by Elizabeth Hand
Here is the obligatory blurb from the publisher
"Widely praised and widely read, Elizabeth Hand is regarded as one of America's leading literary fantasists. This new collection (an expansion of the limited-release Bibliomancy, which won the World Fantasy Award in 2005) showcases a wildly inventive author at the height of her powers. Included in this collection are "The Least Trumps," in which a lonely women reaches out to the world through symbols, tattooing, and the Tarot, and "Pavane for a Prince of the Air," where neo-pagan rituals bring a recently departed soul to something very different than eternal rest. Written in the author's characteristic poetic prose and rich with the details of traumatic lives that are luminously transformed, Saffron and Brimstone is a worthy addition to an outstanding career."
We were down on state street. The first time this year that the evening wind has held a little bite. Ironicly, it was the first time this year that the cold blue LED Christmas lights seemed appropriate. We were on our way to a show. Jacob Marley's Christmas at the Bartell theater. We'd never been there before, and we weren't sure how the parking was going to be that night, so we left early.
We found a parking spot almost immediately. Oddly enough the spots around the Capitol that had big "Reserved" signs by them were all vacant.
"Resevred for who?" we wondered.
"Reserved for us maybe? Well that's offly kind of the state of Wisconsin. Imagine that.... They must have known we were going out to a play and thought 'Christopher and Sarah are going to need a place to park when they go out tonight'. Offly kind of them indeed."
But we were too early to go right to the theatre. So we walked down state street instead. And what's a walk down State Street without a stop by A Room of One's Own? Nothing I tell you, NOTHING!
Sarah had her list of specific books to look for. I was lamenting the fact that I just haven't found any good books lately. It's been a while since i've really been excited reading something. Probably Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things (Which I still haven't finished, I'm on the last story and I'm saving it for something special. Like the next time I get suckered in to a family vacation to someplace with a mall).
Sarah pointed out a few, but they just didn't interest me at all.
And then a book caught my eye. I've never really bought into the "don't judge a book by its cover" theory. Too many times it's been the cover of a book that first gets me to notice it. And too many times a book with a cover that gets my attention ends up being a good book.
The cover of Saffron and Brimstone is a big bug. ...so maybe it was the "Strange Stories" that caught my eye. i don't know... quit pestering me.
It's a good book either way. I'm 2 stories in and I love them. I've been searching for something. Looking for a story without knowing what it is. It's a true story, a story about everyday life, about you and me. Something in rich prose so thick with metaphor that when the first little tinges of something weird slip in you aren't sure if it's a metaphor gone astray, or truly a tinge of the supernatural.
And in the very first story (the collections namesake) Elizabeth Hand does just that. Perfectly.
1 comment:
This book did not disappoint. This was one of the better collections of short stories that I’ve read. The stories were strong through out, weaving back and forth across the line that divides the supernatural from the plausible.
The last four formed a quartet. They weren’t part of the same story, they might have been 4 different views of the same incident, they didn’t share common characters. Maybe it was a shared theme, I’m not sure. I’ve read stories where one incident is viewed over and over again from different perspectives, by different people. And maybe when I reread the last 4 stories I’ll see that this is what is going on here too, but it feels more like it’s different perspectives of a feeling. Four different views of a single human experience.
I plan on rereading the last four stories again sometime in the near future. And I plan on looking for another book by Elizabeth Hand.
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