Fantasy as Something Brighter: Peter S. Beagle’s The Overneath and Jane Yolen’s The Emerald Circus
The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon Publications, 336 pages, $15.95 in trade paperback, November 14, 2017)
The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen (Tachyon Publications, 288 pages, $15.95 in trade paperback, $9.99 digital, November 14, 2017)
In 1900 Frank L. Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, arguably the first truly American fairy tale. Now, a century and counting along the Yellow Brick Road, what can be said about the current state of the fairy tale in America? We seem deep in the wilds of dystopias like Hunger Games and its darker cousin, The Walking Dead, captivated by the grim fantasies of American Gods and Game of Thrones. Is this the new reality for the American fable, for literary fantasy that aspires to be anything more than a Disney retelling?
Against this darker background, a pair of recent collections from San Francisco’s Tachyon Publications attempts to reestablish or at least reconfirm fantasy as something brighter, if no less compelling. The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle and The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen (both published November 2017) together provide a sample of American fantasy by two of its most enduring and cherished voices. Beagle and Yolen are both giants, with hundreds of publications and dozens of awards between them. They have won the highest accolades in the fields, and both now write from positions of something like legend. But do the unicorns of Beagle or the Arthurian retellings of Yolen have anything to give readers who have come to expect a heavy dose of grim realism or even grimmer apocalypse in their high fantasy?