Four Torches (Out of Five)
Imagine that you try to save someone’s life, but she ends up dying anyway. Making matters worse, the police think it may be murder, and consider you a person of interest.
Lily Ivory finds herself in this nightmare situation in Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell. This is the first book in a new mystery series called Witchcraft Mystery.
Lily is a witch, and magic is heavily woven into the plot of the book. The added bonus — the “gimmick,” if you will — is that part of the magic is, according to an author’s note, based on interviews with “real life witches.”
Lily feels like an outsider, the result of being a witch. She’s drifted around the world for years, ever since being forced to leave her home town. Now she’s in San Francisco, where she hopes to establish roots. This gets threatened by the mysterious death, particularly when the police start checking her past.
In addition to the mysterious death, she gets involved in investigating the mysterious disappearance of a young girl, apparently the latest in a long line of children who’ve vanished from one neighborhood and never been seen again.
The plot is good. It’s not as neatly-crafted a puzzle as an Agatha Christie novel — although, let’s face it, very few writers reach that standard. But the plot is always interesting, and there is genuine suspense as to how it will turn out.
But what really makes this book, I think, is the character development of Lily. She’s an interesting character, and there’s a sense of depth and history. By the end of the book, I felt I’d only barely gotten to know her (unlike some books that make me feel like I know everything I’ll ever know about their oh-so-simple main character by the end of page two!).
Supporting characters don’t strike me as being quite as deep as Lily, but they are believable and have some depth. The secondary characters who impress me the most are the men. Often, mystery series that star a woman have men who are one dimensional cardboard cutouts who do little more than show up in time to bash the murderer over the head as he threatens the heroine’s life.
The highest compliment I can pay this book is this: I got this book as “light reading” for when I commute on the bus. I started reading it on my way home. When I got home, instead of setting it aside for the next day, I kept reading.
Pick it up. It’s a magically good mystery.
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Black’s short stories are billed as Modern Faeire Tales, which as an apt description because of the vampires and elves and unicorns and anthropomorphism. Yet, even though the themes are consistent, every story is delicious on its own.
I know everyone out there is just dying for more vampire stories, something our culture is almost completely deprived of, so thank the powers that be that The Vampire Diaries has been picked up for another season. 
Not only were the books an enormous amount of campy, melodramatic fun, Carey did something bold: she brought full-fledged erotic writing — even S&M! — into the sometimes-staid world of fantasy fiction.
But he is misremembering. In the DVD commentary, Peter Jackson calls the scene a “visual trick,” pointing out that, “Very briefly, Christopher Lee’s eyes are actually glued onto Ian McKellen’s face…You also hear Christopher Lee’s voice — it’s blended in with Ian’s. We did want people, at least the uninitiated, to think that this possibly was Saruman.”
A: The Oracle would strongly agree with The Lord of the Rings and Earthsea, but would also enthusiastically add A Song of Fire and Ice by George R. R. Marin, the first Kushiel trilogy by Jaqueline Carey, and (yes) The Chronicles of Narnia and The First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (but not the third trilogy, which is almost unreadable).
Q: Another question: what is fantasy? For me, it’s not just supernatural. Magic has to be part of that reality. For example, The Dragonriders of Pern series isn’t strictly “fantasy” to me — the planet has spaceflight. Though the dragons can traverse space and even time, my memory is that this ability is never framed as magical, and no other magic seems to exist. — Robert
Many beloved fantasy films (and these days, television series as well) are adapted from novels and comic books, and it’s almost unheard of that a story will be reflected on the screen precisely as it’s described on the page.
Did the writers go too far? The reaction is split, and while almost everyone can agree that the films were a success, there still remains a faction of rabid fanboys who have turned their back on the movies (often after watching them many times to find out just why they hate them.)
A: Ralph, I think every fantasy or sci-fi author does have some fans like this — at least once he or she reaches a certain level of fame. And the reason why, as you suggest, has to do, in part, with the anonymous nature of the internet, but also just the nature of geekdom. As much as the Oracle (a geek to my core) hates to admit it, there might be some truth to the stereotype that a small sub-set of geeks has, well, social problems. We’re all best off ignoring them, because all they really want is attention — since, obviously, they have no friends.
A: Interestingly, while most of the events in The Chronicles of Narnia do not have exact years and dates, author C.S. Lewis did create a “time-line” of Narnian history before he died in 1963; it was published in 1979.
Q: Your article that mentioned the mynock in The Empire Strikes Back got me thinking about how ridiculous that scene is where they put on those flimsy breathing masks and basically go out into deep space (albeit in the belly of a space slug). Or am I missing something? Would the fact that the space-slug is reportedly a silicon-based life form make a difference? — Tom, Seattle, WA
Back again for another highly opinionated — some might even say downright cranky — look at the week in fantasy. You’ve been warned!
Anyway, I wasn’t too impressed with most of his reasons for the popularity of fantasy: because the future has caught up to sci-fi, because we’ve grown up on fantasy films, and because “literary” writers like Margaret Atwood are cannibalizing sci-fi sales with their own speculative fiction.
Traditionally, of course, both science fiction and fantasy gave women only ridiculously passive and stereotypical characters. (Depressingly, even some female writers still do this today **cough** Stephanie Meyer **cough**).
Speaking of sci-fi movies, earlier this year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced that they’re increasing the number of Best Picture Nominees from five to ten — which has some folks speculating that a genre movie could potentially 
Full disclosure: there are still a few movies I haven’t seen yet (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Zombieland), movies I refuse to see out of principle (New Moon), and movies that haven’t opened yet (The Princess and the Frog, Avatar, Sherlock Holmes).
A producer of speculative fiction magazines is paying 1/5 of one cent per word — 
Last week I pointed out the rather 
It reminds me of that moment in Dazed and Confused when Matthew McConaughey says, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That was unsettling to hear from him, and he was a hot dude in his 20s!
He was 247. She was 16. He kept telling her how much he loved her, and waited, patiently, until finally having sex with her on the night of her 17th birthday. You got that? He slept with her the moment she became legal. That’s just as creepy as all of those websites counting down to the day the Olsen twins turned 17.
Q: I hated Dollhouse for a lot of different reasons, but one thing that creeped me out was the idea that the “dolls” were programmed for sex, which they had no control over. How is this entertaining? It bugs me that Joss Whedon also romanticized prostitution in Firefly. Given his reputation for writing strong females, does he not understand that most women see this “fantasy” very differently? — Margot, Chicago, IL
Q: How can Santa, one person, visit all those houses in a single night? There are billions of people in the world! — Mehran, St. Louis, MO
Q: Someone told me that the characters in The Year Without a Santa Claus were puppets and that you could see the strings. So I guess I want to know if they were indeed puppets or is it just lines on the screen from the film being too old? – Barb