Thanks to Candice, Jill and Douglas for their tips. I look forward to
checking out all your leads. I know the (excellent) Ashliman site already.
Candice's Victorian photos remind me of a nice moment in John Crowley's (for
me, disappointing) Little, Big, in which a character comes across an old
photograph where someone has scrawled on the back the names of the people in
it, and the word 'Elf'. Little, Big and Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale were
two novels I tried through the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and both seemed to
me like eating a box of chocolates at a sitting. I need some kind of
intellectual limits keeping the flights of fancy in check. On the other hand
I also discovered Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare, which I recommend in
the strongest possible terms, a novel of astonishing richness and wit, and
Jan Potocki's Manuscript Discovered at Saragossa, which I certainly should
have heard of before - a masterpiece of the gothic and the Enlightenment
(yes, both at once). I got my wife to give me the Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction, the predecessor of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, for Christmas, and
have been greatly enjoying it. Douglas, I should add, is featured in it, for
his writings on Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany and others.

You can find updates to the Encyclopedia of Fantasy at:

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Misc/fec.html

Amazon.com has several enthusiastic reviews.

Best wishes

Matthew
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 15 January 2001 22:59
Subject: Re: Supernatural


>Oh goody, we're walking our souls on our soles now--soon we'll be lost
>lost in our supercultural forest and desperately looking for the Trail
>of Breadcrumbs. But it's no use! The birds have eaten our maps, and all
>the kindly woodcutters of yore have become Sierra Club phone solicitors
>trying to raise a few bucks to save the Arctic wilderness from the Bush
>league. We'll never find our way home again!
>
>Okay, having gotten that out of my system, let me say thanks for the
>tip on John Grant's Encyclopedia of Fantasy (anything available from
>or on it online?) and suggest in turn the Encyclopedia of Fairies by
>renowned "elficologist" Pierre Dubois, the TOC and excerpts from which
>at Amazon.com (as of last month anyway) will indicate how comprehensive
>this encyclopedia is and give you a sense of Dubois prose style (in
>translation at least), which I find, er, enchanting myself. As to its
>soundness, I have no way of judging that myself and decided to elide
>the whole question by reading such works as lore in and of themselves.
>More obviously scholarly material is available, too, if that's what
>you need, such as the two or three websites maintained by University
>of Pittsburgh anthropologist D.L. Ashliman, whose special interest is
>Germanic and Celtic changelings, but whose websites (and the links to
>others there) are great resources for things wee and twee. The other
>great site for my purposes (a banshee/ballad project) is Lyra Celtica,
>where you can find many ancient and modern English, Scottish, Irish,
>Bretagne, and Cornish poems, high- and low-cultural alike--some of
>them "border" ballads of the otherworldly sort (and avant la melodie)--
>which, when you see compiled this way, really give you a sense of how
>important such lore was to the nationalizing-mythologizing processes
>of these regions. And the accompanying notes by William Sharp seem
>both reliable and geared toward a synthesizing of regional traditions
>in terms of the way several different ones will spawn a figure like the
>headless horseman of our own Catskill Mountains, while respecting the
>differences of topo/typographic specificities (many of them landscape-
>dependent).
>
>I've also been reading a fascinating study published by Oxford UP
>last year (or 1999 maybe) on fairies in Victorian England (the art
>and literature thereof) and the circumstances under which this age's
>culture supposedly drove them out of the British Isles for good. The
>author's name is Carol Silver, but the title is eluding me at the
>moment and the book's at home. Among other interesting aspects she
>covers are such cases as those fake (1930s?) photos of two little
>English girls--sisters--playing in their garden with their fairy
>friends (all looking suspiciously like Tinkerbell) that inspired
>the song "There Are Fairies At the Bottom of My Garden"--and which
>were believed genuine by some otherwise smart and sane people of
>the time--and the so-called "Tipperary Horror" of the late 1890s,
>when a middle-class man, together with some of his friends and
>relatives, and the local "elf doctor" were charged (though I think
>only this man was actually tried) with the murder of his wife, whom
>they all believed to be a changeling and were trying to "send back"
>to the other side in hopes that the man's "real" wife would be
>restored to them.
>
>Candice
>
>
>
>>I am also a great admirer of John Clute and John Grant's Encyclopedia of
>>Fantasy. Much more than a reference book, a source book for literary
ideas,
>>with its entries on woods and borderlands and the changed time-frames of
>>people who've been kidnapped by fairies. The only problem with it is that
I
>>don't altogether trust their verdict on the authors they've written
about -
>>and I must admit that sword-and-sorceror stuff strikes me as incredibly
>>naff. So I'm always on the lookout for good literature of the fantastic
that
>>doesn't overstretch my credulity. Any suggestions?
>>
>>Best wishes,
>>
>>
>>Matthew Francis
>>[log in to unmask]
>>
>>Visit my website at http://www.7greenhill.freeserve.co.uk
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
>>To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
>>Date: 15 January 2001 21:24
>>Subject: Re: unfashionable thought
>>
>>
>>>Doug Barbour wrote:
>>>
>>>>b) I'd sort of agree that Anne Rice's first novel had style, but she's
>>been
>>>>going downhill ever since, and I found, say, her last couple unreadable,
>>>>and especially boring in the extreme. She has fallen into that worst of
>>>>states, believing that her thinking is more important than her
>>>>storytelling, that she has something to SAY! There are far more writers,
I
>>>>believe, even in supernatural fiction, who write with far finer style
than
>>>>she does...
>>>
>>> Agreed on Anne Rice, although I found the second novel (_The
>>>Vampire Lestrat_) as interesting as _Interview_, if already marred
>>>by some latent signs of the fatal overwriting that became so florid
>>>in her subsequent books.
>>>
>>>I agree too that there's better to be had in supernatural fiction:
>>>Peter Straub is a very good novelist, not just a competent genre
>>>hack, and he's not afraid to get political--as in _The Throat_,
>>>where Vietnam is "horrified" and bears the novel's antiwar burden.
>>>Just bought _Mr. X_ (has anyone else read it yet?). And among the
>>>current Brit novelists of the supernatural, Peter James is very
>>>good, I think.
>>>
>>>Brit novelist Gwendolyn Butler's Coffin series is also good, horror-
>>>enhanced detective fiction, the vaguely horrific atmosphere of the
>>>City/Docklands area of London worked by her detective, John Coffin--
>>>a historical urban setting where many buried bodies still are--
>>>lending itself to an eeriness that deepens Butler's genre meditations
>>>on evil. Crime is also dramatized in and as its performance in the
>>>same space that was once a theater district, the resurrection of which
>>>via ongoing restorations to an old playhouse by the detective's wife,
>>>a former actress and current producer, "naturally" turns up some of
>>>those buried bodies at the various historical layers and levels of
>>>which this urban socioarchaeology-cum-detective fiction is composed.
>>>
>>>Candice
>>>
>>
>>
>