The Secret History of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle
379 pages
Published 2010
Read from July 1 to July 21
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
You ever develop a fixation on a certain kind of food, to the point where you gorge yourself on it repeatedly and can't get enough of it for a period of days or weeks or months? And then all of a sudden you can't stand the thought of it anymore, and you avoid it in the supermarket for months afterward? I'm sort of like that with short fiction anthologies right now. I was all about the fantasy and science fiction anthologies late last year, and I made plans on which compendiums I would ILL month by month all through this year, figuring surely I'd devour two a month and never ever get tired of them and my own short fiction would improve markedly thereby. And then December came, and I got sick of short fiction. I made several half-hearted attempts to plow through The Year's Best whatever, but honestly, for the last six or seven months I wanted nothing to do with it.
And yet I can't forget that some of my favorite fiction is short. I find myself thinking of James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" at least once a week, and I read that last October. Done well, even a nine page story can push its way into you with the weight of a continent. It's the chore of reading the others, the forgettable stories, that keeps me away from short fiction anthologies. Sadly, even a crack anthologist will gather in a lot of crap with the gold.
This collection, predicated on bringing together a diverse selection of fantasy that evades or defies the banal post-Tolkien tradition of dark lords, dark elves, and rings of power, certainly seems like it will fit my sensibilities better than, say, yet another annual Rich Horton-selected collection. And it's fairly short. We'll see how much interest I can sustain.
"Ancestor Money" by Maureen F. McHugh (2003). Conceptually, this scores high on the "I wish I'd thought of that" scale: Rachel, woman who lived and died in Appalachia in the early 20th century, spends the first seventy years of her afterlife in peace, "living" in an idealized version of her own home. Then she gets notified that her granddaughter has made an offering of money to her ancestress. Off Rachel flies to the afterlife's Hong Kong to collect the money from a temple. So far so good. But once there, she is given a choice: to progress through the seven heavens, or to go back and not progress at all. Stressed from the unfamiliarity and the bustle, she blinks and finds herself back in a less idealized, decaying version of her shack in the hollow, where she feels calm again. The end. (Um, spoilers?) I have to admit... I kinda don't grok this one. Is it purely nihilistic? Is it an eccentric take on "If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha"? Did McHugh wring all the story's juices into the concept, leaving none for the denouement? A curiosity, but nothing truly affecting, I think.
"Scarecrow" by Gregory Maguire (2001). A charming, optimistic humanist fable shucked from the early education of the Scarecrow, before he meets Dorothy. It's a bit pat, maybe a tad didactic, but thoroughly winsome.
"Lady of the Skulls" by Patricia A. McKillip (1993). I wish I hadn't seen the copyright date for this story before I read it, because it would've been a perfect opportunity to test my hypothesis that I can date any story from the late '80s to mid '90s to within a few years. Forewarned by the publication date, I found this to be a sturdy, unsurprising example of early '90s high fantasy, twisting older fantasy cliche into a commentary on gender and How People Don't Understand Each Other (But Could if They Tried). Possibly groundbreaking at the time, now terribly dated and somewhat boring.
"We Are Norsemen" by T. C. Boyle (1977). Mediocre historical Norse fantasy made "humorous" with anachronistic irony and bathos. I'm not sure what the point is beyond wiping some of the romance off Norse fantasy, an early stirring of the "dark and gritty realism" thing so ubiquitous nowadays. I'd been meaning to check out Boyle's novels; this is not an encouraging start.
"The Barnum Museum" by Steven Millhauser (1990). Fantasy fiction about fantasy fiction -- an extended metafictional metaphor about the seductive hallways and lingering, intrinsic tawdriness of fantasy. Picturesque like a brochure, but I kept thinking it would have been improved with something like an actual story in its fabric.
"Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" by Stephen King (1984). A slow-burner that delivers. I'd heard about this story in some laudatory context (damned if I remember what -- it was years ago now), and while I wouldn't say I'd built up expectations for it, I was amply satisfied, even if it doesn't stray beyond (and in fact gives a convenient name to) King's "holes in the middle of things" metier.
"Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (1990). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy last October. I'll quote from that review: "I've been looking forward to this one since I first
glanced over the contents page. It does not disappoint."
"Bones" by Francesca Lia Block (2001). Evocatively written little blip about being young and empty and drugged in the big city, with one of those psycho killer turns I can see a mile away. Great prose wasted on a disposable story.
"Snow, Glass, Apples" by Neil Gaiman (1994). Attempting to place where and when I'd encountered this story before unearthed a whole part of my life I hadn't thought about in ages. In the spring and summer of 2004, while I was trying to worm my way out of the army on a medical discharge, I still had to work (though I was taken off normal duties, with some silent scorn from the higher-ups, and reassigned to administrative work in the company HQ, which involved longer hours but suited me just fine). For a while I got rides from another soldier in my company, whose name I've forgotten. I remember barely anything about him, in fact, aside from his fondness for listening to books on tape during his commute. I remember now with some vividness listening to this story on one or two mornings. The fact that it was by Neil Gaiman slipped my mind (I'd never heard of Gaiman at that point, so my brain never bothered to attach any significance to the name when my friend talked up Gaiman's talents), but practically every word in this story, every dip and turn of its cadence, seemed familiar to me. Part of that familiarity may be because "Snow" reads like a hot mess of cliches to me now. I'm sure it was groundbreaking at the time, but now you can watch spooky reimagined fairy tales cranked out on network television (with greater or lesser emphasis on menstruation-as-symbolism and incestuous cock-biting). It's still an okay story, maybe even good, but it's such a yawn to me now compared to the amazing "Holy shit, I didn't know stuff like this existed!" revelation I had a decade ago. Maybe it's just better read out loud.
"Fruit and Words" by Aimee Bender (2001). Clever but almost kind of pointless composition that fizzles out without a neat, satisfying resolution to tie everything together. Unless it's one of those endings you're supposed to sort out for yourself from, like, symbols or something. I'm not sure what the point of it is, regardless.
"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford (2003). Superbly evocative, ending with a twist I probably should have seen coming but didn't. One of the most creative and stirring "love" stories I can remember reading.
"The Edge of the World" by Michael Swanwick (1989). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction last November. I'll quote that review: "[A]s a story, it is perfectly put together, and it -- all of
it, not just the gunshot of an ending I had forgotten -- leaves me
dizzy."
"Super Goat Man" by Jonathan Lethem (2004). "Superheroes in real life" and "The shifts in white middle class culture between the psychedelic '60s, coke-party '80s, and business-casual '00s" are two subjects that, in retrospect, I'm surprised I don't see paired more often. This was a mildly interesting piece that, typically, had a wobbly ending. It didn't speak to me particularly.
"John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner" by Susanna Clarke (2006). A charming, funny little tale with a Brothers Grimm structure, set in the wizardy Britain where all Clarke's stories are seemingly set.
"The Book of Martha" by Octavia E. Butler (2003). What would you do to help humanity if God came to you and offered the chance to make one change to human existence? A Big Question piece that feels more appropriate to the late '60s or 1970s -- dated, in other words. Solid but not amazing.
"The Vita Æterna Mirror Company" by Yann Martel (1993). I haven't read Life of Pi yet, though it is on my immediate to-read list. So I was most interested to read this story. It turns out to be a lot of experimentation with layout and story structure wasted on a rather flimsy "lesson": Listen to your elders! Their experiences matter! A letdown.
"Sleight of Hand" by Peter S. Beagle (2009). Is it cocky to edit an anthology portentiously titled The Secret History of Fantasy, and include one of your own stories, published just the previous year? Probably. This is a damn good story regardless, moving and human in that reliable Peter S. Beagle way.
"Mythago Wood" by Robert Holdstock (1981). A story of the classic English woodland fantasy type, a place where oak glades draw mythological archetypes out of the unconscious mind -- something Peter Ackroyd would love. Slow-burning but good, overall; there's something about the idea of encountering the gods and monsters of the Neolithic, or even of the Ice Age, that will always appeal to me. I would have appreciated more character development rather than pseudo-scientific rationalizations, and more time amid the myths, but I suppose that's why this got turned into a popular series of novels, according to Wikipedia.
"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson (2008). A quite good, strangely moving, Bradbury-esque piece -- more tired, apathetic, and contemporary than Bradbury gets in my experience, but it ends on a terrifically sweet note.
The anthology closes out with two essays on fantasy fiction. The first is Ursula K. Le Guin waxing acerbic about the modernist disdain for "genre." Like all lit-crit essays in my experience, it only makes about half sense unless you know the works and ideas of every author casually name-checked in passing. The second is a swift, jet-window overview of fantasy literature in English, particularly its "mass market genrefication" through the second half of the twentieth century, penned by David G. Hartwell. Essays of this type (seemingly de rigueur in these anthologies) serve only two purposes for me: They depress me with tales of the realities of economics supplanting artistic expression, and they give me names and titles to add to my ever-growing to-read list. This particular recitation of the formula includes an interesting insight about the paint-by-numbers Del Rey fantasy formula: It can be seen as a revival of the Plantation Novel, a Southern genre of utopian fiction "in which life is rich and good, the lower classes are happy in their place and sing a lot, and evil resides in the technological North. The fantasy plot is the Civil War run backward: the South wins." The parallels are striking.
All in all, I found this collection to be moderately enjoyable, though my two favorite stories were ones I'd read before. The only stories I disliked were "Lady of the Skulls" and "We Are Norsemen." Not bad for such an anthology. I'm not sure if I feel like diving back into short genre fiction again, though. I mean, I kinda have an itch for one or two of the annual best-ofs, but what would really do it for me now is another collection like this one or Modern Classics of Fantasy, curating stories from a span of several decades. I can't think of another specifically fantasy title that offers what I want.
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