Review - Looking Glass by Christina Henry

Looking Glass (The Chronicles of Alice, 3)
Christina Henry
Titan Books, 21 April 2020
Available as: PB, 336pp, e, audio
Read as: PB advance copy
ISBN: 9781789092868

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of Looking Glass to consider for review.

Following from Alice and Red Queen, Looking Glass sees Henry return to her Alice-In-Wonderland inspired world, this time with a collection of four novellas featuring Alice and Hatcher - and one focussing on Alice's sister, Elizabeth, living in the New City.

In the first story, Lovely Creature, Elizabeth seems in danger of falling as Alice fell - blundering into the Old Town, being made use of, and then rejected by her parents. Henry cleverly gives us more insight into Alice's early life while making it clear that Elizabeth is not just a substitute Alice (even if that's how her parents see her). Yes, we encounter the Jabberwock. Yes, there are hints scattered around - like the creepy Mr Dodgson - that we're in the same world. But stories don't all end the same way and Elizabeth is determined to shape her own, whatever happens rot her. I hope we'll meet her again.

Girl in Amber sees Alice take centre stage. She and Hatcher are travelling through the wilderness, looking for somewhere to call home. But it's not easy. Winter is closing in, Hatcher can't be with other people too much, Alice can't survive in the wilds. So a mysterious building looming out of a snowstorm should be welcome, no?

This story really sees Alice come into her own, and its tender and insightful portrayal of the relationship between her and Hatcher - two half-broken, half-mended people - is a (painful) joy to read.

When I First came to Town is the exception here in that it takes places before the events of Alice and Red Queen. Hatcher has learned now to trust enough, has healed enough, to tell Alice about his early life - before the asylum, when he was a boy called Nicholas who was keen and hungry, training in a boxing gym to take on the most fearsome bruiser in the Old City. The Grinder, though, works for Rabbit and making his acquaintance will come at a cost. Perhaps the closest story in tone and mood to the earlier books, When I First came to Town goes some way to explaining Hatcher's fall and the hurts done to him - as well as telling us more about the Old and New Towns and the varieties of men and women who live there. A brutal story that spares nhe reader nothing, it was my favourite here.

Finally we come to The Mercy Seat in which Alice and Hatcher, crossing the mountains to find their safe place, come across a self-righteous, hypocrisy-ridden village which will destroy them if it can. It's a simple story and shows both coming into more knowledge of what they can do (and what they can't).

I loved these stories. They're distinct, but taken together, give an overall picture - like the mirror of the title, they give us a reflected view of Henry's Alice world, mixing viewpoints, making the large small and the small large, hinting at what else might come and planting some seeds. Ideally read after the other two books, they could still serve as a taster to this world, and there are many places where you'll post a sly Wonderland touch, whether integral to the plot (as with the Rabbit) or - seemingly - just placed there to be spotted.

Great fun, and I especially enjoyed revisiting this world.

For more information about Looking Glass, see the Titan Books website here.

Blogtour Review - Wonderland ed by Marie O'Regan and Paul Kane

Design by Julia Lloyd

Wonderland: An Anthology of Works Inspired by "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
Edited by Marie O'Regan and Paul Kane
Titan Books, 17 September 2019
PB, e, 352pp

I'm grateful to Titan Books for a free advance copy of Wonderland to consider for review and for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour.

I love themed anthologies. It's always interesting to see what a diverse group of top-grade authors make of a meaty subject, what similarities and differences there are between their take on it, and how the editor juxtaposes things. Recently there seems to have been a resurgence of anthologies playing with classic stories - understandably because, really, with something like Alice, there is always something new to say, not least because times change, we change, and our approach to these stories must also change.

This anthology is bookended by poems from prolific author and poet Jane Yolen. Alice in Armor muses on an Alice taking her own life into her hands and arming herself against injury. The implications of this are made clearer in Yolen's closing poem, Revolution in Wonder. It's fitting that Yolen both opens and closes the book, echoing the range of approaches followed by the stories in between (especially given her contributions elsewhere to this whole area of reinterpreting and reimagining those classic tales we all have as part of the furniture of our minds.

Overall this collection has teeming variety. There are stories inspired by Wonderland, using its look and feel, as it were, stories which expand upon aspects of the original books, prequels, sequels, real-world stories where a "Wonderland" aspect might be taken as objective reality or equally, may reflect a state of mind or be a metaphor for the distance from childhood. There are transpositions of Alice to varied settings - the Wild West, a dystopia future, urban Japan - and all manner of other reimagining (including some which touch on uncomfortable aspects of Dodgson - Lewis carroll - and his circle.

They are all strong stories and it would be invidious to try to rate each one, but I particularly enjoyed Genevieve Cogman'' The White Queen's Pawn, Good Dog, Alice by Juliet Marillier, About Time by George Mann, LL McKinney's story What Makes a Monster and Alison Littlewood's Eat Me, Drink Me.

In Wonders Never Cease, the first story proper, Robert Shearman picks up where Alice itself ends, imagining her leaving Wonderland and rejoining a very prosaic Earth of roundabouts, typing and switchboards. Or has she left? The story is effectively timeless, weaving together Wonderland weirdness with moments in an ordinary life, while keeping the sense of being in a dream which Carroll's novels depend upon.

There Were No Birds To Fly by MR Carey presents a Wonderland-tinged, but post-Apocalyptic, Brighton. Deadly aliens walk among us, and a small party is fleeing - but to where? And why? 'If you follow the rules' the Narrator (who wears an apron, and carries a set of carpenter's tools) is told at the start, 'you'll live a whole lot longer.' And there do seem to be rules in this story, but they are frustratingly hard to grasp. A grim, allusive take that seems to inhabit the spirit of Wonderland while being rooted in a real place.

Genevieve Cogman presents a different Alice in The White Queen's Pawn, set in the 1930s where dreams of dozing by the river and drinking resizing potions are long gone and the nasty realities of the later decade take the foreground - with, however, the order 'Off with her head!' still ringing. A neat reversal involving a looking glass is a nice commentary on the politics of those, and perhaps these, times.

Cavan Scott's Dream Girl plunges into what seems to be a world of classic horror - a dark and bloodstained Wonderland with its own secrets where the March Hare's madness has taken a sinister turn. Alice is missing - if she is found will she be able to restore order or will she just bring ruin? There is a clever conceit to this story which I didn't spot coming, but it's one that casts a shadow at the end of the story. I wasn't sure whether the was a Happy Ever After here.

In Good Dog, Alice by Juliet Marillier the protagonist is Dorothea, not Alice, but there is a small doorway, there is a magical food that can resize the eater and there are - in the background - Oxford dons. Here Wonderland (if that's what it is) is both a refuge and a source of strength, with the real hours outside, in our world. A neat and haunting story, one of my favourites in this book.

Jonathan Green's The Hunting of the Jabberwock gives us the true story of this famous quest - in which things turn out to be both less, and more, heroic than the legend which has been handed down. Drawing on the possibilities for the Hunt as a self-contained episode Green creates what could almost be a Dungeons & Dragons module, complete with an eager young Squire, a battered, world-weary knight and an unfriendly Hermit. Liberally spattered with gyres and gimbles, more raths and fearsome Jubb Jubb birds, this story is fun and entertaining.

In About Time, George Mann gives a thoughtful interpretation of Alice in a wider context, dwelling on childhood and adulthood and the responsibilities each has to the other. Here, as in several other stories, Wonderland serves several purposes, including being a refuge, a comfort and a mirror (of course!) to "real life". Another of my favourites.

I previously knew Angela Slatter for her Verity Fassbinder series of urban fantasy sets in Brisbane (excellent - read them!) so it's good to see her do something every different in Smoke 'em if You Got 'em which is... how to describe it? A kind of Alice "Western" complete with six-shooters, a sheriff and a saloon. An excellent, rounded story in itself giving its Alice plenty of action and agency and, perhaps, a peep into a wider world we might see more of? I can hope.

Rio Youers's Vanished Summer Glory takes a more sentimental vein, being one of those stories that looks back on a (sort of) past Wonderland, or Wonderland experience, making no judgement on objective reality (I had thoughts) but definitely using the whole concept to convey vanished youth, innocence and childhood joy. As a native of Cheshire I was pleased to see the Daresbury setting.

Black Kitty by Catriona Ward might be, perhaps, a prequel to the Alice stories? It very cleverly weaves elements from the Alice mythos into a deeper, scarier world but - and I think this is unusual in this sort of story - gives its Wonderland participants real hopes and fears, which are perfectly rational in their (irrational) world.

Laura Mauro's The Night Parade takes us to Osaka, to a humid night where Airi, unable to sleep, lights a moody cigarette and observes the city from her tiny balcony. That might seem as unlikely a jumping off point for a Wonderland story but it really isn't - as Mauro shows, everything joins up. Another of my favourites, both for its distinctive atmosphere and for its resourceful central character.

LL McKinney has form in reimagining Wonderland, her A Blade so Black using it as the basis for an urban fantasy set in modern Atlanta, so What Makes a Monster already has a whole world to draw on - one she uses with relish in this story of London, gaslight and fog which also serves as something of a prequel for ABSB.

James Lovegrove's The White Queen's Dictum is perhaps more tangentially Wonderland-ish - the title refers to the idea of believing "six impossible things before Breakfast" but with that nod we're into rather a different kind of story - still an effective and twisty one, though.

In Temp Work, Lilith Saintcrow gives us a grim, corporate-ruled and environmentally degraded future. Not a Wonderland, you'd think, and temping maid Alise, required to dress pleasingly for someone else's fantasy, is just making it from one day to another, staving off hunger and getting by. Its not though only her bosses who have have strategies and plans.

Alison Littlewood's Eat Me, Drink Me, like a number of other stories here, picks up on the atmosphere and trapping of the original stories and deftly turns them round to reflect on its Alice's situation and dilemmas. A claustrophobic, harrowing and tense story, another favourite in this collection.

Cat Rambo's story How I Comes to be the Treacle Queen is a slightly different take, written in - at first - a slightly difficult language but it's an intriguing and passionate story that quickly grew on me. It is really Wonderland from below. Excellent.

The final story in the book, Six Impossible Things by Mark Chadbourn complements Vanished Summer Glory in meditating on "real life" (whatever that is) but doing with both a more direct take on the Alice books (looking at the people who inspired then, including some darker aspects concerning Carroll) and a less direct one: it involves an Alice, exploring something very like a canonical Wonderland... but not exactly like. Fittingly, the story raises many questions, bringing the anthology towards its end in a very open way, before Yolen's closing poem of high revolt rounds things off.

A super anthology showcasing a range of authors doing splendid stuff. Great fun.

For more about the book, see the publisher's website here and the other reviews and pieces in the blogtour set out in the poster below.

Review - Mad Hatters and March Hares ed by Ellen Datlow

Cover by Dave McKean

Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Tor, 12 December 2017
PB, 332pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

The playground that is Lewis Carroll's Wonderland begs to be peopled by authors, filmmakers, comic makers, indeed anyone with a creative spark who can produce a fresh take on the adventures of Alice and the surreal, sinister crew that she encountered down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.

And so we have in this book an abundance: dark Wonderlands, Wonderlands turned into theme parks or battle fields, imaginary Wonderlands, Wonderlands that have spilled over into the "real world". We have White Rabbits (literal and metaphorical), Red and White Queens, Cheshire Cats (and other Cheshires), Jabberwockies, wabes and much, much more.

Above all, we have Alices. Alices of all sorts: little girls who fell down that rabbit hole, older women who came out, the real Alice Liddell, missing daughters, wayward Alices, tough cookie Alices. Alices as victims, as manipulators, as surrogates, as avengers.

All read at once, it is perhaps rather overwhelming, like eating a whole box of Christmas chocs in one go, and I wouldn't advise that (apart from anything else, many if not all of the stories evoke - mostly with some success - the jargon and atmosphere of Carroll's books and that is something which is perhaps best not taken in large doses). No, I'd suggest rather that you come and go: read a story, ponder, return. Hop around the book, depending whether you want pastiche Alice, Alice-with-a-twist or - and these were my favourites - Alice inspired fiction, perhaps with no Wonderland, indeed even no Alice as such, but with a sense of something.

As you fall down that rabbit hole, passing shelves and volumes, I offer the following as a brief guide, to help you choose what to read and in what order.

My Own Invention (Delia Sherman) - An Alice meets the Red Knight in a wood. Or is she a not-Alice? In Wonderland you can never be sure.

Lily-White and Thief of Lesser Night (CSE Cooney) is a beguiling piece of fantasy, clearly set in a Wonderland but not, for once, featuring an Alice. It's a nice story of fantasy and adventure set among the vorpal roses.

Conjoined (Jane Yolen - some of whose Alice stories were included in her The Emerald Circus which I recently reviewed, although not those featured here) is a story of the Tweedle twins touring with Barnum's circus.

Mercury (Priya Sharma) is a dark tale set in a debtors' prison not so far from the village of Daresbury where the real CL Dodgson is commemorated in church window.  It features a hatter and his daughter and the mercury that causes hatters' madness. The ensemble of Wonderland turn up in wonderfully distorted ways - a Duchess who is the boss of the jail. An Alice who's taught "Be tiny. be giant. Adapt to the dictates of the situation". A cat called Dinah. A Knave... Here, it's all about escape.

Some Kind of Wonderland (Richard Bowes) reimagines the Alice stories as a film made in 1960s New York, which is revisited by its stars, now advanced in age. Again, the Wonderland motif bleeds through into mundane reality raising possibilities of escape but also of entrapment in that beguiling pocket universe.

Alis (Stephen Graham Jones) is towards the horrific end of the whimsy-horror spectrum that these stories define, taking a familiar trope - foolish students experimenting with things that should be left alone - and giving it a distinctly Carollian twist involving a mirror. "Inspired by" rather than "interpretation of", I think, but nevertheless a fine and chilling story.

All the King's Men (Jeffrey Ford) is one of the odder stories here. Again it features motifs from Carroll's books, but is not quite set in either Wonderland or in any real world. It is more a nursery rhyme kingdom, complete with an evil Humpty Dumpty. It's an inventive, twisty tale, hauntingly effective, portraying a world which could surely feature in a longer piece of fiction.

Run, Rabbit (Angela Slatter) is firmly set in the (a) real world but in a seamy, noirish version of it. The Rabbit (something of a dandy) is on the run from the Queen, and he's late. Then he encounters a girl in a bar. Her name is Pleasance and she works in a garden, with roses. Rabbit works in import-export: don't ask in what he traffics or for whom. A truly seamy, shudder-inducing take on that original encounter between innocent Alice and the distracted Rabbit.

In Memory of a Summer’s Day (Matthew Kressel) is another rather twisted story, its embittered narrator working as guide ("I've been leading tours of Wonderland for forty years...")  in a tawdry version of Wonderland that's now run as a theme park. It's still not a safe place, though, as some of the visitors - and our narrator - discover. Memorable for the collision between the essential Wonderland magic, the sheer sinisterness of the reality behind that, and the hustle of the carnival, this one will stay in your mind a long time.

Sentence Like a Saturday (Seanan McGuire) points out that "doors swing both ways" as do stories and then rather brilliantly inverts the logic (or illogic) of Wonderland to ask what happens if somebody - or something - comes up the rabbit hole? A rather tender story, in point of fact, this contains multitudes and shows how strange our world would be - it runs on logic! - to a befuddled Wonderlandian exiled here. And the price they might pay. After all "a mother was the door through which tomorrow passed".

Worrity, Worrity (Andy Duncan) is another that might almost be a classical horror - I was strongly reminded of MR James. It focuses on Sir John Tenniel, illustrator of Alice, and his problem with wasps. Eerie, chilling and a nice counterpoint to the stories which actually take us to Wonderland.

Eating the Alice Cake (Kaaron Warren) is another horror story (I think!) There's no overt Wonderland here, quite the opposite: but we have an Alice, who has a consuming passion for food and a painful secret, we meet a Mock Turtle... and there are some familiar names and a mirror. It is a grim little story, slightly nasty in the manner of the best horror.

The Queen of Hats (Ysabeau Wilce) is a little different from the other stories here in that it takes the Alice mythology and transposes it into a new cultural setting: it's about a "poor tamale girl", locating the story in South America but also evoking a meta fictional world which might contain "Ticonderoga, Arkham, Cibola, Porkopolis, Beleogost, Goblin Town, Eboracum, Sunnydale" as well as that most fictional of locations, "London". These names are found on labels on a theatrical trunk, a trunk that contains many marvels, indeed, wonders... here the Wonderland settings are transposed to disused backdrops as might be found in an old style theatre, complete with wardrobe room and auditions for something called (to avoid bad luck) "The Oxford Play". What might that be?

A Comfort, One Way (Genevieve Valentine) speculates on the very question of the identity of an Alice, seeming to suggest that despite all appearances, Wonderland has its own logic and that this may lead it to consume you...

The Flame After the Candle (Catherynne M Valente), a long story, indeed practically a novella, is very much set in this world, the real world, until it isn't. Again it seems to suggest that to its hero, Olive (not, for once, an Alice) real world events and people foreshadow or parallel another, richer place ("Father Dear had left them for that pale, rabbity little heiress in London"). Olive's story is interspersed with an the story of an encounter between who great literary figures, scarred by their visits - whether real or not, is never quite sure - to Wonderland and Neverland. The two tales complement each other well and there are echoes between them, as there are echoes between Olive's own life and the fantasy behind the mirror. A truly enchanting fairytale with a rather bitter edge to it - my favourite in this volume.

Moon, Memory, and Muchness (Katherine Vaz) is another "real world" story. It invokes the tropes of Wonderland ("Everything screams, Eat Me, Drink Me") to tell a very sad story, set in present-day New York, about a mother's loss ("I turned my back, and the earth swallowed her.") A story about appearances, and hurting, and what comes afterwards. Very moving.

The book closes with Run, Rabbit, Run (Jane Yolen), a short poem and perhaps a warning that the childish delights of Wonderland will only carry you so far.

If there is a preoccupation that these authors return to time and gain it is perhaps, "afterwards". We see both the effect on the Alices (and others) of that time in Wonderland - a kind of theme of the effect on survivors of what was a very weird experience, whether treated as real or imagined. But we also see the effect on "real" people of their encounter with an author who, literally, wrote them into immortality. How does it change you to have your life defined at an early age like that?

Overall, a very strong collection of stories. Recommended.

Alice Blogtour: This is Not Wonderland

Image from www.titanbooks.com

I'm delighted and really, really honoured to host a guest post today by Christina Henry whose book Alice is published in the UK today - you should read it:

"In a warren of crumbling buildings called the Old City, a hospital echoes with the screams of the poor souls inside. Inside, there is a woman. Her hair, once blonde, hangs in tangles down her back. She doesn’t remember why she's in such a terrible place. Just a tea party long ago, and long ears, and blood...

Then, one night, a fire at the hospital gives the woman a chance to escape, leaving her free to uncover the truth about what happened to her all those years ago."

For more on the book see here and for my review, here. Now - over to Christina

This is not Wonderland

Christina Henry

It’s always a tricky thing, walking in another story’s footsteps. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is a tale beloved by millions, so embedded in our cultural memory that nearly everyone can conjure up an image of Alice – from the original story, a film remake, a video game or one of many re-imaginings done by assorted authors through the years.

Alice has taken on the quality of myth, a character no longer bound to her creator or origin story but a modern-day legend open to interpretation like those other contemporary fairy tale figures from Neverland and Oz.

I wanted to write my own story of Alice, but I wasn’t certain where to begin. When I wrote my first book, BLACK WINGS, I heard the characters speaking before I saw them, before I had an inkling of a story. That series is really driven by sound in my mind – the sound of the dialogue going rat-a-tat-tat. Because of that I never really thought of myself as a visual writer – a writer who saw things in her mind before she wrote them – until I wrote ALICE.

I played around with a few different story ideas, but nothing really stuck. Then I woke up one morning with an image in my head – a girl under glass, a girl with sad terrified eyes and wings like a butterfly. That girl wasn’t Alice, but she stayed with me.

Then one day I saw Alice. She was covered in blood, wearing a torn dress, somehow magically reappearing from a place where she was supposed to be lost forever.

Now I had Alice and my butterfly girl and I needed to draw a line between the two of them. That was where the story was. I had that line in the Old City. In the original story Alice follows a muttering white rabbit with a waistcoat and watch. In my story the Rabbit is not Alice’s unwitting guide but the very heart of her nightmares, though she does not remember exactly why. I constructed the geography of the Old City like a rabbit’s warren on steroids, full of twists and turns and terrors unforeseen.

I populated that city with pimps and killers and crime bosses, the kind of people a nice girl from the New City should never know, but Alice wasn’t a nice girl anymore. She’d come out of the Old City broken, and how would my damaged Alice survive in a place like this?

She needed a guide, a helper, someone more dangerous than the dangers around her. Again, I saw him – gray eyes and a red-stained axe in red-stained hands. Carroll’s Mad Hatter became my mad Hatcher, a murderer who loves Alice and killing things, not necessarily in that order.

Hatcher has visions of monsters, too - one monster in particular. Alice doesn’t believe that monster is real but she’ll find out soon enough. This is not Wonderland, but I hope you’ll take this journey with Alice and Hatcher.


Next stop on the blogtour: Off With Her Head