| The Goblin Market | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| edited by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Raechel Henderson | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Eggplant Productions, electronic chapbook | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A review by Georges T. Dodds
The original Goblin Market,
was a poem written in 1859 (published 1862) by
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)
for her love-lorn sister Maria Francesca. Christina, along with her brothers D.G.
and W.M. were associated with the literary and artistic movement termed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
While nominally considered a classic narrative poem for children, the story of the straight-laced
Lizzie and the wild Laura, lured to eat fairy fruit by the nasty goblins at their market, packs
gobs and gobs of repressed Victorian eroticism:
Some works, like "Thy Days May be Long Upon the Land" by Tom Piccirilli and Gerard Daniel,
or "Where the Sun Comes From" by Nancy Bennett are poetic and largely non-narrative -- telling in
the first case of the death and rebirth of a people dedicated to the message of their God, and
in the second of a child's curiosity about the sun, in a Norse context. Some like "Wistril Besieged"
by Frank Tuttle, are more humorous, telling of a beer-swilling pacifist wizard defending his
castle. Others are stories with a twist: "Waiting for Springtime" by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, tells
of a stubborn water sprite's demise; "Changeling" by Ben Peek, of a young child claimed by the little
people; and "Passion Play" by Paul Pence, of an insect king getting more than he expected in a
mate. Yet others, like Steve Goble's "The Hungry Bottle" and Barbara Davies' "The Princess and the
Barbarian" are more standard horror and fairy tale variants, respectively.
The Goblin Market also has a number of illustrations (by Duncan Long and others) and
margin graphics that give the work a pleasant layout. I might have perhaps chosen the more Victorian
styles of the likes of Aubrey Beardsley and Laurence Housman and their contemporaries, or some of
those gorgeous British paintings of women done in Pre-Raphaelite period, but then I'm not the editor of
The Goblin Market and I do tend to have rather odd tastes.
The text-background colour combinations have been well chosen to minimize the problem some of we
people who haven't learned to read from a computer screen -- yes we hoary people of the paper and
ink generation -- might have with this alternate medium.
Included with the whole package is a nice mood-enhancing background musical piece by
"The Dreamsharer."
Besides the prose and poetry, The Goblin Market interjects a number
of legitimate advertisements, but some mock-ads of the publishers' own design are also
included. From a classified section with fairly clichéd ads for dragon harnesses to a
"full-page" ad for an inter-realm travel agency, these really added very little to the overall
experience of the work. Not that I find anything wrong with injecting a bit of humour, but it
works better if it isn't so sophomoric and actually makes me laugh.
Overall, The Goblin Market is a nicely presented anthology and is well worth the
admission. If you like your fantasy in a more prose-poem mode than the current more
down-to-Earth trend in fantasy prose, this is for you. Besides, it's time to come out from
those musty Victorian and Edwardian tomes and get with the times -- e-chaps rule!
Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. |
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