The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  handled—a process reflected in small-scale alternative histories.

  DEAN, PAMELA (1953– ). Pseudonym of U.S. writer Pamela Dyer-Bennett. In the trilogy comprising The Secret Country (1985), The Hidden Land (1986), and The Whim of the Dragon (1989), a role-playing game intrudes upon the primary world. Tam Lin (1991) recycles the famous ballad in the context of a university. In the psychological fantasy The Dubious Hills (1994), wizards conduct a magical experiment that alters their subjects’ perceptions of pain. Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary (1998) features three sisters whose life is infused with magic by an enigmatic young man.

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  DEATH. The symbolic personification of death is a common stratagem of fantasy art, to the extent that the image of the hooded Grim Reaper carrying his scythe has become a popular scarecrow of humorous fantasy, flamboyantly developed in one of the main sequences of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Other familiar depictions include the angel of death, often called Azrael, and urbane elderly gentlemen. Personable young men, like John Death in T. F. Powys’s Unclay and female manifestations like Mara in George MacDonald’s Lilith are also featured, and other idiosyncratic guises are improvised in melancholy fantasies and horror stories.

  Notable examples of personified Death are featured in Pedro de Alar-cón’s The Strange Friend of Tito Gil (1852; tr. 1890), Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s Lord of the Dark Red Star, Alberto Casella’s play Death Takes a Holiday (tr. 1930), Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer,” L. E. Watkin’s On Borrowed Time (1937)—in which

  “Mr. Brink” is temporarily trapped in a magical apple tree—Nik Cohn’s King Death (1975), and Dan Simmons’s “The Great Lover” (1993).

  DECADENT FANTASY. The term “decadence” was borrowed from historians of the Roman Empire for application to literary works self-consciously symptomatic of a supposedly parallel phase in 19th-century European culture. Such works often deal with—or are themselves aspects of—neurotic quests for eccentric and extreme sensations capable of combating the dire effects of ennui and spleen. Charles Baudelaire was the definitive exponent of “decadent style,” and followers of the fin de siècle movement inspired by his example were fascinated by all

  things abnormal, artificial, morbid, perverse, and exotic; they were inevitably drawn to fantastic themes and bizarre stylistic embellishments, and their work dramatically expanded the ambition, bizarrerie, and grandiloquence of fantastic fiction.

  Key figures in the Decadent movement included the poets Paul Ver-

  laine (1844–96) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), the prose writers Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917), Catulle Mendès (1841–1909), Jean Lorrain, Rachilde (1860–1953), Rémy de Gourmont, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Pierre Louÿs. Many of these also warrant consideration as lifestyle fantasists, the most extravagant French exemplar being the would-be Rosicrucian magus Joséphin Péladan (1859–1916). The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-siècle France (1998), ed. Asti Hustvedt, and two Dedalus Books of Decadence (1990 and 1992), ed. Brian Stableford, are useful samplers.

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  The central document of decadent prose fiction is Huysmans’s sar-

  castic comedy À rebours (1884; tr. as Against the Grain or Against Nature), the “yellow book” that led Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray to damnation and inspired John Lane’s famous periodical. Lane’s Keynotes series included several classics of English decadence, but the British movement was nipped in the bud by the fall of its implicit leader, Wilde. Notable short-story writers influenced by its ideals include Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, Vernon Lee, Arthur Ransome, and R. Murray Gilchrist, the author of The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances (1894; exp. as The Basilisk and Other Tales of Dread 2003). London’s leading lifestyle fantasist was Count Stenbock, the Estonian-born author of Studies of Death: Romantic Tales (1894; exp. 1996). John Meade Falkner’s The Lost Stradivarius (1895) and Shiel’s The Purple Cloud were the most significant English decadent fantasy novels.

  The fugitive spirit of British decadence was carried forward by James Elroy Flecker, Norman Douglas, Lord Berners, Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925), and Ronald Firbank’s Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) and The Artificial Princess (1934). Vincent O’Sullivan, whose decadent fantasies are included in Master of Fallen Years: Complete Supernatural Stories of Vincent O’Sullivan (1995, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson) made his home in Europe, although he belonged to a cadre of American “Bohemians” that included James Huneker, Lafcadio Hearn, Ambrose Bierce, Emma Frances Dawson, and George Sterling. The most extravagant American decadent fantasies were, however, produced by the immigrant George S. Viereck and Ben Hecht; the leading German decadent fantasist, Hanns Heinz Ewers—author of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1907; tr.

  1927) and Alraune (1911; tr. 1929)—also spent a good deal of time in the United States.

  The ultimate examples of exotic decadent prose were, oddly enough

  produced for the pages of Weird Tales by Sterling’s disciple Clark Ashton Smith, whose work in that vein influenced other members of H. P.

  Lovecraft’s circle and many later writers in a similar vein, including Thomas Ligotti, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and Darrell Schweitzer. An ornately artificial style and a preoccupation with cultural exhaustion are retained in a great many far-futuristic fantasies and other texts focused on long-established cities. Secondary worlds often present an exaggerated contrast between decadent cities and Arcadian landscapes, tacitly viewing civilization in Rousseauesque fashion as a process of corruption. Notable decadent cultures are featured in

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  Brian Aldiss’s The Malacia Tapestry, Sarah Ash’s Moths to a Flame, and Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series; notable decadent cities include Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, Faren Miller’s Xalycis in The Illusionists (1991), Felicity Savage’s Delta City, and K. J. Bishop’s Ashamoil.

  DE CAMP, L. SPRAGUE (1907–2000). U.S. writer who set the characteristic tone of the pulp magazine Unknown with humorous/chimerical fantasies applying a distinctively modern rationality to premises borrowed from traditional fantasy. In “None but Lucifer” (1939 with Horace L. Gold), a young American employs modern marketing theory

  to revitalize the Devil’s temptation-and-punishment business. De Camp’s long-standing literary partnership with Fletcher Pratt began in 1940 with the first of the Harold Shea stories, whose hero is displaced into a series of literary and mythical milieux; the first two novellas, collected in The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), visit the worlds of Nordic mythology and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, while The Castle of Iron (1941; book 1950) dips into the world of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

  The two books were combined as The Compleat Enchanter (1975), even though two further novellas had by then been issued in Wall of Serpents (1960), which had to be added to the larger omnibus The Intrepid Enchanter (1988; aka The Complete Compleat Enchanter). The series was further extended by the of shared world/anthologies The Enchanter Reborn (1992) and The Exotic Enchanter (1994), both coedited by Christopher Stasheff, to which de Camp contributed Sir Harold and the Gnome King (1991) and “Sir Harold of Zodanga.”

  De Camp and Pratt also collaborated on the Celtic fantasy The Land of Unreason (1941; book 1942), the alternative history fantasy The Carnelian Cube (1948), and the tall stories collected in Tales from Gavagan’s Bar (1953; exp. 1978). De Camp’s solo fantasies for Unknown included the parodic fairy tale The Undesired Princess (1942; book 1990 with a sequel by David Drake, “The Enchanted Bunny”) and

  Solomon’s Stone (1942; book 1957), which features an astral plane inhabited by the dream projections of earthly men. His subsequent humorous fantasies include those collected in The Reluctant Shaman (1970), The Purple Pterodactyls (1979), and Heroes and Hobgoblins (1981), as well as three volumes written in collaboration with his wife, Catherine Crook de Camp (1907–2000): the novels The Incorporated Knight (1987) and
The Pixillated Peeress (1991), and the collection Footprints on Sand (1981).

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  De Camp was the first posthumous collaborator to extend the career of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, completing some fragments for Tales of Conan (1955) and revising Bjorn Nyberg’s The Return of Conan (1957; aka Conan the Avenger) before writing many more pastiches in collaboration with Lin Carter when the series was reprinted in paperback in the late 1960s. His own sword and sorcery stories are more lighthearted; The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales (1953) collects his early work in that vein, including the 1951 title piece, while the No-varia series comprises The Goblin Tower (1968), The Clocks of Iraz (1971), The Unbeheaded King (1980), and The Honorable Barbarian (1989). The Fallible Fiend, set in the same quasi-classical milieu, is a broader comedy.

  De Camp’s crucial contribution to the establishment of fantasy as a commercial genre also involved editing a definitive series of showcase anthologies, comprising Swords and Sorcery (1963), The Spell of Seven (1965), The Fantastic Swordsmen (1967), and Warlocks and Warriors (1970), their exemplars supported by essays collected in The Conan Reader (1968), Blond Barbarians and Noble Savages (1975), and Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerors: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (1976).

  More essays in a similar vein are included with other materials in Rubber Dinosaurs and Wooden Elephants (1997). De Camp also wrote The Miscast Barbarian: A Biography of Robert E. Howard (1975; exp. as Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard, 1983, with Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin), and Lovecraft: A Biography (1976).

  DEDALUS. Publishing house specializing in “literary fantasy,” founded by Eric Lane, Robert Irwin and Geoffrey Smith; its launch package included. Irwin’s The Arabian Nightmare and Smith’s revisionist vampire fantasy The Revenants (1983, bylined “Geoffrey Farrington”). It went on to reprint a good deal of decadent fantasy and some surreal fantasy, much of it in translation; it became the English publisher of such writers as Sylvie Germain and Herbert Rosendorfer and the discoverer of such native talents as Andrew Crumey and David Madsen, author of the historical fantasy Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf (1995) and the hallucinatory fantasy A Box of Dreams (2003).

  Dedalus provided an invaluable account of the historical range and international scope of fantasy literature in a series of showcase anthologies including The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: The Meyrink Years 1890–1930 (1992; exp. 2003 as The Dedalus Book of

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  Austrian Fantasy: 1890–2000), ed. Mike Mitchell; The Dedalus Book of German Decadence: Voices of the Abyss (1994), ed. Ray Furness The Dedalus Book of Roman Decadence; Emperors of Debauchery (1994), ed. Geoffrey Farrington; The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy (1995), ed. Eugénio Lisboa and Helder Macedo; The Dedalus Book of Medieval Literature: The Grin of the Gargoyle (1995), ed. Brian Mur-doch; The Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy (1996), ed. Wiesieck Powaga; The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy (1999), ed. Margaret Jull Costa and Annella McDermott; The Dedalus Book of Greek Fantasy (2004), ed. David Connolly; and The Dedalus Occult Reader: The Garden of Hermetic Dreams (2004), ed. Gary Lachman.

  DE HAVEN, TOM (1949– ). U.S. writer in various genres. The humorous fantasy Funny Papers (1985)—categorized by the author as

  “screwball noir”—was followed up by the marginal Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies (1996) and Dugan Under Ground (2001). The Chronicles of the King’s Tramp trilogy, comprising Walker of Worlds (1990), The End-of-Everything Man (1991), and The Last Human (1992), is an earnest portal fantasy in which a multiverse is threatened with collapse. The Orphan’s Tent (1996) is a bizarre mystery involving a vanished rock singer. His short fiction is sampled in Pixie Meat (1990).

  DEITZ, TOM (1952– ). U.S. writer. His work is mostly contemporary fantasy set in his native Georgia, whose supernatural aspects are syncretically accumulated in the series comprising Windmaster’s Bane (1986), Fireshaper’s Doom (1987), Darkthunder’s Way (1989), Sun-shaker’s War (1990), Stoneskin’s Revenge (1991), Ghostcountry’s Wrath (1995), Dreamseeker’s Road (1995), Landslayer’s Law (1997), and Warstalker’s Track (1999), as well as in the trilogy comprising Soul-smith (1991), Dreambuilder (1992), and Wordwright (1993). The Gryphon King (1989) employs elements of Celtic fantasy in a similar setting, while the Mexico-set couplet comprising Above the Lower Sky (1994) and Demons in the Green (1996) is more eclectic. The intrusive fantasy series comprising Bloodwinter (1999), Springwar (2000), Sum-merblood (2001), and Warautumn (2002) tracks the consequences of the discovery of a magical gem.

  DE LA MARE, WALTER (1873–1956). British writer whose poetry and fiction—especially that written for children—routinely employs fantastic motifs. The mildly sinister title piece of The Listeners (1912) is one of the most popular children’s poems. Henry Brocken: His Travels and

  DE LARRABEITI, MICHAEL • 105

  Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance (1904) is a quest fantasy with landscapes and characters borrowed from a hectic admixture of literary texts. The existentialist fantasy The Return (1910), like much of de la Mare’s short fiction, edges into the field of horror fiction (refer to HDHL), but his ghosts are not always terrifying, and there are occasional sentimental fantasies and oblique pleas for re-enchantment in such collections as The Riddle and Other Stories (1923), The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926), Over the Edge (1930), and The Wind Blows Over (1936).

  Most of de la Mare’s children’s stories—the most blatant exception is the classic animal fantasy The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910; aka The Three Royal Monkeys)—are modeled on folktales, but their lighthearted surfaces often conceal murky philosophical depths. The bibliography is inordinately complicated, but the most important collections are Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925) and The Lord Fish (1933); the versions assembled in Collected Stories for Children (1947) are revisions.

  DELANY, SAMUEL R. (1942– ). U.S. writer and scholar. His novels, from The Jewels of Aptor (1962) to They Fly at Ciron (1993), played a leading role in the revitalization of hybrid science fantasy (refer to HDSFL); the Orphean fantasy The Einstein Intersection (1967) and the Promethean/grail romance Nova (1968) use classic fantasy motifs to complicate and refine sf narratives. Delany’s major fantasy series, set in an imaginary prehistoric empire, with settings and characters ingeniously that combine decadent imagery with barbarian vigor, comprises Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Nevèrÿona (1983), Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), and The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987, rev. as Return to Nevèrÿon, 1989). The stories are supplemented by various appendices, one of

  which explains some of the parallels between Nevèrÿon and contemporary New York (the Bridge of Lost Desire being a fantasized version of Brooklyn Bridge). The central thread running through the series is the history of Gorgik the Liberator, a slave who becomes a statesman, but its themes are sexual-political and metafictional.

  DE LARRABEITI, MICHAEL (1937– ). British writer. The unobtrusive race featured in the children’s fantasy series comprising The Borribles (1976), The Borribles Go for Broke (1981), and The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis (1986) presumably derives its name from a fusion of “Borrowers” (refer to Mary Norton) with “horrible,” and the characters in question are considerably tougher than such relative innocents

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  as Terry Pratchett’s Nomes. Provençal Tales (1989) recycles regional folktales.

  DE LINT, CHARLES (1951– ). Canadian writer. He began publishing short fantasies as chapbooks from his own Triskell Press in 1979,

  reprinting them as Triskell Tales (2000); they included early items in the Celtic Cerin Songweaver sequence, which also includes the novel The Harp of the Grey Rose (1985). De Lint’s other Celtic fantasies include the Angharad series, collected and extended in Into the Green (1993).

  These works reflect a strong interest in music; echoes of it infuse all his work.

  The Riddle of the Wren (1984) is a conventional portal fantasy, but Moonheart (1984) and the sto
ries collected in Spiritwalk (1992)—which include the 1990 novel Ghostwood—broke new ground in the development of the distinctive species of contemporary fantasy commonly known as urban fantasy, for which de Lint provided the paradigm examples. His cityscapes—initially those of his native Ottawa—overlap a magical realm populated by individuals syncretically drawn from folkloristic traditions that are as varied as the ancestry of modern Canadians.

  The apparatus was further elaborated in Mulengro (1985), Yarrow (1986), and Greenmantle (1988).

  De Lint’s Celtic fantasies broadened out their references to British folklore in Jack the Giant-Killer (1987), its sequel Drink Down the Moon (1990), and The Wild Wood (1994). Wolf Moon (1988) features a persecuted werewolf. The Little Country (1991) is a portal fantasy in a similar vein, and Seven Wild Sisters (2002) also has rural setting, but the bulk of his effort after 1990 was devoted to a long series of urban fantasies set in the imaginary city of Newford; they include the stories in Dreams Un-derfoot (1993), The Ivory and the Horn (1995), and Moonlight and Vines (1999), as well as some of those in Waifs and Strays (2002). The novels in the sequence are Memory & Dream (1994), Trader (1997), Someplace to Be Flying (1998), Forests of the Heart (2000), and The Onion Girl (2001). The painstaking depiction of a fantasized North America contained in these novels was carefully broadened out in Spirits in the Wires (2003) and its sequel Medicine Road (2004), which incorporate the Ozarks and Arizona into the same Faerie-linked backcloth.

  Other short fiction is reprinted in Tapping the Dream Tree (2002) and A Handful of Coppers (2003). The horror novels de Lint initially bylined “Samuel M. Key”—of which the one with most fantasy relevance is Angel of Darkness (1990)—were all reprinted under his own name.

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  DEL REY BOOKS. An imprint of Ballantine Books founded in 1977, named after editor in chief Judy-Lynn del Rey. While she took charge of the sf line, her husband, Lester, assumed responsibility for a fantasy line markedly different in character from the one Lin Carter had instituted in the late 1960s, whose unprofitability had become desperate by 1974.