”

“Don’t you?” Charlie asked.

Thor Slaymaster thought for a long moment, and then realized that he was feeling something that he never had before, a desire, a deep-seated yearning for one thing.

“Revenge,” he said.

Charlie’s long, alien tongue darted over Thor’s naked chest, dabbling at the bright red blood that was still seeping from his wounds. “Bet your ass. Nobody does this to my boyfriend and gets away with it.”

“Andy?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“Leaving now, Mr. Slaymaster.””

Thor Slaymaster’s Dangerous Game

Orson W. Zaroff owned a large yacht, a private island, and an extensive collection of expensive cigars. He was also free with his whiskey. It did not take Thor Slaymaster long to decide that Orson W. Zaroff was his favorite client ever.

“Are you enjoying the whiskey?” Zaroff asked.

“Very much,” Thor Slaymaster said. Thor Slaymaster preferred energy drinks and the kind of cheap vodka that went well when mixed with energy drinks, but the whiskey wasn’t bad. Zaroff explained that the whiskey was a rare vintage that he himself had looted from an Irish farmhouse in a daring raid that involved killing what anyone other than Thor Slaymaster would have considered to be an improbable amount of zombies. It was the kind of story that is best told over expensive cigars and rare whiskey, on a warm Caribbean evening, on board an expensive yacht.

“Anyway,” Zaroff said, “I was in the launch with the whiskey, headed back here, to the Cossack Queen, and there was a zombie swimming after me.”

“Unusual,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“I can’t explain it,” Zaroff said. “Maybe the zombie wanted the whiskey. Maybe he owned the house before he died, and felt protective somehow. Anyway, I was all out of ammo, so I nailed him with a harpoon. Most thrilling moment of my life. Until now, that is.”

Thor Slaymaster stayed silent. It was his nature to stay silent, especially in situations where he had the sneaking suspicion that someone was going to try to drop a boxcar on his head. Up until then, Thor Slaymaster hadn’t questioned Zaroff’s motives, the way that most people don’t question the motives of people who ply them with whiskey and cigars and cruises aboard expensive yachts.

“You hired me to kill zombies on your island,” Thor Slaymaster said. “But I am starting to doubt that there are any zombies there at all.”

“Oh, there were,” Zaroff said. “I killed the last of them three years ago. I thought about restocking it, actually. I missed the thrill of the hunt. The danger of knowing that I could die at any moment–and live on as a foul zombie corpse. You, of all men, must know what I am talking about.”

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Killing a zombie is not a sport. It is not even a job, even if you are a Slaymaster. It is a duty that I owe.”

“To whom? Society? Bah.”

“To the zombies,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Not one of them asked to be zombies. Any of them, if given the choice, would gladly throw themselves into a pit of fire to end their existence. I don’t kill zombies because it’s enjoyable, or even because it’s necessary. I kill zombies because I need to. Because they need me to.”

Zaroff took a sip of whiskey. “It is a fine night,” he said. “And here we are, aboard my fine yacht, smoking fine cigars, drinking the very last of my single-malt. It is all very fine. But it is not enough, not for me. So in the morning, my crew will escort you to the island. You will have three hours to run, or hide, or both, whichever you prefer. Then I will join you. Man to man, except that of course I will have a shotgun, due to my old age and comparative lack of muscle mass. Then we will play our dangerous game.”

Thor Slaymaster glanced around the cabin. “There are at least fifteen things in this room that I could kill you with right now.”

“Of course you could,” Zaroff said, “and you probably would, if I hadn’t drugged the whiskey. Don’t worry, it’s a mild sedative.”

Thor Slaymaster tried to get out of his chair, and found that he couldn’t. “Not exactly sporting, Zaroff.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I drank some too, so we’re even. See you in the morning, Thor Slaymaster.”

The next day, Zaroff waded onto the beach of his private island. Thor Slaymaster was sitting in a deck chair on the veranda of the beach house, just outside effective shotgun range.

“I explained the rules to you last night, Mr. Slaymaster,” Zaroff said. “Run, or hide.”

“I hate running,” Thor said. “I am too big to hide. And there are no rules, not here.”

“Just so,” Zaroff said. “But then, where is the thrill of the hunt? Where is the adrenaline rush? If I shoot you now, I get none of that.”

“So drop the gun, and come and face me. Man to man. I guarantee you will have an adrenaline rush that will last you the rest of your life.”

“You’re trying to bait me, Slaymaster,” Zaroff said. “It won’t work. Get out of that chair and start running, or I will shoot.”

“Come and get me,” Thor Slaymaster said.

It had taken Thor Slaymaster half of the morning to dig the pit that Orson W. Zaroff walked into, and the other half of the morning to find a zombie to throw into the pit. He wasn’t surprised. If you don’t use Thor Slaymaster to rid your private island of zombies, you shouldn’t be surprised if there are still a few zombies walking around.

To his credit, it only took a few minutes for Zaroff to emerge from the pit. He was bleeding and badly bitten, but he was still clutching the shotgun. “How do I look?” he asked Thor.

“Not good,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Well, you ought to see the other guy.”

“Just so. I need the shotgun, Zaroff.”

Zaroff threw the shotgun at Thor’s feet.

“I don’t enjoy doing this,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I want you to know. It is nothing personal. I am doing it because I need to.”

“Because I need you to.”

Thor Slaymaster picked up the shotgun and aimed it at Zaroff. “I can keep the yacht, right?”

“Burn in hell, Thor Slaymaster,” Zaroff said.

Thor went back inside the beach house and found Zaroff’s bedroom. He had never slept in a better bed.

Thor Slaymaster’s Shopping Spree

Thor Slaymaster crouched in the ruins of an abandoned Wal-Mart, just outside of the ruins of what had once been Knoxville, Tennessee. A generation of looters and scavengers had taken most of the merchandise, including all of the firearms and ammunition. Thor Slaymaster was annoyed by this, but not surprised. The only useful thing he had found so far was a hideously ugly winter parka, size XXXL. It was made from a horrid green-plaid fabric, and it had multiple loose threads where the Chinese slave-laborer who had sewn it had said, “Screw this, nobody’s going to buy this ugly thing anyway.” Thor Slaymaster did not care. There was a blizzard raging outside, and he reasoned that if you have to be crouched in the ruins of an abandoned Wal-Mart, there was no reason not to be comfortable.

The mission statement for Team Slaymaster was three words long: “We kill zombies.” Thor Slaymaster had been put on this earth to ravish beautiful alien women and kill zombies, and he was running out of zombies. The North American zombie population, in no small part due to Thor Slaymaster, was on the decline. For Thor Slaymaster, that meant that he no longer needed to wait for zombies to attack the remaining human strongholds. He could attack them on their turf–and, preferably, do so when that turf had a bit of frost on it.

Thor Slaymaster set out for Knoxville with his standard arsenal (ten sniper rifles, twenty shotguns and enough ammunition to overthrow a small Central American republic) in the back of an armored vehicle. It would be an easy mission, he thought. Thor Slaymaster liked easy missions, the way he liked lightweight body armor, mini corn dogs, and aggressive foreplay. Temperatures were scheduled to be in the high twenties all week, which meant that the local zombies would be chilled, if not frozen solid.

At first, it was easy enough. Thor found a convenient perch atop an abandoned bank building and started potting away at zombies. As the smell of undead flesh attracted more zombies, Thor Slaymaster waited until they formed a crowd, and then waded in with his shotgun. The below-freezing weather seized up their reflexes enough so that Thor could blast away with impunity.

Everything was going fine until the snow began to fall. The colder weather slowed the zombies to a near-crawl, but it impacted Thor’s visibility enough to the point that he started worrying about zombies sneaking up on his blind side. As the snowstorm turned into a blizzard, he sought shelter in a suburban complex of big-box stores. Thor found a cache of energy drinks and decided to wait out the bad weather. He set fire to a stack of Stephenie Meyer novels in an abandoned bookstore and waited for the cold front to blow through.

Unfortunately, the next thing that blew through was a very small but very powerful missile, which punched a hole in the ceiling and smacked into the makeshift fire, blowing cinders everywhere. Thor Slaymaster was protected from the full force of the explosion by his body armor, but his hair was singed and his ears were ringing. “Killbots,” he said to himself. Thor Slaymaster hated killbots more than he hated snowy weather and talking to himself.

Thor Slaymaster burst out of an emergency exit and looked up to see that there were three flying killbots orbiting the airspace around the bookstore. The other two bots fired their missiles into the burning building, collapsing its roof. Thor ran across the vacant parking lot to a Wal-Mart, which he devoutly hoped had some item available that would help him demolish the killbots and make his escape.

After ten minutes of frantic searching, all Thor Slaymaster had to show for his efforts, besides his ugly plaid parka, was a 38 DD bra, a tire iron, and a double handful of Matchbox cars. It would have to do.

The killbots, drawn to infared signatures, were still hovering over the ruins of the bookstore. Thor used the bra and the tire iron as an improvised slingshot, and fired a double load of Matchbox cars at the closest killbot. The killbot’s targeting software did not recognize the toy cars as weapons, which was too bad for the killbot. A black Pontiac Trans Am with red flames on the hood found its way into the killbot’s jet intake and disintegrated. The metal shards caused the blades of the turbine to seize up. Gravity took over, and the killbot came down with a thump.

Thor Slaymaster dashed back into the Wal-Mart and ducked behind a row of vending machine. One of three things would happen, he knew. The killbot could self-destruct, which would leave him with two more killbots to deal with. The killbot could start shooting wildly at everything, which would require Thor to wait until the killbot exhausted its ammunition supplies.

Thor peeked out between two of the vending machines. Through the curtain of snow, he thought he could see a warm orange light in the distance. That meaant the third option was in play, the one he had been hoping for. It meant that the killbot was still operational, but in maintenance mode. It was a safety feature, allowing technicians to approach wounded killbots and repair them without getting shredded by flechette rounds.

Thor Slaymaster crept up to the disabled killbot. He tapped the “Settings” icon and turned the control for FRATRICIDE MODE to “ON”, and hit the “Global Transmit” button. The two remaining killbots looked around for the most powerful source of infared radiation, and locked their targeting software in on each other.

The ensuing killbot battle was epic, but Thor Slaymaster didn’t stay around to watch. He went back inside the Wal-Mart and picked up a filmy green nightgown he’d seen on one of the racks. It would, he thought, complement the greenish tinge of his girlfriend’s skin. Thor Slaymaster had been put on this earth for something else besides just killing zombies, after all.

Review: A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA, by Paul Park

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A Princess of Roumania






Paul Park




Fiction




Macmillan




August 1, 2005





368

Raised by her adoptive family in a quiet Massachusetts town, teenager Miranda Popescu is astonished to discover that she is a princess from an alternate world that is split by a deadly political battle.

You know, it’s called fantasy literature for a reason. And let’s face it…you do it too. Everyone does, and maybe adopted children do it more than anyone else. What if your parents weren’t your parents, what if your homeland wasn’t your homeland, what if you were born to be a princess ruling a far away land somewhere in your imagination? You need not have spent a lot of your life trying to get through wardrobes to get to Narnia — or down rabbit holes to get to Wonderland, or pick your fantasy of choice — to understand the appeal of A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA.

The real world in which we live (unless you’re reading this on a broadband hookup from Oz) can be a dark, difficult and dangerous place. Although fantasy worlds can be dark and difficult at times, they’re largely meant to be escapist and fun. What author Paul Park has done in A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA is to make things in the alternate fantasy world darker, more dangerous, and much less fun — to the point where characters in the fantasy world tend to see our reality as their fantasy.

In the fantasy world of A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA, the sixteenth century isn’t dead, or else it has been going on for a very long time. America is still a trackless wilderness, populated by its native people and a few brave English and Dutch colonists. The kingdom of Roumania is under the thumb of its German occupiers. Meanwhile, the disinherited Baroness Ceausescu — once the leading lady of the stage, now the penniless widow of an alchemist — plots her return to power. And the way to get power is to gain control over the rightful heiress to the throne.

Meanwhile, the rightful heiress to the throne is in high school in the Massachusetts that you and I know, hanging out with friends, exploring the woods around her home, and, from time to time, looking at the mysterious artifacts she has had all her life. Miranda Popescu is a normal teenager of Romanian descent, adopted out of a Romanian orphanage shortly after the fall of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. (And yes, there is a connection.) She has only vague unanswered questions about her past, and does not know that she is at the center of intrigue, mystery, and an unknowable destiny.

To say much more about what happens to Miranda would be unfair — and it would be even less fair to say what happens to her friends and how they come to accompany her to the alternate Roumania. However, despite a good deal of magical doings, and a subtle and malicious plot, all that A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA manages to do is set a scene. It is clearly intended to be book one of a series, although you might not know that at first. Readers looking for a sense of closure would be advised to look somewhere else, or to wait for the (hopefully) inevitable sequel.

Until then, the real question for the reader is whether he or she wants to spend time in Park’s fantasy world. The world that is created for the reader is dense in detail, in smoke, and in political maneuvering. There is magic both in the story and in the rich, layered, baroque style in which it is written. But it is a world with a long and complicated history, with subtly different rules. There is almost a textbook quality to the novel at times. While it is undoubtedly a complex and challenging work, it feels like it’s almost trying too hard to prove that it outclasses its roots in fantasy literature. The only problem with A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA is that it’s a bit of a struggle to get down that rabbit hole.