Book Review: Saffron and Brimstone - Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand

Elizabeth Hand, if not our finest fiction writer, is certainly among our most challenging and adventurous. Her stories blur the line between mundane realities and the utterly fantastical. Saffron and Brimstone, aptly subtitled "strange stories," eloquently illustrates the quiet horrors of contemporary society from a personal vantage point.

This is not a collection of horror or even science fiction genre fiction. It can't even be called a short story anthology. Hand's stories are typically novellas that explore the nuances of her characters and their environments. The resultant works read like rich tapestries, bleeding with muted colors and telling often abstract tales. Usually told in the first person, these stories not only lure us into the protagonist's psyche, but once there, trap us in a world we have no desire to escape. We relish our time there, and as exhausting as it may be, we find it to be a refuge of sorts.

The opening sentences of "Cleopatra Brimstone" (the only story here not told in first person) demonstrate Hand's mastery of words as dreamscape:

Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upward to grasp them but could not: they were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.

Throughout, Hand's phrasings invoke a sense of remarkable imagery that lift her stories from what would be pedestrian chillers in lesser talents. "Cleopatra Brimstone" concerns a young rape victim who inadvertently discovers her fascination with butterflies affords her a means of revenge, but with unforeseen consequences. In "Pavane for a Prince of the Air," neo-pagan, drug imbued funeral rituals transcend the finality of death in almost romantic ways. And in "The Least Trumps," the tattoo artist daughter of a children's book author finds love redefined and intertwined through a pair of errant tarot cards.

Article Author: Ray Ellis

Ray Ellis is a freelance writer who has been dissecting pop culture and its effect on how we view ourselves for over twenty years, ruffling feathers and dragging unsuspecting pedestrians along for the ride whenever possible.

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