Soft Focus

Sometimes I have to go away for a while. Not physically, of course. I'm too strapped for cash to hop a plane to Barbados or wherever the fuck it is that people associate with "escape." When I need to go away, I go inside. I pull the plug on social media, ignore the phone, draw the blinds and hide inside of my pajamas. When I go to work, I am Robo-Annie, here to help and willing to smile for as long as the Gabapentin/Imitrex lasts. But at home, I won't read the headlines or answer email. I watch reruns of old crime shows or British comedies. When I go to bed, I watch cartoons until the Ambien kicks in. And when the rub and scrape of static voices snarking at one another becomes too much, I shut everything off and grab a book.

I have a shitload of books. Of course I do. Most of them are of the horror variety, dark and hopeless and soaked in blood. A sizable chunk is nonfiction - media studies, sociology and history. And then there's the teeny tiny stack on the bottom shelf, barely more than a handful, which I think of as my "soft focus books." When the world gets too ugly and every mirror shows me a tired out cynic on the verge of tears, I reach for the soft focus, the slightly unreal but not too unbelievable. I'm not much for romance, or dragons and wizardry (unless it's Game Of Thrones, because that's different - it just is, okay?) but Urban Fantasy is just the right patch of shade in the literary meadow. And, for a while, I can pretend that the world still contains mushroom fairy rings, magical antique stores, people who dress in patchwork and serve tea cakes, and friends who actually help each other when things become dire.

Jack of Kinrowan

This was not the first book I ever read by Charles de Lint. That honor would go to Spiritwalk, a purple jacketed mass market whose cover art sported an intriguing little fox headed dude in jeans and flannel. I spotted it one day on a spinner rack and grabbed it on impulse. It was a purchase I never regretted, and one that led me deep into the world of the urban Fae, where the fairies of old have more or less adapted to the new machinery of the "civilized" world. Jack of Kinrowan struck a chord with me because the Jack of the title is a girl - Jackie - a misfit of sorts, pretty and smart but loathe to leave the comforts of home in exchange for garish neon, loud music and crowds. When her extroverted boyfriend finally dumps her - destroying her fragile self esteem in the process - Jackie does what a lot of us girls have done before. Cuts off all of her hair, smears on some make-up, then goes out and gets good and drunk just to prove that she can be a part of such an empty and vacuous existence. But the loud, mechanized world spits her right back out into a world of goblins, ogres, wizards and fairy folk, right where she truly belongs. And the moral of the story? Don't try and ram your square self into a round peg hole. The square shaped world needs you.



Yarrow

Here's another de Lint heroine who proves that you don't have to be a extroverted party girl to enjoy life. Actually, novelist Caitlin Midhir prefers the world of sleep and dreams, where bards weave tales on harps, antlered deities wander through ancient woods and a thousand stories can be brought back with her into the waking world where she transforms them into best selling novels. She lives a quiet life, alone in a big, cozy old house in Canada. Caitlin doesn't have a boyfriend and doesn't need one. She's not lonely. She's content to spend her days writing with occasional expeditions to the used bookstore, there to curl up on the couch with a coffee and talk books with her friend who owns the shop. But into this comfortable existence, a thief has come for her dreams, a vampire of sorts who drains the hopes and fantasies from his sleeping victims and leaves their empty, lifeless bodies behind. Caitlin can't dream anymore, and if she can't dream, she can't write. Even worse than writers block, Caitlin's dreamland is being laid to waste, it inhabitants murdered and its magic sucked dry by the ancient demon known only as Lysistratus. Caitlin doesn't have to crank up the badass soundtrack, don ninja gear, hop in a Ferrari and/or muscle up to defeat the dreaded dream eater - she just has to sleep and find a way to take back what is hers.

Dangerous Angels

The last time I saw Hollywood, it was hot and dirty, strewn with trash and garish with cheap souvenirs. But I wasn't looking at it through a hot pink kaleidoscope with a lace filter. Francesca Lia Block has the most incredible ability to turn petrol fumes into pink champagne. Set in the LA of the 1970s, Block's tale of a girl named Weetzie Bat is a totally normal slice of teen angst, but spun just a titch to the left and tilted just slightly into a dimension where every sequin is a diamond, every cottage in the hills contains a portal to Narnia and every article of clothing contains fairy dust. Weetzie's friends are gay punks, secret agent filmmakers, interracial lovers and heroin addicted ghosts. As Weetzie grows up and watches her own daughter emerge from her chrysalis, falling in love and making friends - including a gothic Witch Baby with bat wings and roller-skates - Block moves fluidly and deftly into the 90s, somehow sustaining the innocent magic from the old world and carrying it into the new on the backs of Generation X. For them, the magic will be slightly darker and perhaps heavier to bear, but it's up to them how to experience it, share it and transform it for the next wave.




Moonwise

I can't possibly tell you what this book is about. You tell me. Is it fantasy? Sci-Fi? An epic poem like Idylls of the King or Beowulf? Why does it remind me of The Worm Ouroboros? Sylvie lives in the woods, in a cabin I imagine being carved from the trunk of a massive living oak tree. She collects string and spools and scraps of lace in her pockets, gathers goose eggs and pots of honey and jam for her breakfast and simply must drape herself not in a mere dress but in many fluttering layers of material, calico and velvet and more lace under pilled and unraveling wool, heavy knee socks with mens shoes, her long hair ever wind tossed and secreting love letters and baby birds. When her lifelong friend Ariane comes to visit her in the dead of winter, a childhood game of their own creation swallows them whole, transporting them into a thick tangle of dark woods where the Nine Worlds dwell. Except the rules have changed and escaping is a riddle that is hopelessly tangled within the stars. This is such a strange and beautiful book, and even if the off-kilter Jacobean writing style doesn't suit you, it's also a book that can be opened anywhere and read, if just to enjoy the patchwork combination of nouns and adjectives that no hands not washed silver by moonlight can ever hope to weave.


Incubus

I know this one sounds like a horror story, and indeed it is a horror story, at its core. But with a demonic nugget at its center, the stuff surrounding Incubus is nothing short of homespun gorgeousness. Set in New England of 1974, Incubus is old world tradition and superstition mixed with modern day awakenings. It is summer in Dry Falls, Maine, where the gardens normally explode with color and swell heavy with fruit and vegetables. Most of the womenfolk are content to bake from scratch, attend church functions and accept mutually enjoyable sex from their spouses once or twice a week. But preacher's wife Cora is beginning to take notice of a strange series of events unfolding in her pleasantly dull community. As a killing heatwave descends, crushing the town beneath its oppressive weight, the women are complaining of nightly molestations by a greedy lover, one who takes pleasure but gives little in return. The husbands plead ignorance. Strange sounds are heard in the wee hours, and a huge black dog seems to be hanging around, observing the female population in eerie silence. When Cora's liberated and assertive (and bitchy) sister Hannah goes missing in the middle of a field of flowers, the alarm is raised in earnest. There is a demon among them, drawn by the scent of summer roses, the smell of fresh baked bread and the innocence of an untouched town blooming undisturbed. Incubus moves along quietly, sanely and without cheap scares or a-ha moments. It's a slow burn, both literally and figuratively.