Not that there's anything wrong with that. But fantasy to me means far more than a stock preindustrial landscape populated with figures out of Scottish ballads, French fairytales, and Germanic sagas of dungeons and dragons. Fair enough, I suppose anyway, one of the few really nice things about growing old is that a whole lot of stuff simply stops mattering - categories among them. I'm on the books as a fantasist, a genre writer, and I'd go on being considered one even if I wrote nothing but naturalistic novels and gritty urban–realist tales from here on in. In life and art I have never been able to laugh without being intensely aware of tears, or to shine a light on horror without also illuminating beauty. At times this precarious high–wire act exhausts and exasperates me, to the point where I feel that I'd give almost anything to step off the line, once and for all, and settle down to stories that, whatever their matter or milieu, don't always insist on balancing so. It is my personal tightrope of choice, the one I most naturally walk, clutching only a small and somewhat silly–looking parasol of logic for a counterbalance.
A line neither one thing nor ever quite the other, but now and eternally between.Īs a writer, the line between is where I have always lived. There it is: that invisible boundary between conscious and not, between reality and fantasy, between here (whatever «here» is) and there (whatever «there» might be), between the seen and the seen's true nature. Ever since I was a small, shy, overweight boy - a boy who could most often be found curled up under the stairs of his Bronx apartment building, telling himself stories - I've been used to almost hearing voices, almost catching sight of Donne's «things invisible to see.» Indeed, my favorite among my own novels, The Innkeeper's Song, had its birth on an island off Seattle, with me well–snuggled into the sweet spot between sleep and waking, when a rough, sour growl announced itself in my head, saying distinctly, «My name is Karsh. In a very real sense, that's what I've been doing all my life - trying to turn my head in time to glimpse that creature, that color, that melody, that metamorphosis, that human situation to be found living just around the farthest corner of my vision. (What, you never bought yourself a single blessed moment of sanity by risking your children's cervical vertebrae, eyesight, digestion, or emotional well–being? - Hypocrite lecteur, - man semblable, - monfrere! I want to see a note from your mother.) When my children were still small enough to be suckered (that's the two youngest, not their older sister she was never that small), I could keep them occupied in the car for some while by telling them that if they turned their heads fast enough they could look in their own ears.
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