Zenna Henderson’s The Anything Box
As so often happens, I was at a book fair the other week when, again as so often happens, I stumbled on a book by a writer I’d heard of at some point and about whose work I was vaguely curious. In this case, the writer was Zenna Henderson and the book was a collection of sf and fantasy short stories called The Anything Box. Which, upon reading, I found to be quite intriguing.
Henderson was born in 1917 and died in 1983. Most writing I’ve found about her online (including her homepage, her SF Encyclopedia entry, and this excellent appreciation by Bud Webster) mention some or all of the following things: that she was a Mormon, that she taught Japanese-Americans in an internment camp during World War Two, and that she was one of the few women writing sf in the 1950s under an obviously female first name. Her work has influenced Orson Scott Card, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Connie Willis.
Henderson seems to be best known for her stories about the People, refugee aliens trying to make lives for themselves on Earth. None of those pieces are in The Anything Box. These stories stand alone; most, but not all, focus on teachers, children, and domestic life. Their technique is mainly simple and direct: straight-ahead narrative prose, eschewing tricks of chronology or unreliable narrators. “Things” uses alien vocabulary extensively, and “Turn the Page” borders on a Bradbury-like expressionistic lyricism, but on the whole the book is good solid 50s commercial prose. Which does some unexpected things.
Typically in these blog posts, I write about some work of fantasy, science fiction, or horror; of fantastika. I’m not sure whether the book I want to write about this time round can be described as any of those things. It’s not always, in fact, easy to distinguish what is fantastic and what is not. Does the distinction lie in what the writer has in mind, or in how the reader interprets the text? If a man who believes himself to be a magician writes about magic, is that fantasy or mimetic fiction? The author describes the world as the author understands it. The reader, reading, then sees the world as the author does: so writing is perhaps inherently magical, a possession. All words are magic words. All stories are true.
For some time I’ve had the idea that there are unknown treasures yet to be mined in the deep veins of 80s fantasy. That among all the many titles published in those years are overlooked tales that are worth digging up. I don’t necessarily mean neglected masterpieces, though that’s possible. I mean little gems: books offering unexpected or idiosyncratic takes on the genre. Books that to some extent operate by conventions of their own. Books that suggest slightly different ways to do things. I want to write here about an example of what I mean: Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair.
A little while ago, Fearless Leader John O’Neill 
I don’t remember where I first came across Ursula Pflug’s name. I know I’d seen it mentioned in several places before I stumbled across a collection of her short stories, After the Fires, at a recent book sale. From what I’d heard, she was a Canadian writer of literary fantasy, which was enough for me to take a chance on the book. On the whole, I think that was a good call.
Arthur Machen first published a version of “The Great God Pan” in 1890, in a magazine called The Whirlwind; then revised and extended the tale for its republication as a book in 1894, when it was accompanied by a thematically-similar story called “The Inner Light.” It’s a fascinating work, creating a horrific mood mostly through suggestion and indirection. Nowadays, one looks at it and notes very Victorian attitudes toward women. At the time of its original publication, the story’s implied sexuality caused real scandal.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been looking at Joyce Carol Oates’s Gothic Quintet, in preparation for the publication of the fifth book in the sequence, The Accursed, set for next March. I started off with 1980’s 
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been looking at Joyce Carol Oates’s Gothic Quintet, in advance of the publication of the fifth book in the sequence next March. I started off with 1980’s 
Published in 1980, Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Bellefleur is an astonishing gothic tour-de-force, a breathtaking and phantasmagoric book that whirls through generations of an aristocratic New England family. It deals in almost every kind of traditional horror-story trope: a sprawling, crumbling, haunted house; angered spirits of the land; men who take the shape of beasts; at least one innocent heiress who develops a peculiar case of anemia after being courted by a sinister European nobleman. All these things are folded into an overarching tale of greed, power, sex, and tragedy, told in a wild style that almost hides a precise structure of event, theme, and imagery.