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The Line Between

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Peter Beagle belongs to that vanishing type of writer whose strengths are in strong characterization rather than plot, although their plots are often quite strong. Writers like the late Theodore Sturgeon, Edgar Pangborn, Mary Pangborn & Avram Davidson. Writers like the still living Algis Budrys, Ed Gorman or, on his better days, Stephen King.

He also doesn't write (or at least, publish) nearly enough. Yet here is a collection of short stories, all fairly recent, and many with their first publication herein.

The lead-off tale is a little charmer about a mouse who decides it's a whole lot better to live as a cat than a mouse, so he goes off to cat school, with some humorous and ironic results. Beagle's note to the story mentions that he hopes to turn this into a children's book in the manner of 'Charlotte's Web'. If so, this is a pretty good start.

The next story, 'Two Hearts' is a sequel to Beagle's best known novel 'The Last Unicorn'. I'm always leary when a writer returns to the world of a major work, years after that work's publication. In this case, it's been 38 years but Beagle pulls it off, returning many of the major characters from that novel and developing a new character that will lead into a new novel. Brillant, warm and hearttouching.

Next up are four fables, dealing with moths, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, ostriches and octopi. Funny stuff. In fact, Beagle is so good at this type of writing that one could easily see a complete book of such fables. Listen up, Mr. Beagle!! The world needs more bluejay stories.

Next is 'El Regalo, which deals with two Korean-American kids and their witchy abilities. Another good story that one can easily see expanded into a complete novel.

'Quarry' is a tasty prequel to Beagle's novel 'The Innkeeper's Song', which tells an early tale of one of that novel's major characters.

'Salt Wine' is the best story in the book (and that's saying something, considering that 'Two Hearts' is here too). An old sailor relates the horrific tale of his shipmate who saves a merman and is granted the merman's most cherished secret, the ability to make salt wine. The gift comes with a horrible price, however, that makes itself known in a quiet, understated fashion. This story ought to be in the running for a number of major awards next year. Very disturbing.

'Mr. Sigerson' is a Sherlock Holmes tale, related by a narrator who doesn't appear to like Mr. Holmes at all. There are tons of Sherlock Holmes knockoff stories out there but this is a good one.

The closer is 'A Dance For Emilia', a warm story of a dead man possessing his own cat so that he can leave one last message for the love of his life. Warm, tender and haunting, in the best sense of the word.

You're gonna love this book. Buy one for yourself and one for your best friend. You'll both be happy you did.

Peter S. Beagle has had a long career and is already a legend for such novels as The Last Unicorn and such short fiction as "Farrell and Lila the Werewolf". But just in the past few years he has produced a string of wonderful shorter works that rank with the best work of his career. This collection includes most of those recent stories, including a few new to 2006, as well as one or two older pieces. Beagle's characters are the heart of his works - thoroughly believable, often a bit battered, often somewhat worldy wise. Though he also depicts much younger characters very well.

The very moving closing story, "A Dance for Emilia", tells of a late-middle-aged actor mourning the death of his childhood friend, a critic, in the company of that friend's young lover, and of his strangely possessed cat. "Two Hearts" is a lovely sequel to The Last Unicorn. "Quarry" is first rate adventure fantasy, with a young man fleeing scary monsters meeting an older man and joining with him, only to face another monster. "Salt Wine", one of my favorites here (though the stories are wonderful throughout - hard to name a favorite) is an absorbing sea story about a sailor and the formula for a special drink he gets from a merman (or merrow), with a sharply pointed moral dimension. "Mr. Sigerson" is a satisfyingly different Sherlock Holmes story, featuring Holmes under the title alias spending time playing violin for a backwoods Central European orchestra - only mysteries to solve find him there as well. "El Regalo" and "Gordon, the Self-Made Cat" are both focused a bit on younger readers - but quite fine for adults - the first about a young Korean-American boy who is a witch, and his long-suffering sister, the second about a mouse who wants to be a cat. We also get "Four Fables", three of them brand new, mostly cynical (though with heart) short pieces about such subjects as a Tyrannosaurus told of the coming asteroid.

What more can I say? There are simply delightful stories - a lovely lovely collection from one of the best contemporary fantasists.

The short and sweet: Get this book. If it helps, know that "Two Hearts" won the Hugo award for Best Novelette. If you loved The Last Unicorn (how could you not?), then you must read "Two Hearts." It's also got the story "Quarry," starring my favorite character from The Inkeeper's Song: the fox.

(This review previously appeared in the bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, www.mythsoc.org)

This long-anticipated new collection of short stories by Peter S. Beagle fulfilled this reader's hopes. Readers can see the culmination of a long life of writing distilled here, as his many styles and interests come together in one book rather like an apartment building between the worlds, with each story exploring new quirky characters inhabiting each room, whether temporarily or for generations.

Each story is prefaced by a Beagle-penned paragraph describing how it came into being. Allowing the reader in on its creation in this way adds to the joy and anticipation of entering the story. In particular, the preface to Two Hearts, a short-story sequel to The Last Unicorn, entices and charms, as Beagle explains how he moved from a stance of `a sequel can't, and won't, be done' to getting slowly snookered into writing it by his friend and publicist. How? By enticing Beagle to write one new story based in that world. Once there, of course, four of the main characters happened to show up. Then Beagle fell in love with the new main character, a feisty young woman named Sooz -- so now, an entire novel may be lurking in our future. Hooray! Readers are similarly led to anticipate more stories following the siblings in El Regalo, to be collected in a book entitled "My Stupid Brother Marvin the Witch." Who can resist a title like that?

Other stories in the collection showcase Beagle's wide-ranging ability to combine the magickal with the ordinary, while playing with several literary styles as seen across his earlier work, from his motorcycle travel saga I See By My Outfit to the somewhat tongue-in-cheek Folk of the Air. One can also see the aging man as author of these stories, with the wit and wisdom of a grandfather amusedly musing over his life and the many types of fictional worlds he's entered earlier. "Gordon, the Self-Made Cat" was originally a humorous morality tale for his children while small. "Four Fables" is a paean to his own exposure to serious fables as a child. (He also drops the tantalizing historical tidbit that Aesop was done in...). "Mr. Sigerson" pays homage to Sherlock Holmes. "Quarry" brings back the world of The Innkeeper's Song, in order to answer the question posed to him about how Soukyan originally met his shapeshifting fox companion. Since Beagle had no idea how to answer, he wrote this story to find out. Quarry contains an encounter with houses that are not houses, but something else, something malevolent posing as the familiar in order to lure in the prey... a motif that I must admit I found unforgettable, as it echoes some of my deepest childhood nightmares.

These stories all have a sense of continual discovery and wonder. Even when a tale has a twist to the end like the best-planned mysteries, you get the feeling that Beagle was surprised and delighted by it too. These stories do not feel contrived, but organic, flowering madly where and how they will. And the characters are what drives them. One of my favorites, Salt Wine, is told in the voice of the crusty old sailor Ben Hazeltine, "not some seagoing candy-trews dandy Captain Jack...I can promise you" (p 135), who gets involved in a business deal involving a recipe conned out of a merrow. And the final tale, "A Dance for Emilia," is a magical-realism homage to friends who have passed on too soon.

These are tales no young person could have penned. It takes the wisdom and the pain of years to bring about this sort of poignant appreciation, this combination of gentle love and no-B.S. crankypants humor. It's a beautiful collection, and one that provides thrilling anticipation of more to come. Like Theodore Sturgeon before him, Beagle is proving himself a master bard whose tales use wild rolling imagination to kindle the reader's heart.

I hereby nominate Peter S. Beagle as a Living National Treasure. How many of us have laughed and wept and felt goose flesh while reading his stories? And for decades!! The Line Between contains the novella for which Peter won (finally, finally) a Hugo Award. What a treat to see Schmendrick, Molly and King Lir again. Rather than seem like an epilogue to The Last Unicorn, this reads more like a prologue to a new epic story of love and adventure. I can't wait to find out what happens to Sooz when she turns seventeen and gets to use her gift of magic. If I were a king I'd build a special wing at the castle for Sir Peter and give him all the food, wine and song (okay, and women too) his heart desires so he could happily and contentedly write me tales until I'm an old man.

(UPDATE: Since first writing this review Peter won the Nebula award for Two Hearts, the coda to the Last Unicorn included in this collection.)

I'm a pretty typical Peter Beagle fan in that my first encounter with Peter Beagle's writing was reading The Last Unicorn. Over the nearly forty years since then, I have looked forward to any new publication of his.

I'm not, in general, a huge fan of fantasy novels or stories. Beagle, however, does a better job than almost anybody else of creating fantasy that is realistic enough to be believable. His fantasies seem natural to me; at the same time, there are enough surprises to keep the reader (at least if I'm the reader) interested.

There are some real gems here. El Regalo, for which Beagle first considered the title My Stupid Brother Marvyn the Witch, is an absolute delight, hilarious and terrifying by turns. Schmendrick (my favorite Beagle character), Mollie Grue, King Lir, and the unicorn reappear in Two Hearts, which is a tale well-told indeed. Salt Wine is a wonderful story of the price that must be paid for any happiness.

I'd say that the least successful piece here is A Dance for Emilia, which, of course, has already been published in book form. The fantasy here seems forced to me, while, paradoxically, I don't think that there's enough of it. In fact, the whole story seems forced. Both it and Mr. Sigerson seem to have too little content to justify their length.

Peter S. Beagle's one of my new favorite writers and this book has a great collection of stories. He's able to write in a lot of styles, and no matter if he's writing from the perspective on a child or adult, his insights and use of words are always witty and honest.

Short stories are a tricky thing to write - many authors open their own collections with a note about how silly they were to attempt the form. Not surprising, since a short story is not simply a novel with the details cut out. Short story writing requires a precise sense of pacing and an almost directoral view of the subject matter. There are not hundreds of pages to develop characters and create mood; the best the short story writer can do is point out to you the defining moments of a character or a scene and hope you can keep up. Short fiction is most often effective to offer a setup leading to a quick plot twist or a startling ending, not for world-building or profound observations on the human psyche.
That said, the depth of feeling contained in the latest Peter Beagle book is astounding. Twice as much when you consider that this is a short story collection, not a novel. No story spans more than forty pages - a few run no more that five, but many have their own emotional resonance most novelists dream of.
There are plenty of funny, quick reads throughout the collection too. In Gordon, the Self-Made Cat a mouse with no desire to play the traditional role of bait earns his cat card and the respect of his fellow felines. A set of four fables, while feeling a little rushed in execution, have deliciously cynical morals. Salt Wine puts some grand old seagoing-myths on their heads, and Quarry fills in yet another piece of the world of Innkeeper's Song and the short story collection from the same world. There's also A Dance For Emilia - a beautiful story of friendship and love printed here for every fan who missed the much overlooked gift book edition from several years ago.
There is always a strong musical theme running through Beagle's work - and of course there is one musical story here: Mr. Sigerson. Mr. Siegerson is a brilliant violinist and also a persona of the great Sherlock Holmes. In this mystery, Holmes and the conductor of a Norwegian orchestra uncover underhanded dealings and an illicit affair and any musician will recognize one of their own in the narrator and characters of the story.
The real jewels in this book are El Regalo and Two Hearts. El Regalo introduces two new characters, Marvyn and Angie. With promises to tell their whole story in a novel, Beagle introduces two kids growing up in Avicenna and growing into some magical powers. Marvyn, like any well-balanced kid, uses his abilities to take out the garbage and wash the dishes, but Angie is still concerned that his powers might get them into trouble. When Angie makes an embarrassing choice to confess her love to a boy at school, Marvyn rushes in to save the day and lands both of them in last Thursday, possibly permanently. Two Hearts is quite simply a gift to any fan of The Last Unicorn. In Beagle's earlier days he created each book in its own world, and the short stories that he wrote never went back to those places. After more than thirty years, the story is told of Shmendrick and Molly Grue's further adventures, along with Lir and the land he rules. Two Hearts seems almost to be something dug up from the days immediately following the writing of The Last Unicorn. The characters remain as true to themselves as any reader could hope and again, Beagle promises a full-length story of Sooz, the narrator.
Once again, Beagle has topped his previous efforts and not only re-asserted his status as a master of the Fantasy genre, but shown that he still has plenty more stories to tell us.

What can I say about Peter S. Beagle? He is a writer that never fails to surprise me, because, I don't know why, but whenever I start reading one of his stories, I never expect to like it as much as I end up liking it. It happened with many of the stories in this book. He has a way with words that is only his and it's magical and that's all I'm going to say about it.

I'm going to start with Two Hearts because it was the reason I bought this book. Two Hearts is the sequel to The Last Unicorn and I plunged into it with reckless abandon, obviously wanting to return to that world. It didn't disappoint. In fact, when it was over, I didn't know what to do with myself; it touched me in ways not a lot of stories do and I was an emotional... well, not wreck, but let's just say I couldn't do anything for a while but hold the book in my arms while getting flooded by emotions that went beyond words. Two Hearts was achingly beautiful and funny and deeply sad all at the same, and how many stories can say that for themselves?

As for the rest of the stories...

Gordon, the self-made cat: incredibly fun story about a mouse who decides that he can be anything he wants and what he wants is to be a cat so he goes to Cat School to achieve his dreams. I want to read this story to my nephews so bad.

Four Fables: I can only speak highly about the last of this four fables -the first three, I didn't like-. So, The Fable of the Octopus, the fourth one, is one of the best short stories I have ever read. It's a deep, philosophical, witty, ironic, and funny story about the search of an Octopus for God. So good, I tell you.

El Regalo: great story about a an older sister and an annoying little brother who turns out to be a witch. Really funny, yet scary at the same time.

Quarry: this was the only story I didn't particularly like (besides the first 3 fables of the Four Fables). It is apparently about how two of the characters from The Innkeeper's Song met and maybe it is because I have yet to read that book, but I wasn't too engaged by the story. But, even so, the emotional depth Beagle achieves in some scenes moved me and I couldn't help but applaud him for his skill (and imagination).

Salt Wine: one of the stories that when I started reading it, for the first couple of paragraphs I wasn't too sure about it. It's written in first person and the way the narrator talked was a little annoying but then he started talking about mermaids and mermen, and I was caught up in his tale before I even realized it. And it turned out to be one of my favorite stories in this book.

Mr. Sigerson: ah, a Sherlock Holmes tale. Thoroughly entertaining and witty. I enjoyed it very much and it actually surprised me. Beagle did a good job with this one.

And the last one, A Dance for Emilia: the most autobiographical thing he was ever written, as Beagle puts it, born out of mourning for his closest friend, who died back in 1994. And as such, one of the most touching, even heart-wrenching stories of this collection, if a little unbelievable. But what can I say? How can a story born out of such sad and personal circumstances be anything but great in the hands of a man like Peter S. Beagle?

Something else to add: another thing I really love about his collection of stories are the little explanations he gives before each one about how it came to be. It adds a lot to the reading experience and it is always wonderful when a writer share the stories behind their stories.

All in all, great read, some good stories, some amazing stories, and genius writer. Go read them, now.

I approached this book from a 'should read something by Beagle' sense of duty. I'm hooked now. I would have given it 5 stars but for the fact that "Two Hearts", the sequel to "The Last Unicorn" didn't, as editors say, grab me. Otherwise, every story was enthralling. The most enjoyable stories are new to this collection, my favourites being the series of fables. But "Mr. Sigerson", originally published in Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years, is a good example of Beagle's breadth of tone and style, which is full of surprises and often mischievous fun, yet never fey nor contrived. This modest-looking volume is a true classic, and I regret to say that I'm a confirmed fan, dammit. It's much cheaper to have low expectations of an author confirmed.