Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Privilege of the Happy Ending by Kij Johnson

The Privilege of the Happy Ending, Kij Johnson (Small Beer 978-1-61873-211-8, $18.00, 302pp, tp) October 2023.

It’s been more than a decade since Kij John­son’s second story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, and while no one is likely to accuse her of reckless profligacy since then (she’s been busy with academia, among other things), no one is likely to accuse her of playing it safe, either. Two of her most promi­nent publications have invoked writers as wildly divergent as H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Gra­hame, and some of the short fiction included in The Privilege of the Happy Ending is about as experimental in form as anything I’ve seen in genre venues for some time. While there are a dozen stories in the collection (or 14, if you count the three parts of her ‘‘Apartment Dwell­ers’’ series as separate pieces), more than half the book is devoted to her two World Fantasy Award-winning stories ‘‘The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe’’ and ‘‘The Privilege of the Happy Ending’’. The former is her deservedly famous reinvention of Lovecraft’s ‘‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’’, replacing his stalwart Randolph Carter with a math professor at a women’s college deep inside the dreamworld that Carter sought to visit. Faced with a vaguely medieval society already skeptical of women’s education, the college of Ulthar (another name borrowed from HPL) faces an existential crisis when one of the students, whose father is a trustee, runs off with her boyfriend to visit the ‘‘waking world.’’ Vellitt Boe sets out to track her down, inverting Carter’s initial quest into the dreamworld with an equally hazardous quest out of her dreamworld, called the Six Kingdoms. Along the way, she has to contend with many of the same Lovecraftian hazards that Carter had to face, including Zoogs, Gugs, Ghasts, Ghouls, and other critters that sound like discontinued breakfast cereals. Transforming a tale by a writer who could barely bring himself to even mention female figures into a fable of feminist empow­erment is an achievement in itself (quite apart from Lovecraft’s various other problems), but Johnson’s version is if anything more coherent than Lovecraft’s, and the ending has the neatest twist in the collection.

‘‘The Privilege of the Happy Ending’’ is, as its title implies, one of several pieces that in­terrogate the very nature of storytelling, but the story itself combines elements of medieval dream vision, animal fable, and apocalyptic horror. Sometime in the twelfth century, a six-year-old orphan named Ada befriends a talking hen named Blanche, and when the countryside is overrun by swarms of ravenous wastoures, ‘‘scarce larger than chickens but unfeathered and wingless, snake-necked and sharp-beaked and bright-clawed’’ (the term is a Middle English word for something that lays waste), Blanche turns out to be wise enough to find protection for them. As they make their way through a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress landscape, visiting settlements with names like the Unlucky Village and the Lucky Village, they face accusations of witchcraft (a talking hen!), but eventually learn that Blanche is more than she at first seemed (though, as Johnson’s sometimes deliberately intrusive narrator points out, the happy ending depends in part on where you choose to end the tale). With that self-conscious narrative voice, it somehow achieves the feel of both oral legend and postmodern fantasy.

The most purely entertaining – and most conventional – tale is original to the collec­tion. ‘‘The Ghastly Spectre of Toad Hall’’ is a Christmas ghost story set in the Wind in the Willows world as revisited by Johnson in her own delightful The River Bank. When the familiar crew – Toad, Water Rat, Mole, Mole’s sister – discover that Toad Hall is haunted by a spectre whose presence portends the death of the master of the house, their comical efforts to save Toad from his fate seem foiled by a blizzard, until another neat ending provides an unexpected resolution. ‘‘Ratatoskr’’ is drawn from the Norse myth of the squirrel who serves as messenger on Yggdrasil – and who seems to appear outside the window of a ten-year-old girl in Iowa in the 1960s (‘‘This is Ray Bradbury country’’). What initially looks like it might be a conventional monster-under-the-bed horror story instead becomes a haunting lifelong mystery to the girl, who among other things learns to befriend the ghosts of squirrels. Another 1960s Iowa girl shows up in ‘‘Five Sphinxes and 56 Answers’’, which counterpoints her lifelong fascination with riddles with variations on the most famous riddle-tale of them all, Oedipus and the Sphinx (who here becomes a rather put-upon charac­ter called Phix, trying to figure out what these humans are up to). This story leads us toward the more fully experimental mode, deliberately playing with the reader by inserting dozens of answers to riddles without telling us what the riddles are (though a few are pretty familiar). The other original story in the collection is also a riddle tale, the very short but funny ‘‘Crows Attempt Human Style Riddles, and One Joke’’.

Other stories draw on Old Testament mythol­ogy (‘‘Noah’s Raven’’, which adopts the title figure’s point of view), Coyote trickster tales (‘‘Coyote Invents the Land of the Dead’’), and dream imagery (‘‘Butterflies of Eastern Texas’’, a strangely poignant tale of a bored train con­ductor dealing with an unticketed passenger who issues butterflies each time she speaks). By now, though, we’re moving into still more experimental narrative territory, revealing Johnson’s fascination with catalogs and lists at the expense of traditional plots. ‘‘Mantis Wives’’ is a graphic list of ways in which female mantises devour their mates, while ‘‘Tool-Using Mimics’’ offers a variety of interpretations of a surreally altered vintage photograph by the artist Laura Christensen, finally settling on an account of a girl performer in the 1930s. Another artist, Jason Baltazar, provides a series of rune-like figures for ‘‘The Apartment-Dweller’s Stavebook’’, one of a series of three ‘‘guidebooks’’ (the others are ‘‘The Apartment-Dweller’s Bestiary’’ and ‘‘The Apartment-Dweller’s Alphabetical Dream­book’’) all shifting between second-person and third-person narration to reveal tantalizing fragments that may or may not suggest hidden or unrealized tales. If the nonnarrative selections in The Privilege of a Happy Ending might prove disorienting to readers who prefer the more familiar narrative movement of the title story, it’s worth remembering that one of the signature stories of Johnson’s previous collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees was titled ‘‘Story Kit’’. It’s a good description of several of these fictions as well – enigmatic, allusive, poetic, fragmentary, and sometimes oddly moving – but with some assembly required.

This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.

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