Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Embertide by Liz Williams

Embertide, Liz Williams (Newcon 978-1-914953-21-7, $16.99, 346pp, tp) June 2022.

Writers of both fantasy and historical fiction have long recognized the British landscape as a palimp­sest, maps upon older maps upon older maps, but in fantasy it’s another sort of palimpsest as well, disguising hidden worlds just below the surface of what we can perceive. It’s a tradition refined and extended in various ways by writers as diverse as Arthur Machen, Robert Holdstock, Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, and Graham Joyce. To bring this sort of thing off well requires an acute sense of landscape, the stylistic grace needed to make that landscape pop like a Constable painting, and characters congenial enough to draw us in. Right now, the most rewarding addition to this venerable tradition is Liz Williams’s Fallow Sisters series, which began with Comet Weather (2020) fol­lowed by last year’s Blackthorn Winter, and now by Embertide (which appeared this summer). In that first novel, Williams introduced us to the freelance DJ Stella, the fashion designer Serena, the wandering free spirit Luna, and Bee, who maintains the family estate, Mooncote, in Som­erset and is the most down-to-earth of the sisters, despite having a boyfriend who is a 400-year-old Elizabethan ghost. All are capable of occasional shapeshifting or drifting off into other times or other realities, but their mother, Alys, who has a tendency to disappear for months at a time, seems most embedded in the various fae worlds that surround them.

The series has so far followed a clear chronol­ogy, with Comet Weather taking place around a fall harvest festival and Blackthorn Winter roughly around the period between Christmas and Twelfth Night. Blackthorn Winter also shifted the narrative more unequivocally toward the fan­tastic, and Embertide, which takes place at the end of winter and the beginning of spring, shifts it further still: The sisters barely have time to get on with their daily lives before being yanked into the past or into one of the elusive fae realms that none of them quite understand. “There were huge gaps in everyone’s knowledge of this patchwork country,” Luna muses. “All of them were hold­ers of jigsaw pieces, but no one seemed to know what the full puzzle looked like.” The pieces quickly multiply. Serena, in Brighton where her actor boyfriend Ward is shooting a movie, finds herself first in WWII era Brighton – where she finds a dead airman – and then in the Victorian era; Stella, now living with her friend Evie in a barge on the Thames, is told by an angel in the form of a magpie to track down the mysterious Book of London; Bee discovers ominous white tendrils growing on land owned by her wealthy neighbor Nick Wratchall-Hayes, and is later at­tacked by a goat-face man; Luna, though pregnant and trying to avoid stress, finds herself along with her boyfriend Ben nearly trampled by a herd of ghost cattle until rescued by another mysterious figure, Kit Coral.

Eventually, the main antagonists become clear, and more threatening. Chief among them is Miranda, a successful actress and Ward’s former girlfriend, who seems able to pop up in almost any historical era, but more ominous are the Hounds – also referred to as the Lily White Boys, which sounds like a deliberately contem­porary reference but is actually from the ancient folk song “Green Grow the Rushes O” – and the Searchers, associated with the ravens of the Tower of London. While the plot at times begins to seem overcomplicated – almost no character or event is a throwaway, and even that dead airman Serena finds has a role later on – some of the set pieces are genuinely haunting, as when Stella drifts back in time while visiting St. Paul’s, watching it shrink into an ancient Roman temple of Diana and then to an even earlier state, associated with the Celtic figure of Noualen, who becomes an important ally. With Luna’s pregnancy still un­resolved, I expect we’ll see yet another volume in the series, possibly ending out the year with a summer setting, and maybe holding out a promise of some sort of closure for the coolest sisters in contemporary fantasy.