Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories [Paperback]

Elizabeth Hand (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 26, 2006

Widely praised and widely read, Elizabeth Hand is regarded as one of America's leading literary fantasists. This new collection (an expansion of the limited-release Bibliomancy, which won the World Fantasy Award in 2005) showcases a wildly inventive author at the height of her powers. Included in this collection are "The Least Trumps," in which a lonely women reaches out to the world through symbols, tattooing, and the Tarot, and "Pavane for a Prince of the Air," where neo-pagan rituals bring a recently departed soul to something very different than eternal rest. Written in the author's characteristic poetic prose and rich with the details of traumatic lives that are luminously transformed, Saffron and Brimstone is a worthy addition to an outstanding career.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Enthusiasts for Hand's sensuously descriptive brand of literary fantasy are in for a treat with her latest collection of short fiction. Aptly subtitled "strange stories," the eight superbly crafted tales share Hand's predilection for probing the translucent borderline between magic and reality. A young lepidopterist spends a summer volunteering at London's Regent's Park Zoo and discovers a talent for transforming her lovers into rare butterfly specimens. The tattoo-artist daughter of a children's book writer finds a tarot deck once owned by a colleague of her famous mother and watches her destiny become inexplicably intertwined with the cards. In a separate section entitled "The Lost Domain," Hand offers four contemplative tales about transient relationships that she links by using poignant, recurring themes: the fragility of intimacy, the insidious unraveling of civilization following 9/11, the influence of Greek myth on modern love. Her beautifully nuanced, often disquieting style should inspire poets as well as lay down the gauntlet to colleagues also reaching for expressive heights in contemporary fantasy. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: M Press; 1st M Press Ed edition (December 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595820965
• ISBN-13: 978-1595820969
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #149,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

A couple of years after seeing Patti Smith perform, Elizabeth Hand flunked out of college and became involved in the nascent punk scenes in DC and NYC. From 1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space Museum; she was eventually readmitted to university to study cultural anthropology, and received her B.A. She is the author of many novels, including Winterlong, Waking the Moon (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award-Winner), Glimmering, and Mortal Love, and three collections of stories, including the recent Saffron and Brimstone. Her fiction has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopeoic, Tiptree, and International Horror Guild Awards, and her novels have been chose as New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. She has also been awarded a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship. A regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Hand lives with her family on the Maine Coast.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bibliomancy, indeed, January 3, 2007

By 

Craig L. Gidney "ethereallad" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories (Paperback)

Imagine a postpunk Shirley Jackson, and you have Elizabeth Hand<. Like Jackson's oeuvre, Hand's stories are heavy on atmosphere and the supernatural occurrences have psychological underpinnings. Her characters are outsiders, artists and damaged people, and when they don't live in isolation, they live at the periphery of society, in various subcultures.

The opening "Cleopatra Brimstone," the most conventional `horror' story here, sets the template. A plain Jane science geek girl gets sexually molested, which starts a transformation in her. Mousy Jane moves to London, gets a job at the London Zoo categorizing butterflies during the day, and becomes the glamorous Goth minx Cleopatra Brimstone at night. Cleopatra has a seductive, mysterious power that Jane doesn't have that ultimately seals her fate. The climax of the story is morally disturbing, rather than visceral. The writing is lush and richly descriptive, and Hand's attention to realistic detail anchors her tale.

Several pieces here are clearly autobiographical: "Pavane for a Prince of the Air" is about the death of a hippie shaman and has vague allusions to magic, but is mostly an ode to an odd, beloved free-spirit. "Wonderwall," set in early 80s DC, is Hand's eulogy for both her wayward youth and her artistic muse, here portrayed as a queer actor and his alter ego, who succumbs to AIDS. `Calypso in Berlin' is an effectively creepy monologue about the titular muse making her way in the modern artscene.

Lovers of literary fantasy and modern gothic fiction would do well to check this handsome collection out. Four of the stories appeared in a limited edition volume called "Bibliomancy," which means `book magic.' Bibliomancy is precisely what Hand does with her craft.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The Lost Domain", March 10, 2007

By 

Laury A. Egan "Laury" (NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories (Paperback)

This collection seems to weave in and out of autobiography--now close and real, then imagined and surreal. Even when straying from the concrete experiences of Hand's life, there remains a magnetic resonance with what I suspect is her core self, as she imagines it, as she embodies it in her private view, her "lost domain."
Hand's writing glows with color, pulses with strangeness, and weaves in a mastery of detail from entomology to Greek myth with a sureness rarely seen in current fiction. Shimmering descriptions abound, such as one about a fox: "It was grinning at me, I could see the thin rind of its gums, its yellow eyes shining as though lit from within by candles." For Hand, the world is a dazzling, complex place; each square foot of earth teems with life.
The beautifully crafted "The Least Trumps" is perhaps the most evocative piece, replete with hints and feints and magic set against human relationships that are fresh and strongly felt.
At the end, the reader may briefly feel as if he's on the cusp of understanding the author's stories, but then this belief falls away like a foggy scrim, leaving the reader tantalized by all that he hasn't grasped.
An elusive and exotic book!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully strange stories, July 21, 2009

By 

Danielle Arostegui (Miami, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories (Paperback)

Saffron and Brimstone was my first exposure to the beautifully evocative prose of Elizabeth Hand, and I cannot wait to get my hands on one of her full-length novels! Her storytelling is unparalleled in anything I have read lately; she is truly a master at her craft and it shows in this collection of short stories. The stories included run the gamut from horror to fantasy, magic realism to experimental fiction. No two are alike, but they all share certain elements of compelling story-telling that characterize Hand's narrative style in this collection: beautifully worded description, lush and discerning metaphor, a way of showing the reader exactly what is needed to draw the conclusions and realizations that a lesser writer would have felt obliged to say outright, a propensity towards vagueness that only seems to sharpen rather than blur the truth of the pieces, and an attention to detail that firmly grounded the fantastic elements of the stories in startling realism. A careful reading reveals that each and every event, character, detail of setting, word and phrase has been carefully selected to evoke a particular response in the reader. In "The Saffron Gatherers," this discernment is seen in the way that Hand uses Grecian-derived diction in seemingly throw-away sentences to build her comparison, word by word, of the modern world verging on global disaster to that of the lost civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. In this and many other ways she uses contrast to excellent effect.

Of the eight stories included in Saffron and Brimstone, my favorite was "The Least Trumps," a story about a middle-aged tattoo artist that comes across an almost used up pack of tarot cards with an ability to change what is. Like many of the other stories, "The Least Trumps" features a female protagonist living in a degree of isolation and stagnation who finds a way to break out of her rut in a rather magical way. Indeed isolation, whether physical, emotional, or both is a theme that threads through almost all of these "strange" stories. Despite this, each story has its own unique feel or ambience, from the mixed folklore, Charles de Lint-esque "Pavane for a Prince of the Air" to the chillingly dark psycho-drama "Cleopatra Brimstone," and the drug-induced blur of narrative in "Wonderwall." The last four ultra short stories comprise a sequence that meditates in several different forms and multi-varied perspectives on a number of issues, including the artist's relationship with his/her muse. These last four are more experimental and seemed a little less developed to me, both in terms of story and craft. As a result the longer beginning stories appealed to me more, though I appreciated the subtle complexity and ambition of the ending sequence. On the whole, highly recommended. I can't wait to try something else by Ms. Hand!