Black Gate

Steve is a very normal man, perhaps even a bit boring. He works at an English shipping company, handling inventories and looking forward to a career in politics once he climbs the business ladder as far as it will take him. One day, for no particular reason, a sudden fit of discontent sends him down to the docks looking for something different, perhaps a restaurant he hasn’t visited. In an alley, he sees a man being attacked . . .

Chase the Morning, by Michael Scott Rohan, doesn’t have all that much in common with modern urban fantasies like The Dresden Files. It does, however, feature a magic world hiding in the shadows and back streets of this one, so it may fit the category. The setting of Chase the Morning is easily my favorite part of the book — not because the rest of the book is bad, but because the setting touches my sense of wonder.

It’s nicely built up, too. The man Steve rescues is named Jyp, and as Steve’s wounds are stitched up in an old-fashioned gaslit pub, Jyp casually discusses his ship’s exotic cargo: black lotus, conqueror root, merhorse hide. But the pub proves elusive the next time Steve searches for it, the sailing ships he saw at the dock don’t exist, and as for the cargo, Steve actually finds it in his computer — on a ship from 1868. Ass he slips in and out of the mundane world, he keeps seeing an illusory landscape in the clouds — the same landscape. The magical world starts intruding into Steve’s world, to find out who he is and why he’s interfering; this culminates in the kidnapping of his secretary, Clare, by not-quite-human savages called Wolves. In search of Clare, in search of Jyp’s help, he manages to locate the magical version of the docks, the one that’s packed with sailing ships from all eras. And then, too desperate to be skeptical, he watches a ship sail off into the sky, into the landscape of clouds.

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Under the Mountain (1979)
By Maurice Gee

Although not a household name outside of New Zealand, Maurice Gee is one of the island nation’s most prominent and respected novelists. Born in Auckland, Gee established himself as an author starting in the 1960s with his novels A Special Flower, In My Father’s Den, and A Glorious Morning, Comrade. His later acclaimed books include Plumb and Crime Story. All these novels are mainstream adult works, but Gee turned his hand to books for younger readers and made a parallel career in the field of the young adult science fiction. It started with Under the Mountain in 1979, which gained popularity outside of New Zealand with a television mini-series released in 1981. (For more about the mini-series, read my post on its appearance on the Nickelodeon program The Third Eye.)

Why did Gee decide to write a science-fiction book for younger readers? The author explained his choice in 2004 upon receiving the Storyline Gaelyn Gordon Award:

It all began with having two red-headed daughters—not twins though. Then there was my desire to write a fantasy—get away from the real world of my adult novels—but set it in a place New Zealand children would recognise, so that they might get “our story” feeling. What better place than Auckland’s volcanic cones? It was seeing Mt. Eden looming in the mist one morning that really got it started. Everything, monsters and all, followed from that.

It ended up as his best-selling book, never out of print in its home country. But, unfortunately, not so easily available in the U.S. It struggled even to get published in New Zealand in the first place, and finally ended up first released by the Oxford University Press. It has had a long home with Penguin since then.

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The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce
Magic Carpet Books (256 pages, $5.95, May 2000)

To begin with, I should tell you that I adore Meredith Ann Pierce’s writing. It has a sense of fairy tale about it, a simple yet otherworldly quality. I will happily read anything she’s written and recommend it to others.

Nevertheless, I have to say that The Woman Who Loved Reindeer might push some peoples buttons for reasons that have nothing to do with the high-quality prose.

Caribou is an isolated girl of thirteen or so, living away from her people because of her true dreams and possible magic. Then her sister-in-law unceremoniously gives her a baby to care for. Although Caribou resents the request — the sister-in-law admits that the baby isn’t her husband’s — an obscure impulse makes her accept the child. And then her life starts to get both richer and stranger.

The child — Caribou names him Reindeer — is not entirely human. When he’s still a baby, a golden reindeer nearly takes him away. As he grows, Caribou dreams of him as a reindeer calf and notices that he casts a reindeer’s reflection in the water. Also, he doesn’t entirely comprehend human emotion. He’s a trangl, a shapeshifter who turns into a reindeer, a being that Caribou’s culture fears as essentially untrustworthy — a view that’s not entirely unfounded, since Reindeer seems to have a limited capacity for empathy.

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