Here's a little something for Enemy Glory fans who've been wondering whatever happened to Karen Michalson's luckless Llewelyn. Hecate's Glory will fill you in on the whole gory, blasting, twisted, dark deal that Michalson's devilish imagination has rendered in ink -- maybe it was blood. If you like your fantasy dark, depressing, and a little disturbing then Hecate's Glory won't disappoint. Hey, there's even an ill-tempered storm dragon in this world of evil clerics and not so good "good" wizards. Everyone's got issues in Hecate's Glory -- and none of them are healthy! Hecate's Glory is one of those books where it becomes clear pretty quickly that no one and nothing is ever quite what it seems. After blasting enough institutions crisply enough to warrant notice from those folks who dish out the Prometheus Awards, Karen Michalson turns her writing wizard wand to incinerating the literary world and its workings. The Bardic tradition and its descent into the dubious nature of the printed book are at the self-destructive psychological core of Hecate's Glory. Our bad boy Llewelyn just cannot resist a good tale well sung. He's as hopelessly addicted to Ellisand's poetic and musical crafts as the half elf bard is to smoking dope. It's a little like the relationship between fans and rock stars -- complete with hotel/inn wrecking, groupie girls, and carte blanche for bad behavior.

In other words, Llewelyn's love of beauty and art just takes the legs out from under him even when he's finally becoming as bad as he wants to be. How Hecate doesn't see through to his maladjusted core and reject him from the get-go might be a mystery in any other tome. But not in Hecate's Glory. Oh no, here it is perfectly in keeping with context that an evil goddess would accept a cleric flawed at the core with a penchant for positive action -- even if it's not intended to be positive. What better way to inflict torture, pain, and evil than on such a mind? Make no mistakes about such thinking -- take note that one of Lew's jobs is to turn the evil El to good as entertainment for the conquering Roguehan. Convoluted you say? Well, hey, turn on the news, read the paper, browse the net for current affairs, and see how much of that denies logic on the surface. Take heart, Lew is really good at back stabbing -- literally! He's always up front about where he aims his knives.

So take Hecate's Glory with an eye to perusing the evil that men, and women, do in the name of evil and good. Decide for yourself what is the role of Art, of all types, in the affairs of humankind. Are critics anything more than would-be artists frustrated at their lack of ability and taking it out on the art they find flawed? What does it require to play the fame game? Is attitude all it takes to make it in the world? Is it? If so, then does Art have the ability to redeem or just amuse, entertain, and distract?

So goes Michalson's biting commentary via her art in Hecate's Glory. Frankly, I'm wondering how many mediocre, pulp churning, New York Times List-making successful writers could meet Michalson's well-crafted writing quality, or even read well enough to clue into her devastating deconstruction of the literary world. Somehow I doubt she's in danger of a public stoning. More's the pity, because she's clearly attempting to murder the whole publishing/literary scene -- or at least give it a harsh blast upside the head to get somebody to wake up. To those who "get it," what can I say besides, enjoy the crime as it unfolds -- psychological slaughter though it may be. Remember, "…all art is fantasy, is illusion."

For all of you who've ever wondered why fantasy and science fiction are treated like red-headed stepchildren by the likes of English faculty, book store managers, and literary critics, Karen Michalson's immensely accessible Victorian Fantasy Literature: Literary Battles with Church and Empire offers some excellent explanations regarding this continuing attitude. In part, Michalson explores how the mindsets of British clergymen and imperialists influenced the criteria of what became acceptable literature in the education system and the home. The chapter "Fantasy and Victorian Education" should be required reading for all education majors. Anyone harboring grand ideals about the supposed altruistic nature of education might be just a touch disenchanted. The British canon of literature continues to set the standard in both British and American literary arenas. It is a standard that generally strives to keep non-realistic fiction on the fringes of literary acceptability. Michalson provides a comparatively brief yet quite deft overview of the establishment of the still revered canon. Well, while fantasy and science fiction haven't exactly taken the institutions of the literary elite by storm, neither has been driven down the rabbit hole. Also, there's a delicious irony in the air even as I write. J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor of medieval literature. And you must be living in a rabbit hole if you don't know that The Lord of the Rings is about to hit the big screen just in time for Christmas. I for one am curious if the movie will set off a fresh wave of demand for fantasy fiction once the movie fans have devoured The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and demand more, please! Then who knows what fantasy author they'll discover next in the quest to satisfy the appetites of their imaginations: Charles de Lint? Elizabeth Haydon? Tanith Lee? Piers Anthony? Emma Bull? Karen Michalson?

Or new fantasy fans might even dig into the nooks and crannies for the likes of George MacDonald's Phantastes. MacDonald is one of the authors Karen Michalson puts under her critical microscope in Victorian Fantasy Literature. Her other specimens include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Ruskin (a prime candidate for a bi-polar disorder if there ever was one), Charles Kingsley (o what a naughty, naughty fellow!), Henry Rider Haggard (a fellow quite in touch with the softer sex) and Rudyard Kipling (talk about childhood training for nonconformity!). Michalson presents the often contradictory formative forces at work in the intellectual and imaginative formation of each writer and how their respective fantasy works are far from children's reading fare, as they deal with such issues of the adult world regarding imperialism, gender, law, religion, and social politics. Distillations of Kingsley's Water Babies not withstanding. Now this all might sound a bit dry for fantasy fans, but Michalson's engaging tone and the atypical, eccentric natures of her subjects make this tome anything but dry kindling. The combination of historical and biographical information to create contexts for the mental workings of each writer are presented in a tone meant to engage rather than intimidate the reader. Clearly Michalson enjoys her subject, and she wants her audience to share that enjoyment -- a rare quality indeed for an academic. Many of the institutional topics Michalson wrestles with in her own fantasy work Enemy Glory are present in Victorian Fantasy Literature, such as stifling academic, political, and religious institutions. So much so that one has to wonder just how instrumental this academic work was in leading her astray into not just finding a credible field of study in fantasy but a genre worth contributing fiction to. Hmm, someday an industrious graduate student researching the relationship between academics and the fantasy genre just might point out the subversive nature of George MacDonald's Phantastes and fantasy at large upon the workings of Karen Michalson's imaginative powers.

Subversive you say? Well, of course the fantasy written by Michalson's authors is subversive or at the very least nonconformist in one form or another:

Although there is no such thing as one unified Victorian worldview... the nineteenth century was, in very broad terms, an age of absolutes. Christian evangelicals did not read imaginative fiction. Respectable preachers did not publicly preach about a chaotic God. Christian socialists did not denigrate the working class. Men of Empire did not acknowledge their feminine side. Champions of the Law did not criticize the institutions that made Law possible. That is, these activities were not generally publicly acknowledged or validated. Yet Ruskin, MacDonald, Kingsley, Haggard, and Kipling did these things in their lives and in their writings, respectively. They managed to negotiate between mutually exclusive categories of thought and vision. By alienating people on various sides of these categories they had no choice but to fight their literary battles alone.

In my review of Meditations on Middle-Earth, I said something to the effect that it was a collection of essays about falling in love with Tolkien's work. Well, in a similar sense, Victorian Fantasy Literature is Karen Michalson's book about discovering that fantasy is a genre worthy not only of study but of reading -- and it might be about an academic falling in love with a genre. In her conclusion Michalson states, "I look forward to the day when great literary works of fantasy are accorded the same status as great literary works of other, more academically acceptable genres." Hmm, perhaps if we call it the literature of subversive tendencies...? No? At any rate, if you endure the grumblings of an anti-fantasy academic, or some other such individual, you might want to make an investment in their education by making them a gift of Victorian Fantasy Literature: Literary Battles with Church and Empire. Of course you should read it before presenting it as a gift. After all, what better way to confront your enemy than to know what they know and more? Or you can suggest the tome to your local library so that it will be available for the perusal of the public at large. Who knows who else might follow Michalson into Kipling's "fourth dimension?" Don't for a minute think that Kipling's Jungle Books are on the same shelf as Pat Murphy's Wild Angel. As fun as the latter might be, it has nowhere near the intellectual substance as the former. And don't think children won't notice. At the age of about 10 my son looked up from reading Kipling and said, "This isn't just about a boy living in a jungle, is it?" No it's not. A great deal of fantasy is about much more than it appears on the surface. It's often a forum for all sorts of serious discourse. As Kipling and Haggard and their cohorts well knew. Eventually the academic institutions at large will catch on. There must be more Karen Michalsons. There must. But we'll keep on reading in the meantime. And writers will keep on writing fantasy to suit their own ends.

"From my observations, fantasy literature has not become any more acceptable to academic critics en masse than it was when I wrote Victorian Fantasy, although I also sense that is slowly changing. Last spring I attended the Science Fiction Research Association's annual conference, and the scholars I met there -- who did consider fantasy and SF as literature worthy of study -- all conveyed an air of having to sneak around with this interest outside of their respective departments. All of the scholars I talked to had done the bulk of their work in acceptable mainstream literary fields, and were not in a position to be able to consider fantasy literature as more than a side interest to their other scholarly pursuits. Many of them would have liked to have made fantasy criticism more central to their professional lives, and some taught courses in fantasy literature, but their departments back home usually insisted that they focus most of their work on more mainstream areas.

"But I sensed a great deal more enthusiasm and interest among literary scholars for fantasy literature than there was ten years ago, so I believe that it's not unreasonable to expect that one day the canon will include the best works of fantasy as well as realism. My candidates for canonization include George MacDonald's Phantastes, Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, and of course, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings."

In Enemy Glory, Karen Michalson neatly flays the institutions of government, academia, and religion via the fantasy world adventures of a would-be-as-bad-as-he-can-be young cad, Llewelyn. The problem with Llewelyn is that he can't shake his positive vibes for the folks with whom he briefly experienced a certain sort of blissful home-life, which nurtured his emotionally- and intellectually-starved soul: Mirand, Walworth, Caethne, and Baniff. Did this little group just use and abuse our boy for their own ends, then cast him off like so much refuse or not? Michalson cunningly makes this not as easy a question to answer, as it might seem.

Within the pages of Enemy Glory, I think there really is something for everyone who has ever questioned the morality of authoritarian institutions and those who run them -- churches, schools, governments, armies, the IRS, etc. If you're taken in by the purity of those intellectual ivory towers, think again. Michalson effectively smashes carefully crafted illusions with resounding clarity and reality. We've all met people like these double-talking totalitarians, military leaders, teachers, and priests -- and some of us are these people. One has to wonder just how much of Llewelyn's experiences are based on Michalson's own. That's her business, but Llewelyn is our business since he's in the public realm, so to speak, and magic and illusions aside, his world of human behavior is very much alive and well in our own messy reality. The shots at academia are right on target with a cutting portrait of a the monastery school where students attempt to cull praise by parroting the words of others, read critics/instructors, instead of their own thoughts. The priest/scholar El's egocentricity is alive and well in institutions of higher learning all across America. And his students' behaviors are equally realistic. It isn't a pretty picture of education, but it's startling in its methodically drawn accuracy.

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