BIBLIOMANCY REVIEW:

Locus Review

Bibliomancy, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing
1-902880-73-0 $50.00 290 pp. hc)
September 2003. Cover by ????????
Order from www.pspublishing.co.uk

Bibliomancy -- a title as accurate as it is unusual -- is Elizabeth Hand's first collection since 1998's Last Summer at Mars Hill. The four long stories that comprise this new volume all deal, in different ways, with the eruption of magic into the everyday world. All four stories also share a sense of personal urgency, as though their author had been driven to write them by forces too compelling to ignore.

Leading off the collection is the International Horror Guild Award winner, "Cleopatra Brimstone," which powerfully evokes the surreal aftermath of a sexual assault. Hand's heroine, Janie Kendall, is a brilliant, beautiful science student with a preternatural affinity for butterflies. (At the age of thirteen, her eyebrows sprout vestigial antennae, an unexpected offshoot of puberty.) In her senior year at a select girls' college in Washington, DC, Janie is raped while walking back to her college dormitory. From this point forward, everything in her life changes.

Janie leaves school, moves to London to housesit for a pair of family friends, and embarks on a double life. By day, she works as a docent at the Regent's Park Zoo. By night, head shaved and dressed to kill, she adopts the nom de guerre Cleopatra Brimstone and prowls the nightspots of Camden High Street, bringing home a host of willing victims for nights of sex, bondage, and miraculous transformation. As the story moves toward its ironic denouement, it evokes twisted echoes of John Fowles's The Collector and such early Clive Barker tales as The Hellbound Heart and "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament." In the end, though, "Cleopatra Brimstone" is an original, deeply unsettling story about rage, revenge, and sexual violence that illuminates a world in which predator and prey play interchangeable roles.

Next up is another IHG award winner, "Pavane for a Prince of the Air." The most strictly "realistic" of all the stories gathered here, "Pavane" is an account -- rendered with documentary precision -- of a man's slow, painful death, and of the effect that death has on the surrounding community. As the story begins, Carrie, the narrator, returns from a family visit to find an ominous message on her answering machine: Cal -- artist, unreconstructed hippie, and one of Carrie's oldest friends -- has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and has only a short time to live.

The narrative that follows takes us deep into the heart of a protracted death watch, with its vigils, its recurring crises, and its endless stream of neo-pagan rituals. Cal, his wife, Tina, and the majority of their circle are people "who believed in everything. Fairies, elves, spirits of earth air water fire; Tibetan gods, Minoan sea goddesses, totemic animals, reincarnation, Iroquois spirits." Carrie, who witnesses all this, can't quite believe in anything, and suffers as a result. Her unblinking account ranges from the shock of first knowledge through Cal's death, burial, and cremation, and into the weeks and months that follow, ending on an ambiguous grace note that suggests -- but only suggests -- the possibility of spiritual survival. The result is a lovely, lovingly detailed memento mori written in luminous, effortlessly graceful prose.

The centerpiece of Bibliomancy is the 40,000 word short novel, Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol. As the title indicates, Chip Crockett is yet another reimagining of A Christmas Carol. This one, however, is smartly conceived and vigorously written, and successfully transfers Dickens's vision to a very contemporary Washington, DC. Hand's stand-in for Ebenezer Scrooge is Brendan Keegan, a failed husband and indifferent lawyer who, like Dickens's original, has lost his way. Brendan hates his work, is recently divorced, and watches helplessly while his autistic son Peter retreats further and further within himself. Brendan's malaise feeds an ongoing bitterness that alienates friends, family, even strangers. The malaise itself is the outward expression of a worldview in which "Marriages were doomed. Mothers drowned their children. Your father developed Alzheimer's disease and died without remembering your name . . . [He] now knew, irrefutably, that the world had become the wasteland."

Like Dickens before her, Hand explores the nature and dimensions of the wasteland in which Brendan has trapped himself, and then proceeds to show him a way out. Help comes in the form of the benign magic generated by the confluence of three very different people: four-year-old Peter, a wonderfully characterized former rock star known as Tony Maroni (read Joey Ramone), and the recently deceased kids' show host, Chip Crockett. Chip, whose death is announced in the opening page, is the ghost that haunts the narrative. Memories of Chip's programs -- virtually none of which have been preserved -- permeate the text, as Hand's cast -- notably Tony -- revel in their memories of Chip and his comic creations: Ogden Orff, Captain Dingbat, and the puppet known as Ooga Booga. These memories serve as signposts of a better time, and help connect both Tony and Brendan to the images of their own best selves. When rumors hint at the imminent reappearance of a lost, legendary Christmas special -- Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol -- the story gains both momentum and emotional depth, moving inexorably toward a credible resolution filled with open, unabashed sentiment. Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol has brains and humor, as well as heart, and deserves a place on the select shelf of memorable holiday fables.

Bibliomancy ends with "The Least Trumps," which appeared last year in The New Fabulists, a special issue of Conjunctions magazine edited by Peter Straub. As admirers of John Crowley will doubtless recognize, the Least Trumps is the name of the tarot deck that plays a central role in Little, Big. Hand's novella is, in fact, a conscious homage to Crowley, a reiteration of a classic Crowleyan theme: There is more than one history of the world.

The heroine and narrator of "The Least Trumps" is Ivy Tun, gay tattoo artist and daughter of iconic children's author Blake E. Tun. In some respects, the story serves as a thematic companion piece to Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol. Ivy, like Brendan Keegan, has cut herself off from the outside world. She lives by herself in a cottage called The Lonely House on an island within an island off the coast of Maine. When forced to leave her solitary home, she endures agoraphobic symptoms that include nausea and overwhelming panic. These, in turn, are symptoms of a larger malaise, one that Brendan would surely recognize. For Ivy, the real world can never be as "welcoming" as the world of her favorite novels. "Who," she asks herself, "would ever choose to bear the weight of this world? Who would ever want to?"

Ivy finds help from an unexpected source: the eponymous tarot deck purchased at a rummage sale, a deck once owned by Walter Burden Fox, author of a series of fantasies she has loved since childhood. Through a collaborative enterprise utilizing certain images from the tarot deck and her own skills as a tattoo artist, Ivy initiates a fundamental series of changes and comes to believe that the world -- that history itself -- is astonishingly malleable.

Hand is among the most painterly of writers, and her prose is filled with precise descriptions of arcane processes -- tattooing, entomology, cremation, even bondage techniques -- and with luminous evocations of the physical world. Moving gracefully from the gaudy surface of things to the tangled inner lives of its all-too-human heroes, Bibliomancy offers the heartening sight of a gifted writer really hitting her stride. Elizabeth Hand has always been an ambitious, intelligent writer, but she seems to be working at a higher level than ever before. It's therefore odd -- and a bit depressing -- to note that Bibliomancy is only available in a limited edition from a British specialty press. When a book this good can't find a home with a major mainstream publisher, then the industry itself is clearly in a state of deep, possibly dangerous, decline.