SAFFRON AND BRIMSTONE REVIEW

Fantasy Magazine 2006

This collection consists of both the type of fine stories expected from Elizabeth Hand and stories showing a fascinating new direction. A "typical" Hand story is novella length, written in rich language, and full of human details of daily life that allow an intimate knowledge of characters. These damaged beings are often overtaken by darkness, but that doesn't mean death, loss, and loneliness ultimately triumph. The fantastic provides the possibility that darkness can be illumined and reality realigned by magic. When Hand does allow doom, it usually serves a higher justice as in the horrific "Cleopatra Brimstone", in which an American student lepidopterist recovering from rape winds up in London as an uncanny serial killer. Faith triumphs in "Pavane for a Prince of the Air" when a woman who has faith in nothing and a modern tribe of aging ex-hippies who believe in just about anything deal with the difficult death of a once-vibrant friend. The narrator's world in "The Least Trumps" has become confined almost completely to an island within an island, but she discovers the world need not necessarily remain mundane. (These first three stories were collected in the limited edition Bibliomancy [PS Publishing, 2003], but the earlier collection's excellent "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol" is inexplicably missing here.) The narrator of "Wonderwall" learns there are other ways to gouge a hole in the wall of reality than self-destructive hedonism. Grouped as "The Lost Domain", the four final stories all center on love and memory. But memory here is mutable and love vacillates or is illicit. It abides, but is transitory. Lovers meet but cannot share a life. An immortal learns to deal with inevitable loss in the entrancingly mythic "Calypso in Berlin". "Echo" is the eternally lonely story of a woman who waits. In "Kronia" love may not even have existed. The scintillating "The Saffron Gathers", original to the collection, ends the book on a note of uncertainty and disaster. This quartet is shorter, more sparsely written, less fantastic, than "old" Hand; the stories also seem more personally relevant. The entire collection further confirms Hand as an author of extraordinary vision who is unafraid to dream in new directions.