The Necromancer's House

The Necromancer’s House, by Christopher Buehlman, is a scary, funny, fast-paced urban fantasy novel with a rich voice and likeable characters. With its multiple viewpoints and several satisfying reveals along the way, it is one of the most well-crafted and exciting books I have read in a while.

Buehlman tells the story of Andrew Blankenship, a charming, brilliant modern wizard who drives an antique Mustang, wears his long black hair in a samurai bun, and goes to AA meetings regularly. He lives in the woods of upstate New York, in a house stocked and protected with ancient magic, much of it stolen from Baba Yaga in Soviet Russia. He’s in love with his lesbian apprentice, sleeps with a rusalka (a mermaid in Slavic myth), and is served and protected by the reanimated heart of his dead dog in the body of a wicker man. To put it simply, his life is not without complications at the beginning of the novel, but things are about to get a lot worse for Andrew.

After the rusalka drowns a Russian national, Baba Yaga is awakened to Andrew’s continued existence and vows to bring him down. She sends her daughter, along with other arcane magical forces, to hunt Blankenship and destroy him. At this point, it takes all of Andrew’s considerable magical knowledge, combined with that of several of his friends, to evade the arch-witch.

Buehlman has a background in both poetry and drama, and these influences make his writing shine. His dialogue is winding and funny, like the best plays, and some of his prose, laid out on the page in one-sentence paragraphs, reads like poetry. Descriptions like “an embarrassment of stars, like a fay court,” and “a tumble of scratches and playful bites and cheek-licking, a dance as old as man and dog and meat and fire” make the reading experience feel like a treasure hunt.

One of the most powerful tools in Andrew’s toolbox is his house — after all, the book is called The Necromancer’s House. He has armed it in several ways, forming layers of magical protection around himself. These are uniformly fascinating. It’s fun to watch Andrew change skins in his Room of Skins, although the consequences of leaving one’s human skin lying around are pretty bad if enemies get in. There is a tiny replica of the house in the attic with a dangerous surprise inside, a sleeping giant made of car parts in his front yard, and his bathroom appliances can be used to travel to other bathrooms (like in Harry Potter, not as in a flying toilet). In short, the house has so much personality, it’s basically a character in the book.

The other characters in The Necromancer’s House are just as interesting and well-developed. Even the ones we barely meet, like Radha, the computer mage from Chicago, have distinct voices and personalities. My favorite was Anneke, Andrew’s protégé and AA sponsee. She’s sharp and bad-ass and a little bit self-deceiving. Buehlman’s best description of her is as follows: “Anneke doesn’t do regret, or at least she tells herself that enough that it has become her mantra. If she were in Game of Thrones, her household words would be, ‘Yes, I did do that. And fuck you.’”

Andrew’s backstory is fully explored, including the tragic reasons for his alcoholism. Despite his arrogance and vanity — literally, one of the reasons he has left his defenses down for so long is that he uses magic to make himself young — I liked and empathized with him. I cried at the scene near the end of the book, when Andrew spends a last few moments with his reanimated dead dog, and then allows him to die — to go “outside” — for good.

The one era of his life left blank — intentionally — is his time in Soviet Russia as a prisoner of Baba Yaga. He relates this tale to a character in the book, but we do not get to hear it. Instead, Chapter 34 consists of one sentence: “He tells them what happened to him in Russia.” This narrative technique works much like Edgar Allan Poe’s negative description of the pit in his short story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” When we don’t know exactly what Baba Yaga is capable of, she could be capable of just about anything.

Full disclosure for you horror fans and/or –phobes: The Necromancer’s House, which is categorized by the publisher as “horror,” didn’t scare me. This is fine with me. I don’t usually like horror; I get too easily frightened and, unlike adrenaline junkies, don’t find it a pleasant experience. I couldn’t go to sleep the night that I watched Shyamalan’s The Village because I kept imagining the fake-monster-things looming next to my bed, and that’s horror-lite! (Pity me, for I am weak.)

The thing that really scares me is inhuman evil. Anything from Lovecraft, or Stephen King’s terrifying oil slick in “The Raft,” or even human killers who kill compulsively, with joy, instead of for “normal” reasons to murder someone (such as power, or revenge, or bad grammar). These are terrifying monsters to me, ideas that won’t let me sleep at night. Some of the creatures in this book would fit that category, but the main antagonist, Baba Yaga, seemed just as human as Andrew Blankenship. Despite the terror she unleashes (including several very inventive deaths), she wasn’t inexplicable to me. Or perhaps I just read too many illustrated books when I was a kid portraying her as a kindly old babushka with a neat house. Either way, I was happy that I was able to read Buehlman’s book without resorting to huddling beneath my comforter.

*This review originally appeared here at FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave the book 4.5 stars.

Egg and Spoon: Feels more like fabulist literary fiction than YA

Gregory Maguire’s Egg and Spoon is being marketed as a YA novel, and I hope that designation doesn’t drive any readers away. This book blends the humor and hunger of real life with the wonder and otherworldliness of fables, resulting in a story that broke my heart so subtly, it was like a crack developing in an egg.

Egg and Spoon follows two young protagonists in Tsarist Russia. Elena Rudina, a peasant girl from the village of Miersk, meets a young noblewoman, Ekaterina (or Cat, for short), whose train has stopped in Miersk for repairs. The two girls become unlikely friends until one day, in a bizarre series of events, Elena and Cat accidentally switch places. Elena is whisked away on the train, dressed in fine clothing, fed more food than she’s seen in her impoverished life, and taught manners and etiquette in anticipation of an expected meeting of the Tsar’s nephew in St. Petersburg. Cat, on the other hand, is stuck behind in Miersk with Elena’s sickly mother, until she sets off through the forest to find her way to St. Petersburg and her normal life. On the way, Cat encounters Baba Yaga and her cat in their house on chicken legs, and a marvelous journey begins.

Like the game from which it takes its name, Egg and Spoon also follows the precarious journey of breakable things. The egg of the Firebird, a legendary glowing bird from Russian folklore, has been lost. The future of Russia — as a nation, as an idea, as a landmass — depends on the survival of the Firebird, so much of the novel is a wild-goose chase (pun intended) to find the egg and hatch a new Firebird. But the novel is just as invested in the real-life, day-to-day survival of the Russian poor; Elena and Cat represent the next generation, the one that is born in Tsarist Russia but matures in Bolshevik Russia. They are able to forge a friendship and build trust with each other despite class barriers. This ability is as precious and fragile as the egg of the Firebird, and Russia’s people will need it. Both Elena and Cat are well-drawn characters, lovable despite their flaws. Cat is able to move past her privilege to travel with the eccentric (and possibly child-eating) Baba Yaga. She quickly grasps the enormity of the situation with the Firebird and will not give up the search for it, even when it might be easier to resume her lavish life in St. Petersburg. On the other hand, Elena’s journey to St. Petersburg is originally motivated by her desire to find her brother, conscripted into the Tsar’s army. While she never fully loses sight of this goal, her desire for the ease and luxury of Cat’s life causes her to pretend a little too long, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. But it is only pretend and when she goes back to poverty-stricken Miersk to attend her sick mother, she knows she is leaving satin and caviar behind forever. Watching both of these characters as they develop compassion and responsibility was moving. It reminded me in many ways of Maia, the protagonist from Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor.

The storylines of minor characters are equally affecting. Cat’s nurse and butler, for instance, are devoted to Elena and Cat, although it endangers their jobs and neither girl is particularly grateful. At one point, Cat asks them why they are helping her. They answer that although they cannot fix Russia, they will help where they can. “That’s all that most of us who are not Tsars or witches can manage to do.” At this very Mother Teresa-like philosophy, I broke down crying while reading in the tub and almost dropped the book in the water.

Even the dangerous Baba Yaga has her moments of pathos. As the girls leave her, she shows signs of real emotion. “They could see through Baba Yaga, too. The fiendish glee had gone. Her face looked ancient, betraying that she saw worries behind her eyes as well as in front of them . . . . They could hear a sound from Baba Yaga that they’d never heard before. No one could bear to admit what it was.”

Baba Yaga is one of the delights of Egg and Spoon. Her dialogue is witty, sharp, and deliciously morbid, urging Cat to eat some borscht because she finds it “a wonderful marinade when applied from the inside.” It’s also full of references to literature, folktale, and contemporary pop-culture. When Cat neglects to eat her borscht, Baba Yaga says, “You’re not going to drink the Kool-Aid?” In this way, she reminded me of Merlin from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, who, because he is living backwards in time, can reference World War II in his talks with Arthur.

Another delight is the first-person narrator, whose identity we only learn late in the novel. The narrator’s voice is clearly realized and lends a meta-fictional aspect to Egg and Spoon; he seems like nothing so much as a clever, gifted storyteller, a wise and funny grandfather-type. The narration is interspersed with short meditations on the story itself and the narrator often addresses the reader directly. For instance, this passage, while Elena is imprisoned: “I suppose you could say that Elena deserved to weep; she’d made a royal botch of it. But we all do sometimes. If we’re lucky, we weep alone. The one thing captivity can be good for: privacy.”

Maguire’s writing also includes moments of poetic illumination. For instance, the first time we encounter Baba Yaga’s kitten Mewster, he is in the form of a prowling forest cat. Maguire describes him thus: “A look of golden longing in its eye . . . Its face an exotic blossom of fur.” Another example, a description of geese flying: “But every time they turned a certain way in the dawn sun, the cloudless sky became a skin like fish scales, blinking. It seemed a language, a set of signals, if only they knew how to read it. The shadow of their flight upon the ground, a word inscribed upon the earth.” I will not quote my favorite passage, both because it must be experienced in the context of the story and because it is beneath my dignity to blubber all over my computer twice in the same review.

The advanced vocabulary and intensely poetic images in Maguire’s prose, combined with the gravity and maturity of the book’s themes, made Egg and Spoon feel more like fabulist literary fiction than a YA book. I realize that, on a content level, this is a nitpicky and ultimately false distinction. YA books can be as deep, meaningful, and precisely written as books marketed to adults. I’m preaching to the choir here; most of my SFF-reader friends also read and enjoy YA.

But on a marketing level, these terms — “young adult” vs. “literary fiction” — carry weight. Some adults just won’t see a book marketed to a YA audience. Not that they have any grudge against YA, but its existence will float right past their consciousness as they tune in for books that are marketed to their readership. As a (admittedly fledgling) bookseller, I can’t really imagine the teen to whom I would sell this book, probably because, as a teen, a lot of it would have been over my head. I would have loved the folklore-inspired scenes, but I’m not sure I would have understood the deeper implications of class, wealth, and the impending Russian revolution. Maybe that doesn’t matter. I can imagine the adult that I will sell this book to — the readers of Helene Wecker, and Josh Weil, and Lauren Owen, the ones who maybe don’t know they like fabulism before they have it foisted upon them. And I intend to foist it upon them.

*This review originally appeared at FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave the book 5 stars.