WASHINGTON POST 2004

Ho! Ho! . . . Oh!; There's No Light Without the Dark

12/19/2004

Parents dying horribly, orphaned siblings tormented by malevolent relatives, catastrophes that, we are assured, won't turn into anything like a happy ending -- this is a Christmas movie? In a holiday season where the hyped "Polar Express" crashed and the dreary "Christmas With the Kranks" is declared a classic by the "700 Club," the film adaptation of Lemony Snicket's best-selling "Series of Unfortunate Events" gleams promisingly -- for some of us, anyway.

Holiday moviegoing has become a modern ritual that all Americans can indulge in, no matter our age or race or religious belief. For the last three years, I've gone with a group of 20-odd friends and our children to attend opening night of each "Lord of the Rings" film, an event marked by hours of waiting in the frigid Maine cold (and, once, a genuine blizzard) outside a little Depression-era theater, as we take turns running to the pub next door for various forms of sustenance.

This year, the Lemony Snicket movie will stand in for Peter Jackson's opus. In lieu of battlr-ax wielding orcs, slavering wolves and spectral Ringwraiths, we'll have the ghastly Count Olaf and various hench-people. My family and friends are delighted: For us, much of the appeal of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy onscreen came from being scared for Christmas. We're promised more of the same, but different, this year, too.

This isn't a cynical, postmodern take. Raising gooseflesh as the solstice nears is a tradition that goes back hundreds, even thousands, of years, with winter festivals that arose around killing time in Europe (November, Blod-monath, blood-month) with the annual slaughter of livestock to prepare for the harsh months ahead. Modern yuletide's rampant secularization and commercialization has brought about, instead, the seasonal tyranny of goodwill and sugarplum shock that is so feebly satirized in "Christmas With the Kranks." Something powerful has been lost in the process, though: the knowledge that the Christmas season is a temporary triumph over the darkness of winter, rather than a surrender to false bonhomie or commerce.

The result is a reversal of C.S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," where the evil White Witch casts a terrible spell so that it is "Always winter and never Christmas." For Americans, once September arrives we're subjected to months and months where it's always Christmas and never winter, despite the fact that the days are short and frequently dark, the weather often terrible, and the pressure of pretending that this is the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year relentless. Is it any wonder that living through the season exhausts, not to mention depresses, so many people? What's the point of raging against the dying of the light when we refuse to acknowledge that the light does sometimes go out?

Our ancestors understood this need to face down the darkness at the turning of the year. By the Middle Ages, improved agricultural practices made it possible to provide fodder and thus keep stall-bound animals alive, but the ancient feasts held on into the Christian era, with their pagan subtext of misrule and masked revelry, storytelling and revenants still intact.

The English Puritans outlawed Christmas revels, declaring the day an occasion for fasting and humiliation. On Christmas Day, 1644, Mr. Edmund Calamy preached before the House of Lords, "And truly I think that the superstition and profanation of this day is so rooted into it, as that there is no way to reform it, but by dealing with it as Hezekiah did with the brazen serpent. This year God, by his Providence, has buried this Feast in a Fast, and I hope it will never rise again."

It was not until the early 19th century that Sir Walter Scott and Washington Irving popularized a vision of an idealized medieval English Christmas, full of charming merriment; the fact that such a scene may never have existed was beside the point. Inadvertently, their vision of "Old Christmas" gave people a chance to look back to earlier rituals that were dying out due to the rapid industrialization of a rural countryside. They included the ancient Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, whose silent dancers bear reindeer antlers as they weave back and forth amongst strangely costumed figures; or the Welsh rites involving the Mari Lywd, where masked mummers carry a horse's skull that snaps its jaw at unwary revelers.

The sense of mystery has survived in other parts of Europe, too. In Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, St. Nicholas would visit households on his feast day, accompanied by the demonic figure known as Krampus (or Black Peter or Knecht Ruprecht). Krampus carried a whip and stuffed naughty children into his sack. As recently as the 1940s, Belsnickel -- a pelt-wearing variant of St. Nick -- would make the rounds of German American communities in the United States, bearing sticks for beating bad children and a book into which their names would be recorded. Krampus and his kin are still alive in parts of Austria and Switzerland, but it's doubtful that they'll ever catch on again here.

Americans seem to have lost their stomach for the darker aspects of Christmas. We'd rather gorge on manufactured sweets than experience the bittersweet -- even bitter -- cold bite that may be the season's greatest gift.

Still, the ancient, darker impulses remain in literature, film, theater and the visual arts. By now your ears are probably ringing from a thousand Muzak renditions of "The Nutcracker"; but Carroll Ballard filmed a slightly sinister version of the ballet, with Maurice Sendak's fabulous design, that restores the grand gothic glory of E.T.A. Hoffmann's original tale. The theatrical adaptation of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," a fantasy inspired in part by "Paradise Lost," was a hit last Christmas at London's National Theater and is being revived again this season.

One of the most familiar phrases of the season, Tennyson's "Ring out, wild bells . . . Ring out the old, ring in the new," is excerpted from his beautiful, heartbreaking poem "In Memoriam A.H.H.," written for a beloved friend who died young. This long poem provides a moving evocation of a man who eventually overcomes terrible grief and loss. In so doing, Tennyson unforgettably celebrates both his friend and the Christmas season.

Just as Tennyson's words have grown banal through overuse, Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" (about to appear at a TV screen near you) is now often trivialized as sentimental mush. But strip away the angel in a nightshirt and the crowd singing "Auld Lang Syne" at the end, and you're left with a husband and father in despair, preparing to kill himself on Christmas Eve.

Likewise Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge, the good man of business who's become sanctified as a twinkling-eyed philanthropist, a secular saint. Yet his redemption comes only when, despite his pleas, he's forced to confront his own mortality and the terrifying, existential reality of his own future, which is death. It's something we all have to face, of course -- but why at Christmas?

Why not acknowledge the darkness? At the bleakest time of the year we're told to find solace in our religious beliefs, our family, our friends. But faith can falter, and loved ones can be far away or estranged from us or dead.

We're not very good at conceding these realities in our culture, especially not now, not when it's always Christmas and never winter. Instead we pretend that all good children are rewarded, and do our best to reward ourselves, as well, at least for as long as our credit holds out. We bloat ourselves spiritually with false cheer, just as we've bloated ourselves physically with fast food and lack of exercise. No wonder we feel sick.

That's why it's sometimes good to take a break from all the merriment.

To walk outside, alone, in the middle of a frigid, black, seemingly endless night and contemplate that solitary darkness, if for no other reason than to experience all the more the joy and warmth and light that welcomes you when you go back inside; to mitigate the blazing warmth of a fire or woodstove by reading something that brings a faint chill, like "A Christmas Carol" or Lemony Snicket's "The Hostile Hospital" or Robert Southwell's strange, visionary Christmas poem, "The Burning Babe."

If you can't bear the thought of Tiny Tim in any form, Dickens penned other odes to the holiday, including the meditative "What Christmas Is as We Grow Older":

On this day we shut out Nothing!

"Pause," says a low voice. "Nothing? Think!"

"On Christmas Day, we will shut out from our fireside, Nothing."

"Not the shadow of a vast City where the withered leaves are lying deep?" the voice replies. "Not the shadow that darkens the whole globe? Not the shadow of the City of the Dead?"

Not even that . . .

This Christmas, I'll do what I usually do -- decorate the tree, buy too many presents, sing off-key with my neighbors in our little village church, debate the merits of Alistair Sim's Scrooge over George C. Scott's, read "The Night Before Christmas" and eat too much.

But I'll also join my friends to make our now-traditional pilgrimage to that old movie palace up in Belfast, Maine. We'll stand in line and complain about the cold and the fleeting daylight; then we'll sit in the theater with our children and watch a movie. I hope we'll all be just a little bit scared in the dark, and thankful for it.

Elizabeth Hand's most recent novel is "Mortal Love" (Morrow).

The Lost Boys

12/12/2004

HAWKES HARBOR

By S.E. Hinton. Tor. 251 pp. $21.95

Is there an American teenager who hasn't read at least one of S.E. Hinton's books? Ponyboy, Rusty-James, Motorcycle Boy, Tex -- for a lot of us, these names are as evocative of adolescent despair and yearning as Holden Caulfield's. With the 1967 publication of her first novel, The Outsiders (written when she was only 16), Hinton pretty much invented YA (Young Adult) literature as both genre and marketing category. Her best and best-known works -- The Outsiders; That Was Then, This Is Now; Rumble Fish; and Tex -- are all straightforward first-person narratives charting the unstable, if now all-too-familiar, terrain of Teenage Angst Lit: boy trouble, girl trouble, drug trouble, parent truancy, warring high school cliques, abandonment, betrayal, loss, all played out against a working-class background of decaying American heartland towns and farms. They're gritty stories, leavened with a grain of hope and a stoic moralism that have earned them a coveted spot on many middle and high school reading lists, even as the microscopic view of teenage mores has also sometimes gotten them banned from same.

Hinton's career has been in something of a hiatus since 1979, when her last YA novel, Taming the Star Runner, appeared. Since then she's written two books for younger children. Her new book, Hawkes Harbor, her first major novel in more than 20 years, is being trumpeted (and marketed) as her first "adult" novel.

I'm one of those people who grew up with Hinton's books, and I wish I could say that Hawkes Harbor is a triumphant return by a much-beloved writer, but frankly, it's a shambles. The author's cast-iron reputation is probably safe from being damaged by its publication -- I hope, so, anyway -- but it's hard to imagine any first-time readers, adult or otherwise, being captivated by this rambling, episodic mess.

Jamie Sommers, the novel's protagonist, is in many ways a typical Hinton character brought to rather shaky maturity: feckless and lacking direction, essentially goodhearted but easily led astray. Jamie is an orphan, raised by cruel nuns in the Bronx; he attends high school, then has a three-year stint in the Navy. A life on the ocean waves appeals to young Jamie, and after his service he takes up with Kellen Quinn, a silver-tongued Irish gunrunner, smuggler and general ne'er-do-well who is by far the novel's best-drawn character. Kell and Jamie's long-term, intense and intensely competitive relationship has homoerotic tensionstamped on it in shining gold letters; but Hinton, alas, is too timid to pursue it.

Or perhaps she's simply unaware. There's an odd, naive time-capsule quality to Hawkes Harbor; most of the action takes place between the early 1960s and 1978, and the story reads as though it were cobbled together from B-movies made during that period. There are pirates, an insane asylum, a shark attack, soft-core sex with a mean rich girl on a yacht, soft-core sex with two nubile young women on a cruise ship, a haunted house, a ghost and, god help me, a vampire. All of this is recounted in earnest, unintentionally hilarious prose that sprays cliches the way an assault rifle sprays bullets. If Hawkes Harbor were a movie, it would be giddily dissected by the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" crew, and might well become a camp classic, a la "The Catalina Caper" or "Santa Claus Versus the Martians."

Unfortunately, Hawkes Harbor is a book. The first third is likable enough, with Jamie and Kell having adventures on the high seas -- pirates, jewel smuggling, narrow escapes, sharks. But even these engagingly old-fashioned escapades lack narrative drive, since Hinton inexplicably breaks the novel's momentum with an endless and confusing series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, all framed by a series of interviews Jamie undergoes at the Terrace View Asylum, where he is being treated for depression and amnesia.

The vampire angle is tossed into the novel nearly halfway through, though it's hinted at earlier. Again, Hinton seems sadly out of touch. However one feels about the Children of the Night and their eldritch kin, the last 30 years have seen an efflorescence -- or is that effungusence? -- of vampire literature from the likes of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Brian Lumley, Suzy McKee Charnas, Laurel Hamilton and Lucius Shepard, among dozens of others.

Hinton seems not to have read any of these. Her vampire, Grenville Hawkes, is the least convincing member of the undead since Ed Woods's chiropractor put on poor dead Bela Lugosi's cape in "Plan 9 From Outer Space." Once Grenville is mistakenly disinterred by Jamie, who's looking for treasure in an old graveyard, he and the plot lurch from one wildly unconvincing scene to the next, all strung together with as much logic or coherence as, well, an Ed Wood movie. In the book's most bizarre twist, old Kell Quinn reappears out of nowhere. Grenville sucks Kell's blood, Jamie drives a stake through Kell's heart; not long afterward, Grenville appears somehow to have been cured of vampirism and, in his new gruff-but-lovable avuncular role, takes Jamie on a cruise ship, where the young man meets those two cuties mentioned earlier and has the kind of "Penthouse Letters" experience that young men do not have in The Outsiders.

It's sad, and depressing, to read a bad book by a writer one respects.

On her Web site, Hinton states that "I have to become my narrator when I'm writing." One can only assume that in order to write an "adult" novel, she felt it necessary to abandon her great strength -- the first-person voice inside her head that gave us some of the most influential YA books ever written. A novel about the grownup Ponyboy or Tex could have been brilliant; so could a book featuring an entirely new cast of kids adrift in a new century. Sadly, that's not the novel Hinton has written in Hawkes Harbor. *

Elizabeth Hand's most recent novel is "Mortal Love."

The Magic Touch; A celebrated writer and his influential muse.

04/11/2004

JOHN FOWLES

A Life in Two Worlds

By Eileen Warburton. Viking. 510 pp. $34.95.

"Perhaps it is that I am hunting the woman archetype," the novelist John Fowles wrote in his diary in 1954, several years before he began work on The Collector, the book that brought him worldwide fame when it was published 41 years ago. Indeed, John Fowles's entire career seems aimed at giving chase to this elusive figure, as he did in his other best-known novels (The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman), his later works (Daniel Martin, Mantissa, A Maggot) and the stories collected in The Ebony Tower. Fowles himself has remained even more difficult to pin down. Now Eileen Warburton has brought him to ground in her exhilarating, exhaustive and entertaining biography John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds.

Reams of criticism and a library's worth of doctoral dissertations have been devoted to Fowles's oeuvre, but Warburton's biography is the first, and it was written with Fowles's full cooperation. "There's only one way that you could do it," he told her. "Tell the truth. Tell the truth."

To that end, he gave Warburton access to all of his papers, published and unpublished; cleared the way for interviews with friends, family members and colleagues, and allowed her to read the surviving letters of his great muse, his late wife Elizabeth. Warburton has in particular drawn heavily from Fowles's journals -- Volume 1 (which I have read in the UK edition) will be published in a revised edition in the United States later this year. The resulting portrait is not necessarily a pretty one, but the narrative Warburton makes of this prickly author's life is riveting and, in its final depiction of a literary lion in winter -- the 78-year-old Fowles continues to live in Lyme Regis, the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman -- very moving.

Fowles was born in 1926, to middle-class parents. A fine athlete and a good student, the reserved young man was most absorbed by long solitary rambles in the countryside, recording what he saw in a series of journals. According to Warburton, "He began to feel that he had a special 'touch' with wild things. 'The secret [Fowles wrote] is . . . the cultivation of an intuitive sense. . . . Not just at odd times, but always.' He returned over and over to the same places, exulting in 'the pleasure of knowing a place intimately,' and listed, among other pleasures and details, 'the places to hide.' " This "nearly mystical identification" with the natural world grew over time into his fictional obsession with what Warburton describes as "an inexplicable conversion experience, a moment of transformation and emotional comprehension of the possibilities of all life. Some sort of similar mystical, deeply irrational, highly personal confrontation with the mystery of the universe became an experience common to many of Fowles's protagonists." Yet even while Fowles was observing wood pigeons and chipping sparrows, the moths and dragonflies he so loved, he was also hunting them: putting butterflies in a killing jar with cyanide, holding a wounded curlew under a stream to "dispassionately" watch it drown. In light of Fowles's later writerly concerns, this seems less the hunter's detached cruelty than an eerie distillation of one artist's creative process: the ceaseless effort to capture a moment of transcendence, or the being who embodies its mystery, then to relentlessly observe and absorb it and finally transform it into fiction.

In 1944, at 18, Fowles left school for an officers' training program, finishing his training just weeks after the war in Europe ended. In 1947, after debating whether to pursue a regular officer's commission or a university degree, he chose the latter. At Oxford he read Modern Languages, specializing in French. As an undergrad, he enjoyed several rapturous sojourns in France, falling in love with various women as well as with the French existentialists whose works were to inform so much of his own writing.

After receiving his degree, in 1950 he took a position at the University of Poitiers. He seems to have been a lackluster teacher, but he wrote furiously -- plays, filmscripts, short stories, dozens of poems, in addition to the voluminous journals (he calls them "disjoints") he kept for most of his life. He was not asked to return to the University after the spring term, but by the end of 1951 he was already on his way to a new position, as English master at a boys' school on the island of Spetsai, Greece.

At this point real life begins to dovetail with fiction, specifically the imaginary Greek island of The Magus, where the callow young Nicholas Urfe meets a Prospero-like figure whose complex "godgames" interweave strands of Mythos and Eros involving Nicholas's various romantic entanglements. Fowles was enchanted by Spetsai's natural history and its inhabitants. And in 1953 he met its Circe -- Elizabeth Christy (nee Betty Whitton), the 28-year-old wife of Roy Christy, a published writer who arrived on Spetsai to take a position at the same school where Fowles taught. The three almost immediately fell into a pattern of drinking and traveling together, with Fowles usually picking up the tab for the impecunious Roy, a feckless husband and alcoholic. Within a few months, Fowles and Elizabeth were involved in a passionate relationship that scandalized the islanders, even as Elizabeth galvanized Fowles's imagination. She became his once and future muse, and would continue to be so until her death, 37 years later. He did not so much write about her, as through her: She was the prism that refracted his longings for transcendence, the erotic and transformative mystery that was at the center of his work. She was also often his best reader and editor -- it was Elizabeth who pointed out the weaknesses in the original final chapter of The French Lieutenant's Woman, and her insight seems to have inspired the now-famous double endings to that novel.

Warburton's account of the couple's early years together itself reads like a novel -- the loss of the island paradise followed by Dickensian poverty in gray London, the years of waiting for the Christys' divorce to become final. Most heartbreaking is the sad figure of Elizabeth's tiny daughter, Anna, whom Fowles referred to as "it," "an abstract something to be pushed aside." Shuttled among her parents, grandparents, various convent schools and caregivers, the child was a haunting presence -- Anna was 9 or 10 before she knew that the pretty lady who visited her was in fact her mother. Elizabeth remained anguished and guilt-ridden until, as years passed, Fowles grudgingly, then with growing affection, welcomed the girl into the household.

Somehow, within this romantic and domestic maelstrom, Fowles wrote the bestselling, mostly well-received books that in many ways became templates for so much late-century fiction. The deranged, obsessed narrator of The Collector kidnaps and imprisons a young woman in his basement, prefiguring more serial-killer protagonists than one can count. The interplay of myth, sex, faux-magic and conspiracy in The Magus laid the groundwork for books as varied as Donna Tartt's The Secret History, John Crowley's Aegypt sequence, and Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy, among numerous others. The French Lieutenant's Woman, with its twinned endings and sly postmodern take on Victorian sexual mores, begat A.S. Byatt's Possession and launched a thousand graduate careers in English Lit. Mantissa puts us inside a bedridden writer's head, a la Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, and A Maggot can be read as a subtle first-alien-contact novel, like Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary. Do all of Fowles's books stand the test of time? Probably not, but The Collector and The French Lieutenant's Woman remain enthralling and rewarding even now, and the essays collected in Wormholes are marvelous.

Fowles survived his early success. He and Elizabeth moved to the West Country, where he became increasingly involved in preserving Lyme Regis's museum and history, even as Elizabeth fell prey to crippling seasonal depression exacerbated by loneliness and isolation from their London friends. In addition to his fiction, essays and translations of French drama, Fowles wrote a number of unpublished and unpublishable works; it's to Warburton's (and Fowles's) credit that she doesn't whitewash these displays of bad will and bad writing, which include a vituperative and sometimes anti-Semitic rant against the United States, inexplicable in light of Fowles's many Jewish and American friends and colleagues.

In 1988, Fowles suffered a stroke. He made a partial recovery but believed it destroyed his ability to write imaginative fiction. Early in 1990 Elizabeth was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nine days later she was dead.

Fowles never wrote another novel. He developed a December-May relationship with an Oxford undergraduate who sounds like a nasty bit of work; but this muse manque generated no fiction, only 600 pages of obsessive writing in Fowles's journals. In 1998 he married a longtime friend and neighbor, Sarah Smith. The final image in Warburton's book is of Fowles and Anna Christy, Elizabeth's daughter, scattering Elizabeth's ashes over the garden in Lyme Regis, 10 years after her death. It's an elegiac ending to a biography that treats a writer's muse with as much honesty and intelligence as it does the writer himself. *

Elizabeth Hand's seventh novel is "Mortal Love," forthcoming this summer.

Kid Stuff; A very young writer attempts fantasy for very young readers.

04/04/2004

THE PROPHECY OF THE STONES

By Flavia Bujor

Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Miramax. 386 pp. $16.95

A few weeks ago, multiple Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson uttered the f-word -- fantasy -- in front of a television audience of nearly 44 million viewers. For many of us, it was further validation that we're living in a new Golden Age of Fantasy. Not that much more validation is needed, what with the phenomenal cinematic success of Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings," or the children's crusade led by Harry Potter and his league of extraordinary middle-school students, or teen tyro Christopher Paolini's charge up the bestseller lists with Eragon, or the sold-out West End run of an adaptation of Phillip Pullman's brilliant novel sequence His Dark Materials. One need only turn an ear toward the publishing canyons of New York and their Hollywood counterparts to hear the joyous shouts of producers and CEOs: There's fairy gold in them thar hills!

Sadly, The Prophecy of the Stones, a first fantasy novel by a very young writer and a bestseller in France and Germany, is fool's gold. Flavia Bujor was only 13 when she wrote it. As a parent of young adolescent children, and as someone who has taught creative writing to children and teenagers, I have a great deal of sympathy toward a tweeny novelist being exposed to the long knives of literary critics. But as a writer, I must confess that this is perhaps the worst book I have ever reviewed.

Jack Zipes, the renowned scholar of children's literature, famously critiqued J.K. Rowling in Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature From Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter, observing that "the Harry Potter books . . . will certainly help children become functionally literate." The Prophecy of the Stones makes the Harry Potter books appear positively Nabokovian. Bujor's writing is fatuous and cliche-ridden, her narrative and characters seemingly skimmed from Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, "Star Wars" and the Sweet Valley High series. Young readers seeking the pleasures afforded by the aforementioned works will be bored by The Prophecy of the Stones, which more than anything resembles one of those cheesy Saturday-morning cartoons designed to promote cheap, breakable toys to children too young to recognize how badly made and uninteresting these things really are, and parents too exhausted to Just Say No to crud.

Bujor, a daughter of Romanian immigrants, was schooled in France, and credits Tolkien's work as her inspiration. The Prophecy of the Stones more closely resembles the classic Harvard Lampoon parody Bored of the Rings, filtered through a mediocre episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Its heroines are a trio of teenage girls, mostly distinguishable by their hair.

There's haughty Jade, putative daughter of the Duke of Divulyon, whose hair is long and black; "she was constantly brushing back a few rebellious stray locks." There's the peasant Amber, whose hair "was like red gold and gleamed like the sun, framing her lovely face." And there's middle-class Opal, with "the face of a china doll. . . . Her hair was blond, each strand seemingly of a different shade: flaxen, honey-colored, ash-blond." Each girl learns on her 14th birthday that she is not who she thought she was, that she has a magical Stone -- Amber, Opal, Jade, get it? -- and that she and her Stone are part of a Prophecy. The Prophecy concerns the Council of Twelve (bad), the Chosen One (good), the Nameless One (wants to be good), the Army of Darkness (bad), the Sorcerer of Darkness (really, really bad), the Army of Light (you figure it out) and Death, who has gone on strike -- nobody likes her, plus she's put on a little weight.

There are also the barbaric Ghibduls, Bumblinks and a magical country where the girls, with their Stones, must journey amid much tossing of locks, rebellious and otherwise: "Not many travelers can cross the magnetic field that surrounds this territory. To cross, you must believe in the beauty of every individual being, in creativity, in freedom. You must believe in a better world, in the magic of each instant, and in fantastic dreams. You must be able to imagine the unimaginable. Only then can you enter this land. . . . It's called Fairytale. Magic creatures and warmhearted people live there."

This is the kind of writing that gives fantasy a bad name, and there's no reason for me to quote any more if it, especially given the tender age of its author. The Prophecy of the Stones is a crass, cynical attempt to cash in on a writer's youth (and her photogenic qualities -- press material for Prophecy consists largely of an attractive color photograph of Bujor and a list of all the foreign markets where rights to the book have been sold) and the vogue for fantasy fueled by J.K. Rowling's success. The publisher has obviously mustered its marketing forces to push the book; Flavia Bujor might have been better served by editorial guidance. Naming a character Theoden (the name of a central figure in The Lord of the Rings), for instance, is a gaffe a child might make, but one an editor should have corrected.

There are dozens of fine fantasy writers, new and established, young and old -- household names like Tolkien and Pullman, Rowling and Lemony Snicket, as well as Joan Aiken, Nancy Farmer, Ursula Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, Tamora Pierce, Tony Diterlizzi and Holly Black, Katherine Langrish, Diana Hendry, Jane Yolen, Tim Kennemore. Discerning readers of all ages should seek out books by them, and others. The f-word that comes to mind with the shameless effort to promote this novel is flimflam. *

Elizabeth Hand is the author of "Bibliomancy: Four Novellas" and the forthcoming novel "Mortal Love."