Review: The Elfland Prepositions, by Henry Wessells
by Rich Horton
Henry Wessells is a bookseller, writer, and publisher. His imprint, Temporary Culture, has published a number of books in the SF/Fantasy genre as well as some critical works. He also runs a website and newsletter devoted to Avram Davidson. I first encountered his fiction with a remarkable story in the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2003, "Ten Bears; or, A History of the Weterings: A Critical Fiction". Shortly thereafter he published a beautiful collection, Another Green World, which also displayed his bookbinding talents. (The allusion to one of my favorite Brian Eno albums also delighted me.) Since then I have met Henry in person a few times at the science fiction convention Readercon.His latest book is this collection of four more "critical fictions", a label which I take to mean works of fiction that openly acknowledge, and comment on, their debt to previous works. These stories, written between 2017 and 2024, depict the interactions of people from our world and Elfland from the point of view of the lower classes; and rather cynically. The main charactes are a cleaner, a barmaid, a dry-cleaner (and automobile manufacturer!) and a detective. The afterword directly cites Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin; and the stories themselves directly allude to many other writers (a helpful list of works cited is included.)
In "Cleaning Up Efland" the narrator wants to go to Elfland but not as a changeling or slave, and learns how to get jobs there as a house cleaner -- there's not much more to the story than that except of course for the language, and sly references, and the way we see something real about life (if that's what it is) in Elfland. In "The Barmaid from Elfland" the narrator recognizes the title character as an elf and falls for her -- which we know is dangerous! And things go, more or less, as the rules for these stories say they must -- and the story gets there beautifully. "John Z. Delorean, Dry Cleaner to the Queen of Elfland" gives the notorious automaker a backstory in which he makes an Elfland fortune by doing dry cleaning for the elves, which leads to some good fortune as he starts his business -- but of course bad fortune when the Queen turns against him. The last line here is a killer. And "A Detective in Efland" has a man hired to retrieve a young girl who has disappeared -- kidnapped by elves, the mother says. Of course there is more going on -- this is a hardboiled detective story after all -- and we learn a little more about the seamy underside of Elfland, especially the uses a certain school has for kidnapped humans.
These stories are elegantly done, very clever, beautifully dark in implication. The tricks of making Elfland effectively mysterious are ready to Wessells' hand, and so too the ways of showing both the glamour and the danger. It is nice but not necessary to pick out the allusions. Henry Wessells is not prolific at all (in fiction) but what he does is outstanding.