I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. Posts will range from flash to novellas. At some point, I might delve into individual stories/episodes of anthology formats in other media, like television and comics, but for the time being, I’m sticking to prose in print and audio.
Author P H Lee has begun an intriguing series of “secondary world fairy tales” under the umbrella title of Tales from the Great Sweet Sea. I have no idea how many of these Lee is intending to write, but the two that have appeared so far (in the December 2020 and January 2021 issues of Lightspeed) have captured my interest and have me yearning for more. Mostly because these two stories are just that good, but also partly because I want to learn more about this secondary world the stories and their framing device are set in.
The narrator of both tales is a traveling storyteller named Dusty Boots, who hails from the valley of Erwhile and who is in love with a girl they can never have. In introducing each tale, Dusty Boots tells us that in the tale-spinners’ guild, half of the tale-spinner are pledged to never tell the truth and the other half to never tell a lie … and that Dusty Boots is one of those sworn to the Truth. So, each of these fairy tales he tells must be the truth, right?
One of the things I loved about both stories was the way Dusty Boots has of including other versions of the story, or other possible outcomes that follow the story, without breaking the vow to tell only the Truth. While Dusty Boots is not a participant in the stories they tell, they are also not complete cyphers. Bits and pieces of their history and personality filter through. And one wonders if, somewhere down the line, we’ll learn more about how and Dusty Boots became a tale-spinner (and why they swore to the Truth and not Lies).
“Ann-of-Rags” appeared in the December 2020 Lightspeed and is a reworking in part of Hansel and Gretel, with a few other tales filtered in in part. (And for this reader, at least, the name of the titular doll conjured images of Raggedy Ann, adding another layer to the story.) In “Ann-of-Rags,” a young girl wanders into the woods and gets lost. As night falls and goes on, her doll Ann offers several solutions to their predicament, encouraging the girl to follow the doll’s animal friends out of the woods. But to a young child, wild animals are scary, and so she refuses their help but accepts the help of an elderly woman wandering the woods at night because she looks kindly. One of the classic morals of fairy tales (especially “Hansel and Gretel”) is that appearances are often deceiving, and Lee illustrates that so well in this story. But that’s not all the story is about. Once in Bone Grandmother’s clutches, the story takes an even darker turn and started to remind me a little bit of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree: to get the young girl to safety, Ann-of-Rags offers to sacrifice more and more of herself. Thus, the story is also a heart-breaking look at how children don’t always realize, or even remember, the sacrifices loved ones are willing to make on their behalf. I don’t want to spoil the end of the story for anyone who might venture over to Lightspeed to read it (Here’s the Direct Link to the story), but I will say that it brought tears to my eyes.
“Frost’s Boy” is already available if you subscribe to the e-book edition of Lightspeed Magazine and have received the January 2021 issue. If you don’t subscribe, the story will be live on the Lightspeed website on January 28th. Dusty Boots is back to tell us another story, this one combining aspects of many “child left for dead in the woods gets adopted by someone else” tales. Except in this case, the adopting parent isn’t a human woodsman or lonely couple but rather a personification of a seasonal attribute: Frost itself. Naturally, the child grows up cold, controlling, basically heartless. Parts of this story may not be an easy read for some folks as the titular character is essentially a serial killer preying on young women – young women especially who have heard the legends and know they should just run away but somehow believe they will be the one to break the string and thaw Frost Boy’s heart. Eventually we are introduced to the girl who may very well succeed, with the help of her parents. Frost’s Boy reminds me a bit of Rumpelstiltskin: selfish, egotistical, and manipulative, a being who thinks he is so far beyond the mortals he’s dealing with that there’s no way they can get the better of him. And like the farmer’s daughter in Rumple’s tale, the farmer’s daughter in “Frost’s Boy” is the person we really end up rooting for. In a neat bit of subversion to the standard tale, we don’t meet Frost Boy’s farm girl until halfway through the story, where in so many other tales we meet the girl first. Again, I don’t want to ruin anything about the way the story plays out, but I can say that second half of the story is suspenseful in the way of fairy tales (using repeated phrases by the characters and by the talespinner, Dusty Boots) and I was satisfied with the way the whole thing ends.
Linking the tales together is a mention of Bone Grandmother, who here seems a bit more like a personification than the actual person we saw in “Ann-of-Rags.” I found this to be really effective in reminding us that these tales have been told and retold in this secondary world we are learning about, and that Dusty Boots’ versions are the True Versions insofar as the talespinner believes they are.
I’m really looking forward to reading more of these fairy tales by P H Lee, and I highly recommend seeking these two out via Lightspeed as soon as possible.