Another short story collection. Two of the stories in here are repeats from collections I’ve previously read: “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” (in Warlock at the Wheel) and “The Sage of Theare” (in both that and Mixed Magics). The other five are new, in the sense that I haven’t read them before; I didn’t think to approach these things in publication order.

“The Master” didn’t do a lot for me; it felt a little too weird and disjointed, not drawing together until the end, and even then not enough. That scene gave the story a point, but didn’t do anything to put previous events in context.

“Enna Hittims” got me off on the wrong foot with the way Anne’s parents took care of her — or rather, failed to — when she was seriously ill with the mumps. This might be the neglected-child version of what I’ve started thinking of as the Goon Problem: I don’t mind the titular character in Archer’s Goon being horrible at people, because the novel both fleshes out that situation and waters it down with other narrative material, but I dislike that motif when it shows up in condensed form in DWJ’s short fiction. Anne being left to more or less starve, and then being laughed at by her father for the disfigurement brought on by the mumps, really rubbed me the wrong way, even though some of the kids in the novels suffer far worse. The end was touching, though.

“The Girl Who Loved the Sun” was pretty good, in a tragic and deeply disturbed way.

“What the Cat Told Me” is fun but not memorable; the plot is fairly mundane, lifted up a touch by the narrative voice of the cat.

“Nad and Dan Adn Quaffy” I remember reading before, and it still doesn’t do a lot for me. As with my complaint about the stories in Stopping for a Spell and Warlock at the Wheel, the magic is too random and unexplained, and the running motif with the typos doesn’t amuse me enough. I do like the line about pretending to be the captain of a starship, though.

Heather, a girl whose parents are curators for a “British Trust” (i.e. National Trust) estate, accidentally calls forth a Jacobean-era man known as Wild Robert, who runs around wreaking havoc with magic.

This book is short enough that I suspect in technical terms it’s only a novelette — no more than fifteen thousand words, and probably less. It could easily have been included in one of DWJ’s collections of short fiction, rather than being published independently. But it’s a pleasant enough story; I found it much nicer than the stories compiled in Stopping for a Spell, which were also put out as individual books.

As for spoilers . . . .

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I said at the end of my last post that I wasn’t sure if I’d ever read Hexwood before. I can say now that I’m 99% I hadn’t — because surely I would have remembered The One Where Diana Wynne Jones Wrote an Episode of Doctor Who.

Seriously, how else am I supposed to describe a book that has dragons, robots, medieval knights, evil galactic overlords, a girl with four not-so-imaginary voices in her head, and a simulation device that might end up assimilating the entire planet Earth? Plus a story that doesn’t quite go according to normal linear chronology. I pity the poor soul who had to write cover copy for this thing. Here’s what my edition has:

Strange things happen at Hexwood Farm. From her window, Ann Staveley watches person after person disappear through the farm’s gate — and never come out again. Later, in the woods nearby, she meets a tormented sorcerer, who seems to have arisen from a centuries-long sleep. But Ann knows she saw him enter the farm just that morning. Meanwhile, time keeps shifting in the woods, where a small boy — or perhaps a teenager — has encountered a robot and a dragon. Long before the end of their adventure, the strangeness of Hexwood has spread from Earth right out to the center of the galaxy.

Me, I would say that the story concerns a device called a Bannus, which was designed to aid in decision-making: given suitable starting parameters, it simulates every possible set of outcomes. It was built by a race of people called the Reigners, five of whom are now basically the aforementioned evil galactic overlords; when a Bannus left on Earth gets out of control, they rush to try and shut it down, but instead the Bannus keeps trapping everything within its simulation.

Does that make any sense? I can’t tell. This book is extremely hard to summarize, and moderately confusing to read, too. I did enjoy it, but you’ve got to be willing to let go of linearity, and be okay with the fact that many of the characters spend most of the book being totally adrift as to who anybody is and what order they’re encountering each other in.

Maybe spoilers will help. Then again, maybe not.

The hidden leaders of magical society on Earth discover that a neighboring universe is using our world as an experimental laboratory: siccing problems (like global warming) on us with the intent of seeing how we cope with them. They mount an expedition to put an end to the problem.

My recollection is that when I was a kid, most of Diana Wynne Jones’ work was shelved in the children’s department; this book, however, was in the nascent Young Adult section. It’s certainly aimed at an older readership. The only work of Jones’ I can think of that’s comparable is Deep Secret, a later (and more successful) book. This one doesn’t seem to be anybody’s favorite — though I could be wrong — and a great many people don’t like it at all. So bear that in mind when you decide whether to read the spoilers that follow.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

Like Witch’s Business/Wilkin’s Tooth, I’m not sure why this book got retitled. My guess is they wanted something that might at least vaguely signal fantasy, as Aunt Maria could be any kind of book at all, but it doesn’t work very well; the book makes only one use of the phrase, in the first paragraph of the book (comparing their family situation to the card game Hearts, aka Black Maria), and to a U.S. eye it otherwise calls up weird, semi-racial connotations. Or at least it does for me, because fantasy so often uses “black” to signal “evil.”

Anyway, the book. It falls into the “somebody is utterly horrible under the guise of being perfectly reasonable; long-suffering protagonists put up with it for too long” sub-genre of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, but as I’ve said in previous posts, it works better here than it does in the short stories. Telling that story at book-length means other aspects come in, diluting the horrible behavior and making it less unrelentingly awful. (Though it’s still plenty awful. Aunt Maria, so far as I’m qualified to tell, is a master of the Manipulation Handbook.)

The general setup for the plot is that Mig and her family (mother and brother) get suckered into spending their Easter holiday visiting — read, waiting hand and foot on — Aunt Maria, who is actually the aunt of Mig and Chris’s recently-deceased father. When they get to Cranbury-on-Sea, they find the town is deeply weird, with zombie-like men, weird clone-like orphan children, and a bevy of old ladies who seem to form some kind of ruling cabal. They rapidly figure out that the surface niceness covers some stuff that isn’t nice at all.

Spoilers!