Most of the works of Patricia A. McKillip that I’m most familiar with are from the 1970s and 1980s, from her amazing 1974 debut novel, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which Skiffy and Fanty discussed earlier this year, through the Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy, to her 1988 fantasy for juveniles, The Changeling Sea. But despite my losing track of her somehow, she kept writing amazing stories; her 2016 novel Kingfisher won the 2017 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and she kept writing short stories until 2020.
Although McKillip died in 2022, it’s important to keep her works in the public eye, especially when most of those works remain so fresh and intriguing and beautiful. In the introduction to the new collection coming out Oct. 28, The Essential Patricia A. McKillip, Terri Windling talks about the subversive quality of McKillip’s fiction, overturning expectations (despite their age, McKillip’s stories don’t feel dated at all, with some pretty pointed social-commentary implications). In the same essay, author Ellen Kushner discusses how McKillip’s high-fantasy stories have some down-to-earth characters in them; conversely, the stories set in the present day contain myth and magic.
This McKillip collection comprises 16 stories from as early as 1982 (“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath”) to as late as 2016 (“Mer”); also, at the end of the collection are two nonfiction pieces, “What Inspires Me: Guest of Honor Speech at WisCon 2004” and “Writing High Fantasy” (2002). Some are high fantasy, and some are urban fantasy. The shortest is seven pages, and the longest is 49. All of them are reprints, but all of them were new to me, and I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to read them now.
“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath” is not a happy story, but it really had an impact on me. Two people talk past each other, in conversation but not really listening to each other; their separate actions affect each other, and the world, greatly. In that way, although it’s high fantasy, it reminds me a little of Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky.
“Out of the Woods” features a woman who’s not very articulate, but she notices the world more than her brother or the scholar she does housekeeping for, and so she sees wonders.
“The Stranger” is a gorgeous story (in the lyrical words, and the telling) about a man impelled to create monsters out of music, and a woman who weaves, who sees him, and who speaks, and how they affect each other.
I adore “The Gorgon in the Cupboard” for the way it talks about artists’ inspirations, and learning to see other people. Also, one of the characters reminds me very much of Sandy Campbell in The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy Sayers, in the way that he practically worships another man’s wife, but things end far more happily here.
I won’t talk about all the stories in the book, and I won’t name all the stories I discuss here, for fear of spoilers. But there’s a lovely one about a wanderer carrying a heavy burden, who finds unexpected mercy at what he thinks is just a waystation, and a very funny one about a witch who keeps taking different forms, and some of her misadventures, and a wry tale about a supernatural creature who gets drawn into staying in the mortal world, and a hopeful tale about a girl who steps into a different world and vows to return to it someday.
I don’t think I’d have chosen to title a collection of McKillip’s short stories as Essential, because I don’t think that by themselves, they’re quite enough to encompass her mastery of the craft of storytelling. To get a true sense of this author, it’s necessary to read some of her novels as well, experiencing the depths and heights of lyricism and characterization and thematic development that she achieved in her longform fiction. However, for someone who wants an introduction to McKillip’s worlds, or who’s read the novels but never any of the gems of her short fiction, this is a great place to start.
Content warnings: Violent deaths, gendered expectations by some characters.
Comps: Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin; The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg, Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
