Northwest Passages

Northwest Passages (2009) by Barbara Roden contains some very enthusiastic blurbs from the likes of Peter Straub ("Barbara Roden has placed herself among the ranks of the most telling, most effective, most readable living writers of the strange and fantastic tale") and others.  I know to take such blurbs with the proverbial grain of salt, yet I couldn't help but expect something more than the mostly competent yet uninvolving tales that comprise this collection. Only in the title story does the plot and characters cohere into something more than the quotidian. A few of the other nine tales read almost like cribs from the diaries of polar explorers--interesting, but nothing special.  I wanted and expected to like this more than I did, but sadly found a number of the stories a slog to get through.

A Search for the King

Gore Vidal is perhaps best remembered as an American public intellectual with a pungent wit. Of his writings, his essays are especially noteworthy, and many of his historical novels were  popular bestsellers. A Search for the King, published early in his career, is not a typical Vidal novel in a number of ways. Foremost because it mixes elements of fantasy into the story.  Basically, the novel is set in the late twelfth-century and follows Blondel, a faithful troubadour of King Richard the Lion-Heart. Early on, Richard is taken prisoner on his way home from the Crusades, and the novel tells of Blondel's adventures in central Europe while searching for him. These adventures include a fight with a dragon, meetings with werewolves and a vampire, but none of these fantastical encounters are entirely traditional according to legend.  The dragon does not breath fire, the werewolves act as bandits (as their king admits, "instead of eating human flesh we live on gold taken from human visitors"), the giant grew up in a monastery until his obtained his Growth, which the monks regarded as the work of the devil so they cast him out. The vampire is a practical female Countess, who feeds on her subjects but is careful not to kill any of them. And even a unicorn makes an appearance, but not to a young virginal girl but to a young boy on the verge of manhood whom Blondel had befriended.  A Search for the King is a slow-moving, meandering book, and not among Vidal's best, but I enjoyed it.

Black Unicorn

Black Unicorn (1991) by Tanith Lee is the first of a trilogy.  It is a slim story, part of the Dragonflight series of books arranged by the book-packager Byron Preiss. The Dragonflight series ran for about six years and included a dozen or so short illustrated novels by various authors. Black Unicorn has a small number of adequate ink drawings by Heather Cooper, and a color cover, which fails to capture the flavor of the text. The story itself concerns Tanaquil, the daughter of the desert sorceress Jaive. Tanaquil has a special talent for fixing things.  Her piecing together of the skeleton of a unicorn brings the creature back to life, and starts her on a quest to the city near the sea, which also involves the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy.  I found the story surprisingly engaging (probably due to Lee's undoubted stylistic talent), and look forward to reading the next book.