Birthday Review: Stories of Elizabeth Hand

Today is Elizabeth Hand's birthday. I first noticed her work with "Snow On Sugar Mountain" in Full Spectrum 3, then with "Last Summer at Mars Hill", in the August 1994 F&SF. But for me I think she started taking off with the stories below, and she has gotten better and better (from a a pretty impressive starting level), to the point when I realized that she had become on of my favorite writers.

Putting this list together, I noticed that she is extremely good at the novella length (like several other great SF writers, notably Kim Stanley Robinson, Gene Wolfe, and Damon Knight, off the top of my head). The two stories I mention above are a very long novelette and a novella, and most of the stories below are novellas (up to the length of short novels with "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol" and Wylding Hall. At any rate -- search these out -- this is a great list of short fiction.

Sci Fiction summary post, 2000

"Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol", by Elizabeth Hand, is a moving story about an alcoholic lawyer, Brendan, dealing with his divorce, his autistic kid, and the sudden intrusion of his old friend Tony, a former rock star down on his luck.  (Tony "Maroni"'s rock band seems modelled very closely on the great punk band The Ramones.)   It's set in the present day, and it has only a very minor fantasy element.  The story turns on the death of Chip Crockett, the star of an early '60s kids' TV show, and Tony's sudden obsession with him.  Brendan is driven to distraction by Tony's websurfing and Christmas-special watching, but somehow Tony seems to connect, just a bit, with Brendan's young son.  Brendan himself is sort of a combination Ebenezer Scrooge/Bob Cratchit (with his kid an obvious Tiny Tim).  I liked the story, and I was very moved by it.

Review of Redshift (SF Site, 2002)

The other novella is Elizabeth Hand's "Cleopatra Brimstone." This is beautifully written, line by line, a very pleasing read, about a woman, studying insects in college, who goes to London to recuperate from a rape, and finds that she has developed a curious sort of alter ego with a strange power. The story is absorbing throughout, if I thought the ending a bit telegraphed.

Locus, February 2003

The rest of the book is almost an anticlimax, but to say so is unfair: all the stories are worth your time, and several more are very strong, for example Elizabeth Hand's "The Least Trumps" is another beautifully written novella, about a woman tattooist who grows up on the coast of Maine, and her relationship with her mother and with love.

Locus, December 2007

Finally, and rather belatedly I’d like to mention Illyria, a lovely novella by Elizabeth Hand, from PS Publishing. Maddy and Rogan Tierney are cousins – closer than cousins, as their fathers were twins, and they grew up in the same family subdivision in Yonkers. They become teenage lovers and also show interest in the stage, like their great-grandmother, a famous actress. Both these meet with family disapproval, except perhaps from their eccentric aunt. The story is fairly simple, with a minimal fantastical element. The heart is of course the two main characters, beautifully portrayed, and their doomed love and not quite so doomed artistic dreams.

Locus, August 2009

I also enjoyed (in Conjunctions #52) Elizabeth Hand’s “Hungerford Bridge”, about a strange and beautiful creature a man is privileged to see – with a curious condition.

Locus, October 2009

This is F&SF’s big double issue, and there’s a lot here. Robert Silverberg offers a very enjoyable Majipoor story, Elizabeth Hand’s “The Far Shore” is a fine fantasy of an aging dancer discovering a strange boy at an isolated cabin;

Locus, October 2010

There are plenty further excellent stories in Stories ... My favorite piece, along with the Gaiman story, is the longest in the book, “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon”, by Elizabeth Hand. It’s about a group of old friends who once worked together at the Smithsonian. A former associate director of one of the museums is dying, and one of the friends, her former lover, recruits the others to help him recreate a controversial snippet of film that purports to show a very strange airplane flying on a remote South Carolina island two years before the Wright Brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk. That secret history aspect is intriguing, but the heart of the story is the fraught history of the men at the center of the story – the main character a mess after his wife’s death; the other two men with different problems in the midst of generally more successful lives. Lovely writing as ever for Hand, with that frisson of mystery and sadness and loss that is central to secret history, I think.

Locus, February 2012

As I've noted before, the literary magazine Conjunctions has a history of engagement with the fantastic. The latest issue, on the subject of kin, includes a nice Elizabeth Hand story, “Uncle Lou”, about Nina and her raffish title Uncle, with whom she's had a good relationship for a long time. He's getting old now, and a last invitation reaches her, to accompany him to a party at the zoo. We gather quickly enough where this is going – what we and Nina will learn about Lou – so there aren't really any surprises here, but what matters is the grace of the telling.

Hand also appears in the anthology A Book of Horrors, with a strong novella, “Near Zennor”. The protagonist, an architect named Jeffrey, has just lost his wife suddenly, and in going through her stuff he finds some letters she wrote to a children's author as a teen. Intrigued by a mystery from her past, he travels to the author's old place, near Zennor in Cornwall. It turns out this writer, whose children's fantasies were odd and very dark, had been accused of child molestation. Jeffrey's wife and some of her friends had tried to visit the man, and one of them later disappeared. All this points in a disquieting direction, but Jeffrey's visit reveals something quite different, and terrifying (and sad) in another way entirely. Again Hand's prose – and its balance and control – is one delight, as is her depiction of place; and here too, a well portrayed central event.

Locus, February 2016

Elizabeth Hand offers a long novella, Wylding Hall, about the British folk revival of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, in particular about one ephemeral band, Windhollow Faire, and their great album, named after the title Hall, a strange and quite sinister country house. The story is told from the point of view of the surviving band members and a few others, decades later, and it brilliantly captures the creative spirit around that recording session, and the various characters, especially the band’s leader, who it is clear is absent – something to do with a very strange girl who shows up. The shape of the resolution to that central mystery – who was the girl and what happened to her and the band’s leader – is pretty clear to any fantasy reader from the start, but the eeriness of the events, and the combined fear and wonder that affects all those around, is beautifully evoked.

[I read this last story at a time when I was rediscovering the great band Fairport Convention, and especially their great lead singer Sandy Denny. (I have followed Richard Thompson's career forever, but I sort of let my Fairport listening slip. Windhollow Faire, of course, is presented as part of the same English Folk Revival movement as Fairport Convention -- and it was really neat to read this fictional treatment at the same time as I was devouring such albums as Unhalfbricking.]