Best known for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken (1924-2004) wrote over a hundred books and won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards. After her first husband's death, she supported her family by copyediting at Argosy magazine and an advertising agency before turning to fiction. She went on to write for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Argosy, Women's Own, and many others. Visit her online at: www.joanaiken.com.
In stories like "The Dark Streets of Kimball's Green"--about a
little orphan girl whose druid fantasies become reality--and
"Hope"--about a strict spinstress harp teacher getting lost in a
city whose dark corners contain mysterious music--Aiken brings the
arts to the forefront of every human motivation. Whether a
character is seeking the solace of a poem or avoiding the emotional
weight of a song, each one learns in some way the power that words
and art have over (and even beyond) life. This power sometimes
feels familiar to us, such as when a character in "The Cold Flame"
returns as a ghost to make sure his poems get published, and
sometimes takes a more uncanny turn, more magic and danger than
your everyday reverence for a novel or a painting. But in every
case, this supernatural treatment of the arts gives the stories a
strangely pre-modern tone, a mode of writing that became
increasingly unpopular in literature in the post-war days Aiken
wrote in. And yet it is this sincere belief in the signs and
symbols humans create for ourselves that make Aiken's stories feel
timeless and moving, that allow them to come to life in our current
historical moment.
-- Emily Nordling, Tor.com "If you're looking for speculative short
fiction of a decided literary bent, it's hard to imagine a more
satisfying source than this assembly of fantastical work by the
peerless, prolific Joan Aiken (who died in 2004), assembled from
across her storied career. The magical and the everyday collide in
these short, evocative tales, which, in marvelously efficient,
elegant prose, find unsettling strangeness lurking just around the
corner from normal (the ghost of a puppy is trapped in an abandoned
storage box, fairy queen squat in overgrown forests). A slim,
seriously moving collection."
-- Joel Cunningham, B&N SF&F "A welcome anthology of
fantasy stories by a 20th-century master. The author of the beloved
classic gothic for children The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Aiken
(1924-2004) also wrote hundreds of works of popular fiction that
spanned the genres, from fantasy to horror to historical fiction,
including several Jane Austen sequels. Naturally the tone of her
books and short stories varies with their content, but its main
notes include sophisticated, spritely satire and the darker moods
of literary fairy tales. Fans of Wolves will recognize the
honorable orphans and cruel guardians who populate these tales.
Typically the wicked meet with fitting fates and the innocent
triumph, though for Aiken, a good death counts as a happy ending.
She plays with the contrast between the eldritch and modern culture
and technology: ghosts and dead kings out of legend who contact the
living by telephone, a doctor who writes prescriptions for fairies,
a fairy princess who's fond of Westerns. Her metaphors and similes
surprise and delight: "the August night was as gentle and full as a
bucket of new milk"; "He was tall and pale, with a bony righteous
face and eyes like faded olives"; across a field, "lambs [followed]
their mothers like iron filings drawn to a magnet in regular
converging lines." Sprightly but brooding, with well-defined plots,
twists, and punch lines, these stories deserve a place on the shelf
with the fantasies of Saki (H.H. Munro), Sylvia Townsend Warner,
and Susanna Clarke."
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "There's so much to love about
this slender collection... The juxtaposition of mundane and
magical...feels effortless and fresh. The language is simply
splendid, so evocative, as though the stories were actually very
dense poems. And it brilliantly showcases Aiken's affectionate,
humorous, deft portrayals of female characters... Aiken's prose is
extraordinary, impossible to do justice to in this small space. Her
skill with the language of folk tales--specifically the oral
storytelling native to the British Isles--is unparalleled... These
stories both feel very 20th century and somehow timeless."
-- Publishers Weekly, Boxed, signed review by Rose Fox, Senior
Reviews Editor
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