Worlds end at the well

  I can't find it now. Maybe it never existed, or it was from somewhere else entirely. But I always associate the image with the Little Golden Book version of Walt Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People (from the Darby O'Gill tales by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh).

I must have been six or seven, just before I read The Wind in the Willows and was banished from the world of picture books entirely. I remember the image as the cover of the book, but it may have been a picture inside, or, as I've said, it could be some other book entirely--

Not exactly what I had in mind

--or it could be that the original image was twisted and reformed by my imagination over the years. Darby O'Gill was probably in the picture, as well as the tiny king of the fairies. I don't remember. I don't care. What I do remember is that it was deep night, and there was a well, and there was a golden light shining up from the well, where no light should ever have shone, an uncanny light, full of deep magic, and I loved the look of it, the beckoning, and I've been trying to capture that light ever since.

Google is not my friend. That search turned up everything but what I was
looking for. And if it was a different book, I have no idea what it might have been, or whether I interpreted the picture wrongly or have misremembered it. Could my memory have transformed a pot of gold into a golden well? Possibly.  It's not really important, is it? What's important is the image of the well, and the light.

     J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a brilliant essay called "On Fairy Stories", in which he argued that real fairy stories are not about fairies, but about the adventures of men on the edge of faerie, as faerie recedes, and the glamor of magic fades, eluding our grasp like a willow-the-wisp. I've found that my favorite fantasy novels fit that bill -- Little, Big, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Charwoman's Shadow, The Crock of Gold, The Beginning Place, even The Lord of the Rings, are all about the receding of magic from our lives. 

And the rim of that well, with the uncanny light overbrimming, is at the edge of faerie.

Carlos Labbe

 

"He'd been mistaken, he said to himself, as he sat back down at his desk: he didn't want to write a detective novel; he wanted to write a mystery."

--Carlos Labbé

Review: Battle Annie

 When Trish MacEnulty writes a historical novel, she’s apt to use a wide-angle lens. So it is with Battle Annie, loosely based on a true character, whose life is fleshed out with great imagination and brio. 

     From the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen to the upper crust of Baltimore and back again, we follow Annie Walsh, the self-styled queen of Hell’s Kitchen’s brawlers fleeing from a murder rap and everything she’s ever known. The writer builds up the slums of New York in 1895 brick by hurled brick, placing us in the middle of rail strikes and gang wars, contrasted with Gilded Age high society, where survival means learning how to use an oyster fork. 

     It’s grit, brains, and most importantly the friendships forged in the lower depths that keep Annie and her ward Cora one step ahead of the law. She provides a wider societal vista by the inclusion of socialist champion Eugene Debs, who sees beyond Annie’s rough façade to the leader she can be.

     This is a picaresque tale with a lot of heart, well worth the read. If you’re like me, you’ll fall in love with Annie and her company of rogues. And you’ll be left hungry for more.

A Drood

 

After publishing three books without an agent, I've been hitting the cyber-pavement searching for a good one. They don't want snail mail submissions any more, oh, no (my first agent must have been the last one on earth to prefer paper) and half of them have abandoned email queries for query forms--very impersonal and efficient.

One recent agent query form asked me what my dream as an author was, which I thought was an interesting question, one I hadn't thought about before. But I decided my dream would be to leave a Drood--a novel unfinished at my death (like The Mystery of Edwin Drood) so intriguing that authors a hundred years on would still be trying to finish it for me.

What's your dream?