EDITOR’S NOTE: As promised, here is the first post syndicated from Catherynne M. Valente’s writing blog, Goblin Market. If you’re not familiar with Cat or her work, you’re doing yourself a disservice. I urge you to visit her website and cool your heels a while. It’s well worth becoming acquainted with — and not coincidentally, so is she.

Lud In the Mist

A little while back I spirited a copy of Lud-in-the-Mist away from a friend’s bookshelf, curiosity piqued by that by now very old meme about Neil Gaiman referring to it in his blurb for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I had no idea what to expect, beyond knowing some vague trivia about Ms. Mirrlees herself and that it was, assumedly, somehow quintessentially British, since Gaiman had disqualified The Lord of the Rings (there’s no real reason for me to link to that, is there?) as the “finest English novel of the fantastic” until Jonathan Strange, as it was not, strictly speaking, an English novel about England. Or something.1

All that meta-commentary aside, Lud is, in short, an extraordinary book. If Lord of the Rings is the big, bombastic Grandfather of modern fantasy, Lud is obviously the quiet, unassuming Grandma who showed everyone how to grow wild mint out back and jitterbug in the kitchen. In fact, given that Mirrlees published in 1926, some time before Dr. T’s opus, I would not be at all surprised if the Shire was full of Granny Hope’s patented mint.2. Look carefully at any work of fantasy in which urban worldbuilding, provincial farmlife, idyllic villages, or fanciful names figure largely, and you’ll see Mirrlees’ ghost peeping through the pages. She could even be called the mother of interstitial literature, since Lud combines the fantasy genre with horror and of all things, procedural crime drama and political philosophy.

It is, however, one of the most deeply strange and alien books I have ever read, and what’s more, it sucker-punches the reader with that Otherness right at the end, after a long, meandering narrative, that, much like the river Dapple, turns and wanders around the land of Lud without much hurry at all. The tidy, measured style is not at all dated, and the descriptions of the turn of the seasons, village life, and the flora and fauna of everyday are truly transcendant–even leaving aside the unsettling and eerie landscape of Fairyland itself. But for me, the novel, while charming, would have been a failure without its disturbing and marvelous conclusion.

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