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lisa_goldsteinThe first thing you notice is how wonderful, how assured, the writing is.
“The moon came up and the sun went down. The moonbeams went shattering down to the ground, and the jackalope wives took off their skins and danced.
“They danced like young deer pawing the ground, they danced like devils let out of hell for the evening. They swung their hips and pranced and drank their fill of cactus-fruit wine.”
That’s the beginning, and the temptation is to keep going until I’ve quoted the whole thing. Instead I’m going to stop here and just admire those sentences for a while. The narrator is introducing you to a place you might have seen once, or almost seen: the moonlight, and something dancing with or between the moonbeams … You believe it immediately, even with all the impossibilities folded into just those two paragraphs.
And listen to the last sentence, the rhyme and almost-rhyme of “dance” and “prance” and “drank.” The prose is dancing along with the jackalopes.
A foolish young man tries to capture a jackalope wife in the time-honored way: he steals her skin and starts to burn it. “But she screamed — she wasn’t supposed to scream — nobody said they screamed,” he tells his grandmother later. He pulls the skin out of the fire, leaving her halfway between jackalope wife and human.
There are a lot of things between one thing and another in this story — the jackalopes, of course, between jackrabbit and antelope; the poor burned woman; the man, both cruel and kind. The jackalopes dance “on the half-moon, when new and full were balanced across the saguaro’s thorns.” Some of them belong there, but some, like the young man, are trespassing in this liminal space.
The man’s grandmother sets out across the desert, looking for help. (Vernon doesn’t say what desert this is, but my guess is that it’s somewhere near Coconino, where the characters in “Krazy Kat” live.) Her journey reads like a folktale, a story that grew up in the southwestern United States along with the cactuses and the rattlesnakes and roadrunners.
This all by itself would make the story stand out, but there’s still more, a beautiful jolt at the end that made the hair on the back of my neck rise up.
I also liked — well, I liked a lot of the stories, but I’m just going to mention a few of them. “The Dryad’s Shoe” is a take on Cinderella that turns out better than the original story. “Let Pass the Horses Black” Is a retelling of Tam Lin, and if it doesn’t turn out better that the original that’s only because the original is so powerful. Then there’s “Godmother,” which subverts not one fairy tale but all of them.
None of Vernon’s stories end with the guy getting the girl, or vice versa, which is refreshing. Surprising, too — after all, we know how these stories usually go. (You’re just going to have to read them to find out how she does it.) A lot of them are about people struggling, even sacrificing, to help someone in need, sometimes even when they barely know the other person, and that’s refreshing as well, and encouraging. And I can’t think of anyone better at blurring the line between human and animal and making you believe it. (Another Ursula, Ursula Le Guin, did it equally well. I was reminded of “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” several times as I read this collection.)
It used to worry me that the United States didn’t have a lot of myths or folktales. We mostly borrowed them from other cultures, and sometimes they didn’t fit terribly well — how many people live next door to a forest? And what on earth is rampion, the plant that the mother had to have in “Rapunzel”? Now I see that I was far too unimaginative. We have all the myths we could ever want — and if these stories are any indication, we’ll be getting more of them, for as long as Ursula Vernon keeps writing.
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