In the Forests of Serre (2003) by Patricia McKillip. A tyrannical king of a magical forest engages his recently widowed son to the princess of a neighboring kingdom, whether either of those parties want it. The grieving widower son gets cursed by a Baba Yaga-esque witch. The princess tries her best to protect her kingdom, which happens to include a wizard recovering from a debilitating fight to the death with an ancient monster, which he got involved with because of the thoughtlessness a younger wizard whose aid he came to and who he sends off to protect the princess in her travels. The wizard is being tended by a scribe borrowed from the nearby monastary, who finds himself somewhat unwillingly devoted to the wizard, in all his foibles.
Maybe one of the reasons McKillip's books are famously kind of hard to remember is because there's so much going on in them, character-wise, and yet often relatively little plotwise. That is a lot of characters to pack into 300 pages, especially when the pace of the book is fairly slow and meditative. The actual events of this book are thin on the ground and mostly involve characters traveling or having conversations. Every so often we return to the kingdom of Dacre, where our scribe makes sure the enfeebled wizard is sleeping properly and getting enough to eat.
I've described McKillip's ouvre as what I wanted fairy tales to be like when I was a kid: beautiful, gossamer fantasies, with characters that felt like people. This one really nails that for me. We have some elements lifted directly from folk tails, like the witch Brum and the various quests the prince finds himself going on for talking animals he meets. We have the spectre of the monster, who even in death is casting a pall over those it touched in life. We have characters concerned for each others' health and well-being. We even have a very late, very casual reveal that complicates one of our villains in a way I didn't expect at all, even though maybe I should've.
Overall, a delightful time. Glad I finally got to this one in my McKillip reading.
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Furnace (2016) by Livia Llewellyn. A collection of short stories, mostly horror or dark fantasy, some erotic, many with a surrealist bent.
I've been meaning to read more of Llewellyn's work after really liking her story "Omphalos" in a collection
I read a few years ago, and since I've been on a roll reading short fiction lately, now is when I got around to it. In that review, I wrote,
I'm not 100% sure what happens in it, but I don't care. The first half of that continued to be true through most of this collection, but unfortunately after a while I did start to care. I also found that her prose started to bother me after a while; I found a lot of it overheated and overwritten, using too much description to diminishing returns. Her occasional efforts in experimentation, such as the story entirely in lower case or the several stories in second person, also mostly did not work for me.
Llewellyn is definitely saying things around bodily agency, female sexuality, patriarchy, and also some things about toxic female familial relations, often mother-daughter ones. I can't say much of it resonated with me, unfortunately, but I do appreciate the centrality of the female perspective here.
I also really enjoy is that Llewellyn clearly has a relationship with the Pacific Northwest, and most of the stories with an identifiable real-world location are set there. I've never read a horror(?) story set in a Tacoma mall before or in the worker housing at the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. The sense of regional specificity is really neat.
I did like a few stories okay out of the bunch:
"Cinereous." A woman with a menial job at an institute doing horrible human experiments is determined to show them she is worthy of greater involvement in the horrible experiments. A satisfyingly nasty little story with a suitably horrible ending.
"It Feels Better Biting Down." One of the most surrealist of the bunch, a story about codependent twin sisters who get everything they want, more or less. I just enjoyed the incestuousness vibes tbh. Also the body horror.
"Allocthon," the aforementioned story set in Bonneville construction housing, which is also a cosmic-flavored time loop story about a housewife whose prosaic dreams of a tropical vacation morph into an increasing desperation to see something on a mountainside that the time reset prevents her from seeing.
"The Last, Clean, Bright Summer." One of the most straightforward from a narrative perspective, a folk horror piece in the form of diary entries of a fourteen-year-old girl who finally gets to participate in the family reunion. I'm not sure what it says about me or Llewellyn that I often like her best when she's writing about underage rape, although unlike in "Omphalos," the rape here is very weird. I enjoyed the cosmic horror stuff, the weird biology, and the theme of alienation from one's parents (who in this case, it turns out, are literally not even her parents). Would pair really well with Attila Veres' story "The Black Maybe."
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