Strange Horizons, August 2002

by Strange Horizons

  But no decision made by a character in this novel is easy. When Archie finally realizes that Jane is his daughter, he must decide whether to follow Steen back to Kentucky and participate in a conflict he never quite understands, between inscrutable gods whose messengers make shifting and unstable alliances. Royce, who is charged with transporting Jane, must decide whether he is ready to kill a child to maintain his reputation as a New York tough. Steen, rapidly losing control of the entire enterprise, must decide if he still wants to bring on the apocalypse, even if he won't get to rule the world. And even Jane, affected by the magic of the chacmool, must decide which is stronger: her desire to escape the scarred body she has hated all her life, or her love for her father. As all of the characters converge on the Mammoth Cave, where Stephen is waiting, the novel moves inexorably to its ultimate decision: whether the chacmool will succeed in bringing about the return of Tlaloc, whether, that is, the hidden darkness of the American story will overwhelm the daylight world of work and family, of the fragile love between father and daughter. This is magical history at its finest, magical both because in Irvine's America the ancient gods are always ready to return if offered belief and blood sacrifice, and because Irvine's prose magically makes a forgotten era come fully and satisfyingly to life. Who knows, it could have happened that way.

  * * * *

  Theodora Goss’ stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy, Dreams of Decadence, Mythic Delirium, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Alchemy. She is working on a Ph.D. in English literature, with a focus on Victorian gothic. She lives in Boston with her husband, who is a molecular biologist, and four cats who like to eat her manuscripts. For more about her, visit her Web Site.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  A Life Less Ordinary: Kate Bernheimer's The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold

  Reviewed by Christopher Barzak

  8/26/02

  “I want to tell you something, so listen.” This note of urgency is sounded on the very first line of The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, by Kate Bernheimer. Urgency, though, is only one of the qualities this beautiful slim novel exhibits. By turns erotic, manic with intense emotion, tinseled with fairytales and folktales, the stories that make up Ketzia Gold's life, both real and imagined, create a kaleidoscopic vision for the reader, going from dark to light to dark.

  Ketzia Gold is the middle child of three daughters growing up in a nameless American suburb. Her home is infused with a kind of magic that has lost its meaning. This is Disney World, not Narnia. Any wonder to be found here is detached and seemingly unconcerned with the reality in which it exists.

  Ketzia inhabits a world of familial torture, erotic longing, and not-so-quiet desperation. Subjected to both physical and emotional abuse throughout childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, Ketzia Gold does her best to retain a sense of sanity in a world gone wrong, but her best attempts still show us that her world is a broken place, filled with dangerous psychological fissures that may open up beneath her feet at any moment. This is revealed through the many self-destructive episodes littered throughout the novel, as well as through Bernheimer's self-conscious narrative structure, a series of episodic snapshots from Ketzia's life set alongside fairytales, photographs, and illustrations. The resulting collage of imagery and narrative follows no strict line of reasoning, nor the conventions of linear storytelling. It's a beautiful and seemingly effortless structure for a reader to follow, considering the complexity of its creation.

  Throughout the novel, told alternately in first person and third person, we witness Ketzia Gold's heroic attempts to find meaning in a world that seems to offer her nothing but violence and cold indifference. She takes refuge in reimagining her life as the lives of heroines from Russian, Yiddish, and German folktales. Some of these stories are reprinted in their entirety alongside Bernheimer's retellings of them in contemporary detail, while others are simply alluded to: Ketzia owns a dog named Hansel; at one point, we find her wearing her grandmother's red woolen poncho. These tales, riddled with suffering and darkness themselves, serve to instruct Ketzia in how to escape her own narrative fate, while also freeing her from a sense of isolation—the old tales teach her that others have come before her, and that, in the senseless vacuum of her life, she is not alone.

  Ketzia's life, or at least its surface pattern, will be recognizable to most readers, and it's easy to identify with her. She is considered by some to be the smartest girl in her class. She marries Adam, her high school sweetheart, who comes from a family with a good reputation. But no matter how closely Ketzia follows the plan to make the American dream come true, she finds that it is impossible to actually do so. Ketzia is smart, but she's also puzzled by life, and by the feeling that there is a right way to live it. She is cursed with an inability to live life by the subtle and not so subtle rules with which our culture inundates us from our infancy onwards. Ketzia's husband is a musician, smart, from a “good” family; but he is also emotionally abusive and philandering. He cleverly disguises his emotional torture so that she is viewed by others as “the crazy one,” while he still retains his seeming normalcy. When Ketzia's husband reveals the existence of a secret closet and gives her a key, Bernheimer likens their relationship to the tale of Bluebeard. Like Bluebeard's bride, Ketzia is unable to contain her curiosity, her desire to know her husband's secrets. In the closet she finds a variety of objects. Some seem meaningless, while others are incriminating evidence. Ketzia's reflections on her findings illuminate the old tale's meaning with contemporary details from Ketzia's modern world:

  I wasn't surprised but I was sad. I didn't mind about the photographs, only that they were hidden—at the time, that seemed worse, though now I better understand. In any case I closed the closet door as quickly as I could, but every day until Adam got back, I reopened the door, sat on my knees until they were bruised and sore from the floor. I kept trying to arrange the photographs so he wouldn't know I had touched them. What if he had laid a hair across them, though? What if this was all a test?

  But I still continued to look! And each time I opened the door, and even when it was shut, I saw Adam's other women. Eventually it became an obsession for me, like my love for him had once been.

  Ketzia's relationship with her husband—like her relationship with her family, especially her sisters—eventually disintegrates, and she finds herself wandering the desert. In fact, the novel opens with Ketzia living in a hotel in the desert where the manager allows her to stay at a cheaper rate because she allows him to watch her undress and shower through a one-way mirror. Other chapters reveal a Ketzia even further along in the timeline of her life where she has become a transcriber for a detective agency. In these episodes, we find that she has become an emotionally restrained, perhaps even deadened, character, burned out by the intensity of her own past.

  Because Kate Bernheimer's knowledge of folk and fairy tales is so thorough, and so obviously close to her own bones (Bernheimer also edited the anthology Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales), with The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold she has created a novel that is inclusive of both genre and mainstream audiences. If you enjoy fairy or folk tales, characters who become part of your own dreams, and prose that leaps from the mundane to the surreal to the mordant in the blink of an eye, then read this book. It is literary, magical, full of delights and disturbances, and utterly unforgettable.

  * * * *

  Christopher Barzak's fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Strange Horizons, Nerve, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Rabid Transit, The Vestal Review, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he is pursuing his Master's degree in English at Youngstown State University. You can visit his website, or see his previous contributions to Strange Horizons in our archive.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  WorldCon 2002: A Pre-Con Report

  By Mary Anne Mohanraj

  8/26/02

  I'
m writing this a few days before leaving to attend WorldCon. I arrive in San Jose Wednesday night; starting Thursday, I'll be in the midst of the massive swirl of panels, author readings, signings, costumes, gaming, filking, mass insanity, and just plain fun that's a world science fiction convention. If you've never been to a WorldCon, it's pretty tough to imagine what it's actually like. And if you're a professional in the field—an author, an editor, a publisher—then it gets even more complicated; every year there seems to be more stuff I'm supposed to do. I thought I'd give you a little tour of my upcoming WorldCon—in the process, though it may seem overwhelming and exhausting, I hope you can also see a little of how fun, diverse, and wonderfully interesting the speculative fiction world can be.

  It all starts on Thursday, with registration, saying hello to old friends as they show up, and taking a look around to see what's up. Thursday evening I'm on a panel for Broad Universe, an organization we started not long ago to help promote the writing of women in spec fic. There are a lot of volunteer organizations in the field—you can sign up and join all sorts of groups that are organized around various interests. If you're interested in learning how to run a WorldCon, for example, you might start by signing up to volunteer as a gopher at the convention; conventions are always looking for volunteers. This is also a terrific way to meet people if you're new to conventions—they can be isolating and alienating if you're attending by yourself. For your first convention, I really recommend you take a friend, or that you volunteer your time and make some friends. It's kind of fun working the registration desk, oddly enough.

  A lot of the convention is readings, of course—WorldCon is stuffed to the gills with authors doing readings. Lots of my friends are doing individual readings, and I hear that the SFF.net suite is sponsoring additional readings. I have to admit, I have a bit of a tough time sitting through most readings myself; I get itchy being quiet for so long. But if you like the idea of hearing your favorite author read your favorite scene out loud ... well, this might be the perfect place for you. Thursday night, I'm doing a joint reading with several other people—one of them is the editor who first bought a story from me, Cecilia Tan. (It's always lovely re-encountering people who have given you money before ... you never know—they might want to give you money again.)

  Friday morning, I'm planning on attending my first SFWA business meeting—SFWA is the professional organization of spec fic writers, and I'm very curious to see what sort of things they discuss when they meet at a WorldCon. Joining SFWA is something of a holy grail for young spec fic authors—you need three professional sales to qualify for membership; once you're a member, you get access to their member directory, you get to vote for the Nebula Awards, and I'm sure you get some other things that I'm less aware of. Editors can join as affiliate members—that's what I am right now. I'm not strongly interested in joining as a full member myself, but since so many of our authors care about it, I need to care about it too. So it'll be interesting to see what they have to say.

  Then some hours off, where I'll probably attend panels; I'm a panel-junkie, and tend to spend most conventions mostly in panels—if I'm not on the panel, I'm usually sitting up front and raising my hand a lot. I have plenty of opinions. Some people might say too many. In the late afternoon and evening, more panels (on how to flirt and on SF erotica), and maybe a dinner with some friends, if time can be squeezed out. There's so much going on at a WorldCon that it can be hard to find time to just socialize—and yet, it seems a shame not to, since often you see people at WorldCon that you haven't seen since last year's WorldCon.

  Saturday, I have several meetings with various editors and publishers, to talk about anthology projects. If you're trying to make a living as a working writer, it's generally a good idea to keep in touch with what's happening with anthologies—and if you're a working editor, then you're probably going to spend some time trying to convince publishers to let you edit anthologies for them. (Yes, a Strange Horizons anthology will be under discussion. Stay tuned.)

  Then in the afternoon, the Strange Horizons tea party from 3:00-5:00—if you're coming to WorldCon, please stop by and have some tea and cookies! We'll be celebrating our second anniversary—we launched the magazine at WorldCon 2000, and we're just so pleased that it's going so well, two years later. Sadly, I'll have to duck out partway through to go sit on another panel, this one on racial and ethnic minorities in spec fic (at least it's a subject that really interests me). Susan Groppi, one of our fiction editors, will take over hosting the party—lots of our other editors will also be in attendance. In the evening, I'm on a panel about Clarion and its workshop style. Many writers attend workshops, and a good workshop can really shape a writer's writing (and career). I have some strong opinions about Clarion (a six-week writing workshop that I attended in 1997), and about that particular workshop style, so I'm looking forward to that discussion.

  Sunday (tired yet?) I have an early morning reading; I'm not really expecting anyone to come at that hour, but if they do, I'll read whatever they like. Morning panels and readings are generally pretty empty at conventions—if you don't mind getting up early, it's a great chance to get some one-on-one time with your favorite writers. Sometime after that I'll stop by the Hugo hall and familiarize myself with the space—get prepared to give a speech, just in case we manage to win (fingers crossed) (toes crossed, too). At 2:30, there's a panel about online magazines. And then in the evening, the Hugo reception and then the award ceremony. I've got butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it. Oof!

  That isn't everything. Of course, during the days, I'll be visiting the dealer's room and the art show. Buying books I won't have time to read until next year. Bidding on art I've fallen in love with and can't really afford. Checking back compulsively to see if anyone bids on my art. Maybe stopping in the movie room and watching part of a film. Maybe taking a few hours to play some Magic or Mafia or some other game. Snagging snacks from the Con Suite and the Green Room when I don't have time to eat properly. During the evenings, partying with famous people. Trying not to drink too much. Falling asleep with my head on the bar.

  WorldCon can be an endurance test, and even an experienced convention-goer may have trouble pacing herself. By the end of it, I'll probably have caught a cold, and I'll swear myself perfectly happy to never attend a panel again. Or so I'll claim—until it's time to go to World Fantasy in November....

  * * * *

  Mary Anne Mohanraj is Editor-in-Chief of Strange Horizons.

  * * *

  Visit www.strangehorizons.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.