In “What Inspires Me,” Patricia A. McKillip’s WisCon 2004 Guest of Honor speech, and penultimate entry in The Essential Patricia A. McKillip, the award-winning fantasy writer said: “What I set out to do about fifteen years ago was to write a series of novels that were like paintings in a gallery by the same artist. Each work is different, but they are all related to one another by two things: they are all fantasy, and they are all by the same person” (p. 298). That’s the best possible summary of what this new career retrospective is, I think, though of course it’s made of short stories and not novels. It’s an excellent primer on McKillip’s themes, threads, preoccupations, imagery, and style, as well as her incredible range. And it led me to reflect on some of her intersections with other writers, too.
As far as themes and threads go: A prominent one is women who are trapped by their roles, by a lack of opportunity, and by men. These men are sometimes well-meaning and clueless—but often they are mean and even cruel, dismissive and neglectful, and closed. Men who don’t ask questions, who assume things about the women and the world around them: what they are like and what they are capable of and what they mean. Many of these stories (and a lot of McKillip’s work in general) are romantic and end happily (as she alludes to in “Writing High Fantasy,” the final entry in this anthology); but it’s the men who are willing not just to think, but to reconsider, who find happy endings. These men put metaphors together and uncover different perspectives, and they allow other people to know more than they do. The exception to this lies in the more fairy-tale or parable-feeling stories, like “The Lion and the Lark,” in which the man is a magical entity and doesn’t do a whole lot of learning or changing. But in “The Lion and the Lark,” the man at least does a good job of knowing and loving the protagonist.
The fairy world appears often, posited as a secret world. And here’s another of the collection’s threads: secrets, and particularly secret identities and their discovery. The majority of these stories have at least one character who isn’t who they seem to be, or who isn’t sure themselves who they are. There’s often a lot of intersection between secret identities and secret worlds, or sometimes simply a different, secret, way of things. Indeed, the most important hallmark of McKillip’s style, I think, is her particular mix of solidity and dreaminess. Her characters feel like real people, with practical concerns, who you could imagine stubbing their toes or running out of groceries—things that are mundane but also specific to them and their world. But these solid characters exist in much more fluid worlds. Her settings and plots are both held together by feeling, evocative description, and character, and so sometimes they’re vague and oddly shaped. Sometimes her novels can be a little loose and meandering because of that dreaminess, while some of the short stories in this collection end before I wish they did.
My two very favorite stories in the collection are “Lady of the Skulls and “Byndley.” Both of them exemplify this point about style in fascinating ways.
There’s something particularly powerful and rich about “Lady of the Skulls,” and I think part of that is due to how focused the setting is: a lone tower, filled with vast amounts of mythical treasure, standing far away from everything on a barren plain. Those who visit the tower are allowed to choose one thing to take with them. If they choose the most precious thing in the tower, they can leave freely; if they choose wrongly, they die as soon as they leave. The Lady of the Skulls is the woman who guards this tower and has to watch as men come and break themselves on it. She plants her flowers in old skulls. Her watering can is the helmet of some past adventurer.
I felt the awe of the magic here, and understood this woman as a particular, specific person. All of the complex elements and different flavors get to kind of marinate in this one specific place, which sits at one specific point in these men’s lives. We do get a flashback at the end, but it feels like a reward to me, not a break in focus, because it finally gives us the final piece we need to understand the place we’ve been in for the rest of the story.
In general, though, my favorite McKillip stories tend to sit somewhere in between her real-world style and her vaguest dream-like style. “Byndley” does exactly that. It is about a wizard named Reck who once fell in love with the faerie queen. The faerie queen invited him into the woods, and took him into her bed. But the queen has a husband, and Reck can’t help but be jealous. He steals a special gift that the king gave the queen: a “tiny living world within a glass globe” that’s astonishingly beautiful. Because he’s a wizard, he was able to escape, by jumping into the globe itself and making the globe vanish. Now, years later, he still has the globe.
“I took it partly to hurt her, because she stole me out of my world and made me love her and she did not love me, and partly because it is very beautiful, and partly so that I could show it to others, as proof that I had been in the realm of Faerie and found my way back to this world. I took it out of anger and jealousy, wounded pride and arrogance. And out of love, most certainly out of love. I wanted to remember that once I had been in that secret, gorgeous country just beyond imagination, and to possess in this drab world a tiny part of that one.” (p. 111)
But Reck doesn’t say this to excuse or defend himself. He explains this to one of the citizens of the town of Byndley, where he’s come on a quest to return the glass globe back to the faerie world. He cannot live in peace with what he’s stolen. He feels the weight of the queen’s memory—or his own guilt. So he searches far and wide for a way to give it back. And in his search, it turns out, he seems to have discovered something true about faerieland and about himself, something that applies to McKillip’s stories generally: Something about the porousness of worlds, and about what it means to be inside one or another, and how you can sometimes be in more than one place at the same time, in different ways.
In fact, Reck discovers that he’s never really left the globe at all. The town of Byndley is made up of faeries in disguise, and the townsperson to whom he told his tale was the faerie queen herself. When he leaves Byndley, he doesn’t look back: “He looked up instead and saw the lovely, mysterious, star-shot night flowing everywhere around him, and the promise, in the faint, distant flush at the edge of the world, of an enchanted dawn” (p. 116). This is how McKillip’s work makes me feel, too, and I think it’s what I want out of fantasy most of all (alongside characters to be there with me): the feeling of that promise of wonder and enchantment, and the truth of that feeling. Somehow, by giving the globe back, Reck gets to keep that feeling with him, which was what he really wanted anyway.
Stylistically, “Byndley” and “Lady of the Skulls” work particularly well because of the way they give us that feeling—they give us a world that we can feel that way about. It’s magical enough to be wondrous, but it’s also defined enough to picture at all. Sometimes, McKillip’s more real-world stories lose the wonder for me—“Mer,” for example, is this way, although I did really enjoy it. Others are so vague that it’s hard to get a grip on anything, though this is more true of some of her novels than of any of the stories in this collection. In The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995), for example, there’s also a wizard who tries to travel between the fairy realm and the human realm. But that story is written in a much more dreamlike way, and also (maybe more importantly, even) the journey often takes place in Atrix Wolfe’s head. For much of the book, he has nobody to talk to about what he’s trying to do or what exactly is troubling him. In “Byndley,” Reck asks people questions all the time, so that even if we don’t get definite answers about what the world is like, we learn what the people of Byndley are like and what they think. In “Lady of the Skulls,” the two main characters ask each other questions, too. There’s something about that communication and the acceptance of wonder that really makes these stories come alive.
McKillip is unique; there’s no one else who you’d mistake for her. But she is deeply invested in fantasy as a genre, and fantasy in turn is often interested in interpretation and repetition (among other things). Le Guin is maybe the most obvious comparison, as far as feminism and the role of women in magic go (A Wizard of Earthsea [1968] notwithstanding; McKillip didn’t need to go through the learning curve that Le Guin did). Tanith Lee is also in there, and Angela Carter (Carter especially in “The Lion and the Lark”); and, a little bit more recently, Ursula Vernon—the matter-of-factness, the vivid lives of different unusual people (particularly women), the brand of humor. But “Byndley” in particular shows McKillip’s fundamental Beagle-ness.
Peter S. Beagle is an admirer of McKillip’s work and they collaborated on a novel; he also wrote the afterword to Dreams of Distant Shores (2016). Together, they’re two of my personal favorite writers because of their simultaneous true love of fantasy and reality—for the strangeness to be found within. McKillip is a little dreamier than Beagle is, Beagle a little more jokey and parodic, and Beagle’s women frustrate me sometimes, but that’s for some other review; but ultimately what we see in their fantasies is an unusual interest in people and in spaces-between.
Take, for example, McKillip’s “The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath.” This is a relatively early story. And Kushner’s introduction explains that Terri Windling commissioned it for her collection Elsewhere in 1982; it was McKillip’s first published short story for adults. I like how surprising it is, and how funny it is. The characters are taken seriously—it matters who they are and why they think and feel the ways they do. What happens to them isn’t predictable, and nor is it predictable what the story focuses on and cares about. It’s excellent stuff. Likewise, in “The Witches of Junket,” the characters are great and at the very centre of the story, alongside a really fascinating portrayal of witchiness. The POV character in particular is one of McKillip’s excellent older women. If the story gets a little bit jumbled up, and the pacing is a little bit too fast—there are too many new characters and I would’ve loved the time to get to know them a little better, and to more clearly understand what was at stake—this can be forgiven because of the connection it makes between reader and characters.
“The Witches of Junket” is set in our contemporary world, as is “Out of the Woods.” This is another story that’s difficult to predict, but in this case that’s more because of what the story chooses to focus on than because of plot. The main character, Leta, is worked to the bone by her husband and by her magician boss, and we know that something must change. But that change is surprising, more melancholy than I expected, and somehow also exactly right. I wish this story had been longer, because I wanted to know what happens to the main character, but its abrupt ending is part of the point. Indeed, I’m not always very patient about shorter stories, especially when they hinge on ambiguity or some sort of “gotcha” moment, but McKillip almost always wrong-foots me. I have no idea what happens in “Weird,” for example, and yet I’m still thinking about it. I don’t feel irritated or upset about that, just intrigued.
Still, “Knight in the Well” is maybe the book’s primary example of McKillip’s dreamy vagueness: There’s a lot going on, it’s beautiful, and, again, I had no idea what any of it meant until maybe halfway through the story at best. This story, too, ends rather abruptly, and I would’ve enjoyed much more time with these characters instead of having their conflicts resolved so fast. In contrast with “Weird,” however, this is one of the volume’s longer stories, at around fifty pages. “The Gorgon in the Cupboard” is of similar length, and likewise I wanted more perspective from it: on the story’s women, as well as more information about the titular gorgon, who in a way was the least interesting part of the story. If the shorter stories can feel too brief, both of these longer stories feel a little bit structurally lopsided—and so also somehow unfinished.
Why are these stories the length that they are? Why not longer or shorter? I wonder what was going on with these stories; were they written for some purpose in particular? I would love more background information on them. This is perhaps my one real criticism of the present volume: I would have liked more information on the stories, and more information about the logic behind the anthology itself. It’s a lovely book, and all of the stories deserve to be here and to be read carefully. I’m just not sure what makes this collection the “Essential” McKillip, especially when compared to Tachyon’s earlier (and also excellent) McKillip anthology, Dreams of Distant Shores. With a title like this, I’d have liked there to be an explanation of why these stories, and not others, are so definitive.
For instance, “Wonders of the Invisible World,” collected here, is the title of another McKillip anthology, and so we might assume it has significance. In the story (which shares its title with a book by Cotton Mather, the seventeenth-century Puritan), a researcher from the far future goes back in time and pretends to be an angel that Cotton Mather saw in a feverish revelation. Her boss has sent her there because he’s trying to write a history of imaginative thought—and, in their far future, everything possible to imagine has already been imagined by a very powerful computer. The researcher isn’t allowed to veer from her script, which is set to minimize any alteration of the past, even though she very much wants to. When Cotton Mather raves about witches, it’s difficult for her to stomach. But she’s supposed to keep the angel within the limits of what Cotton Mather would have imagined the angel to be.
When the researcher returns home, to a time when everything imaginable has already been imagined, her son and her friends are playing a video game together. Their characters are in an intergalactic zoo, and they try to defeat the computer by imagining different animals. The computer is always able to display whatever the children dream up—but then an angel appears in one of the animal cages. The angel belongs to none of them. Except, possibly, to the researcher. The angel is caught in the zoo, like the researchers are caught in history, and like her current world is trapped because imagination can no longer create a way out. But then the angel disappears, and that’s the end of the story. So what does this mean, and what can it tell us about the logic of this collection? My best stab at it: The Essential Patricia A. McKillip is by and large concerned with three things—how can imagination set people free, what do people imagine, and how do those imagined things/people/places connect and change throughout space and time?
If nothing else, this collection certainly serves as an excellent McKillip primer. The anthology itself is beautiful: Thomas Carey’s cover illustration is so very McKillip, and it’s also resonant of the ornate Kinuko Y. Craft’s Ace covers. Ellen Kushner’s foreword is deeply personal and moving. But other excellent McKillip primers exist: They include Dreams of Distant Shores itself, a Strange Horizons roundtable on Ombria in Shadow, and Audrey Isabel Taylor’s Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building. I also highly recommend The Riddle-Master of Hed and its two sequels, as well as The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. But if you haven’t started reading McKillip yet, this is certainly a good place to start—and then, hopefully, continue. But, wherever you start reading McKillip’s work, you won’t want to stop.