Of Knights, Wizards, and Both

I recently borrowed a The Knight from a friend. Part one of a duology called The Wizard Knight. Strongly rooted in Norse mythology, this fantasy follows a young boy as he stumbles into a land of fairies and giants, seeking to remember his past and become a hero.

In some ways this is a conventional fantasy, such as Able's origin in our world, but in other ways it is completely new to me. One of these new elements is the plot...or lack thereof. When reading, one usually expects a hook, a stirring rise, and a dramatic peak to the action, before dropping off to a conclusion of some kind. Not so, The Knight. With this story, the main plot seems to take place in the background, rather brought to light by inference as Able, narrating in the first person, throws in comments about grand battles and convoluted politics that happen outside the tedious day to day wanderings of the confused hero.

SEMI-SPOILER ALERT

What we the audience see, Able stumbles out of a cave where an Overcyn gives him a bow string. Then he wanders into a forest and meets an old man who takes care of him. Then he meets a knight who sends him back into the forest where he meets a fairy queen. She turns him into a strapping, handsome man. When he goes back to the knight he gets lost and finds a woman and her baby. Later on he gets a dog. Able leaves the woods and travels to a town and gets on a ship, thinking to lose the dog. He beats up the captain, pirates attack, and the dog catches up. After Able gets wounded the dog jumps overboard to find help and fairies take Able to the sea and teach him the way of water. He climbs a tower and drinks some water. By the time he gets back to the ship, years have gone by. The ship takes him to a town where he goes into a volcano, meets a dragon, and years pass. He finds the ship again, and the dog. Then he goes to become a knight and gets sent on an adventure after picking a fight with the local knights and hunting for the fairy queen. Then the dog comes back.

The actual story seems to pick up sometime in the latter half of the book, but even then, one is not certain what the point of the whole book is exactly. But the great thing is that none of that matters. The story is beautifully written and simply making sense of it all is half the fun. And the magic is rendered in a refreshingly clever way: many books have lately tried to make magic more of a science (Harry Potter comes to mind, as does Howl's Moving Castle and the Warhammer Fantasy RPG) but The Knight takes the magic spells and sorcery cookbooks back to the basics by making magic strange and more elemental. My favorite example was when the fairy queen kisses Able and declares that he belongs to her. Able's response: "I knew it was true." Magic!

Now I'm on to the second book, The Wizard. It promises - for now - to be much more linear, though some of the fairy-land frolicking does come into play from time to time, and seemingly random characters are still cropping up without notice. The dog is back, Able is looking for trouble, and there is still no word from America. I'll write again once I've read to the end.

Madcaps Murder

Some folks have been writing about the recent publication of a "how to" book for pedophiles, so I thought I had heard everything. Not so! While stumbling about on Google this morning I came across an archived article in the New York Times about a publisher agreeing to withdraw a "how to" book for hired assassins.

Way back in 1983, Paladin Press released Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, ostensibly to benefit "a wide audience, including crime buffs and mystery writers." It also apparently influenced James E. Perry, who in 1993 killed a mother, her 8-year-old son, and the boy's nurse - the child being a quadriplegic. Curiously, in the ensuing case it came to light, a la one of those CIA programs, that the boy's father wanted to inherit the $1.7 million estate that his son had won through a medical malpractice suit. Perry was hired for the job and the rest is history.

Naturally, rather than simply acknowledge Perry's wickedness, someone went looking for the "cause" and targeted Paladin Press, forcing them through a pretty major court case to withdraw the book, despite evidence suggesting that Perry relied more upon his background in Detroit than on the contents of Hit Man. No matter, a quick Amazon search suggests that the book remains out of print, though prior to the book being pulled it had sold roughly 13,000 copies...

Literary Journal Analysis

I recently subscribed to American Short Fiction and The Missouri Review. Both magazines struck me as the standard literary magazine: stories were character driven, built upon deep thoughts and descriptive tale-telling, achieved through the vivid pictures painted rather than the stories told. It was not the story – though these could be quite compelling, such as the one about Joseph Smith below – so much as how the story developed the protagonist.

The word I would use to describe American Short Fiction would be “edgy,” a feeling that seemed to permeate the whole magazine, even its matt finish. Covers featured interpretive art and photography, including odd themes such as two pair of hands exchanging a bloody knife and a little girl holding dead birds by the feet. The editors of American Short Fiction placed a great deal of importance on themes, as evidenced in the introductions: the Summer 2010 issue focused on “rights of passage” Fall 2010 issue focused on short fiction, including some interesting flash fiction. The content was deeply introspective. The Woolly Mammoth Carried Me Home had nothing to do with woolly mammoths and everything to do with coming of age while losing a parent to cancer – among other things, such as balloons, toy cars, and wiener dogs choking on the same. Diviner, on the other hand, followed the wooing of a country girl by Joseph Smith, as watched by her disapproving, but ultimately defeated father. In Madmen, the narrator did not like how the hands on paper doll streamers merged together. Field Trip drew many visual and ideal parallels between goats and people, ending with a stillborn kid goat.

I should think the audience of American Short Fiction would be deep thinkers and those who like to read challenging ideas. The concepts presented in Field Trip, for instance, were possibly open for interpretation, but were curious in a disturbing sense. The reader was presented with a strange billy goat with a blue tongue, who bred with the young ewes, one of which birthed a stillborn kid at the end of the story. Strange as this spectacle was, the teacher leading the school group of which the narrator was a member was herself pregnant, leading the reader to wonder what sort of message was being delivered. Similarly, the author of Madmen tackles the taboos of puberty in young girls, occasionally straying towards the graphic in a way that challenges accepted norms, contributing to the edgy, rough appeal.

The Missouri Review, on the other hand, while keeping a certain edge, seemed to favor works that were a little more straightforward and story-like. Covers hinted at adventure and more challenging themes, featuring photographs of risk-takers, artistic renditions of people turning flips out of trees and off of precarious chairs. Selection of materials in The Missouri Review was more varied, allowing for essays, fiction, and poetry, though each issue did have a somewhat focused theme, such as “life’s buffetings” or the “dark or destructive forces in human nature.” Content was also rather introspective, though narrative events had more place there. The Church at Yavi followed an ex-husband and wife as they relived their experiences with a rebellious daughter and visited the place of her death. I Think You Think I’m Still Funny depicted the stress a young man felt in the presence of his immature, stoner buddy from school. The poetry was very literary in that it was not easy for me to follow and was structured for those who wish to make sense of what they read, rather than have it presented in catchy rhythm. Happily, in between the melodramatic stories, the editors had the magnanimity to insert cartoons to lighten the mood.

With these things in mind, I envisioned the audience as being those people interested in human dramas on a leisure level. Stories were slow paced and the dramas unfolded at their own pace, giving the reader plenty of time to take everything in. It was interesting to watch the elderly couple traverse the South American countryside in a seemingly vain attempt to solve their daughter’s death (they didn’t) and though it was hard to tell if the narrator changed in any way, as is the usual formula for a story with beginning, middle, and end, his character was certainly developed along en rout. Similarly with I’m Still Funny, the main character’s personality did not really develop so much as get revealed through his interactions with the rather static antagonist/best friend. Both examples depicted characters in a progressing setting, rather than a linear story with a plot, but within each of these stories the drama unfolded to reveal the characters in their entirety.