Sleight of Hand by Peter S. Beagle
287 pages
Published 2011
Read from August 29 to September 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I like Beagle -- I've never yet been disappointed by one of his stories, though I'm sure that will change -- but the dude has written so few novels over the years, even while producing a daunting mountain of short story collections. Annual best-of anthologies are fun, and retrospectives of several decades of fantasy writing are better, but the former are filled with more fluff than gems, and I can't seem to find more of the latter. Digging into collections by my favorite short story authors seems to be a good third option; we'll see how this one turns out.
"The Rock in the Park" (2010). An expanded treatment of a podcast, of all things, originally published in the Beagle anthology Mirror Kingdoms just the year before this collection was put together. I've yet to read a Beagle story I didn't like, but the guy pumps out short story collections like a salmon dumping eggs in a stream, doesn't he? Anyway, for a story anthologized twice in as many years, "Rock" is a shade insubstantial, a charming and funny piece about magic intruding upon real life, standard Beagle material.
"Sleight of Hand" (2009). Read and reviewed previously in The Secret History of Fantasy, a retrospective edited by Beagle. "This is a damn good story," I wrote in that review.
"The Children of the Shark God" (2010). An old-fashioned sort of fable, familiar in both good and bad senses of the term -- cozy but unsurprising. I don't believe it says anything new about the intersection of gods and people, even though it says it in Beagle's usual warm, languid way.
"The Best Worst Monster" (2011). Intersperse the text with quirky watercolor spreads, and this would be a superb kids' picture book. As a short story, it's childish (in a good way), mischievous, and cute, but too brief.
"What Tune the Enchantress Plays" (2008). Now this is classic Beagle: understated, evocative, based in character, sentimental and dreamy without being treacly. I'm moderately intrigued by the secondary world, the world of the Innkeeper stories, he uses here, though I have the feeling that consistent, sustained worldbuilding will never be Beagle's focus. Not the best Beagle story I've ever read -- it didn't wring the tears out of me like "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" -- but it's solid. I recommend it.
"La Lune T'Attend" (2010). Did you ever stop reading a story partway through, because you liked the characters so much you didn't want to see their inevitable pain and misfortune? The friendship between the two central werewolves in this story, Arceneaux and Garrigue, is tired, gentle, lived-in -- and even though their respective families aren't especially developed, I still cared enough about the main duo within just a few pages that it took me days to push through to the end, knowing something bad was bound to happen. Perhaps my pace dulled what should have been a moving climax and resolution, or perhaps Beagle just didn't stick the landing for once -- it's hard to be sure.
"Up the Down Beanstalk: A Wife Remembers" (2009). Cute, insubstantial reworking of Jack and the Beanstalk from the perspective of the giant's wife.
"The Rabbi's Hobby" (2008). A sweet, beautifully well-done little ghost story, understated, full of gentle humanity -- pretty much a template for a solid Beagle story.
"Oakland Dragon Blues" (2009). Winsome but formulaic trifle about the magic of writing, showing a dragon its way back into its proper fairy tale, etc.
"The Bridge Partner" (2011). This story has a distinctively '80s vibe to it, as if it were forgotten in a drawer since 1987 and dusted off for publication here. The whole conceit of a cheerful serial killer reacting to the passivity and predictability of human nature, stalking the mousy housewife protagonist and happily warning her "I will kill you," thereby stirring the woman out of her passivity, would have been entirely at home in 1988's The Year's Best Fantasy. In fact, Beagle takes pains to spell out that an '80s-style switcheroo ending doesn't happen, even as an '80s-style ending kinda happens: "The photographs [of previous victims, in the killer's home] were pressing in around her, each so anxious to be properly savored and understood.... It was not possession of any sort; she was always herself. Never for a moment did she fancy that she was the woman [the killer] she had killed on the beach...." The ending, redemptive and optimistic rather than nihilistic and grim, is the only clue that this wasn't unearthed from a time capsule along with a Bryan Adams cassette single and a VHS of Top Gun. "The Bridge Partner" is a good sample of its type, but this will never be my favorite sort of story.
"Dirae" (2010). Like Fledgling, this opens with sensory stimuli and the narrator's growing awareness of existence and her surroundings. Unlike Fledgling, this story actually justifies and benefits from such a structure, and does so ever so much more stylishly than Butler's sadly final novel. "Dirae" is mostly style around a thin skeleton of substance, so I can't call it a classic by any means, but I liked it.
"Vanishing" (2010). A sad, ultimately moving ghost story built upon a haunting (ha) visual: the Berlin Wall left hanging in a void, as the ghosts or spirits of four people whose lives intersected one day must escape whatever metaphysical allegory it represents. The weakest aspect, in my opinion, was the perhaps inevitable translation of the characters' emotional or existential struggles into a rather on-the-nose attempt to escape over the Wall. But maybe I'm merely looking for things to pick at. Good story all around, really.
"The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon" (2011). Another Beaglean rumination on the meaning of magic, starring the wizard Schmendrick, before the events of The Last Unicorn. Sweetly written, not amazing, mostly just a pleasant interlude.
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