HAND PUPPETS

From Washington Post Book World --

The cover image on Elizabeth Hand's newest book -- a collection of four novellas from a U.K. publisher in a limited, signed edition -- is a piece of High Victorian fantasy: A dreaming woman sprawls languorously in bed while the phantoms of her mind cavort in her chamber. As a metaphor for the contents of Bibliomancy (PS Publishing, $50), the painting is perfect. The oneiric Hand has indeed set loose a menagerie of specters within these pages.

The most terrifying of her conceptions comes first, in "Cleopatra Brimstone." A young woman named Jane who is keen on a career in science, specifically the taxonomy of butterflies, is raped one night while in college. Afterward, in London to recuperate, she takes on another identity. Calling herself "Cleopatra Brimstone" after the common name of a butterfly, she becomes a merciless killer, in a most uncanny fashion. "Pavane for a Prince of the Air" chronicles how a colorful ex-hippie artist named Cal succumbs gradually to brain cancer, and finds in the aftermath of his death some cause for faith in the rightness of life. The centerpiece of the book, in length, feeling and impact, is "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol," a kissing cousin to Harlan Ellison's "Jeffty Is Five." This saga of Scrooge-like lawyer Brendan Keegan, his autistic son Peter and their free-spirited wastrel friend Tony Maroni assumes the dimensions of a whole generation's biography. Finally, "The Least Trumps" focuses on a tattoo artist named Ivy Tun, the daughter of a famous children's book author. Almost a hermit, Ivy finds her world opening outward when she purchases the odd Tarot deck of the title at a tag sale.

Repeated images of death and loss fill these tales, and yet their overall effect is one of hope and uplift. Hand's close attention to the cherished dailiness of life is matched only by the subtlety of her fantastical conceits, producing a fiction that acknowledges both mortality and the eternal. (In this she reminds me not only of her idol, John Crowley, but also of Algernon Blackwood.) Her abiding sense of humor -- seen most plainly in "Crockett" -- also rescues these dramas from any morbidness. Like Cal's friend Carrie, helping wife Tina sift through Cal's ashes after cremation, Hand is able to extract glinting bits of treasure from the shards of despair. ?

Paul Di Filippo writes and reviews science fiction.