Book Review: The Essential Patricia A. McKillip
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.
