In the Labyrinth

Falling From the Sky And The Art of Javier Pinon

I was quite astonished to see this wonderful mythic and western art of Javier Pinon -- the unusual combination of cowboys and Greek myths. This is a collage of Icarus Falling -- and it struck me so much because it bears an eerie resemblance to a passage of transformation that I wrote years ago in The Flight of Michael McBride. Falling from a cliff in the desert, the protagonist Michael McBride makes a last plea to Morrigu, the Irish Goddess of War, to save him. And his pleas are answered, thought not as he expected.

"His arms were pulled from the sockets, the elbows snapping as a force splayed the stretched limbs over the keening winds... [A]nd then from his flesh black shafts sprouted. Along his back, his belly, and his chest, he felt the stabbing birth of feathers pricking his skin. His arms lowered in the air, heavy with the draping weight, and he lifted them again, the air catching beneath the sail of black iridescent feathers."

Go have a look at more of Pinon's terrific art -- his Medusas are a wonderful mix of fashion magazine seduction and a glory of twisted snakes. Actually, Pinon's art really makes me miss the old Journal of Mythic Arts days -- how I would have loved to do a feature on him for an issue themed "Reinvention," on how the ancient has become remade in a new likeness.

"Molly" in "Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales"

 

 

The new anthology, Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villianous Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling is now out for the reading pleasure of your favorite middle grade scary-book reader. (My kids devoured all of Alvin Schwartz's wonderfully ghoulish and creepy tales at that age.) The anthology offers versions of well-known fairy tales, but from a unique perspective -- the villains'. Do they really suffer at the hands of our familiar heroes and heroines? In my story "Molly," based on the English fairy tale "Molly Whuppie," the Giant ogre and his family are certainly made to suffer cruel and unusual punishments. In the traditional version of the tale Molly Whuppie is a heroic youngest sister, outwitting a flesh eating Giant, and securing riches for her sisters as well as royal marriages -- on the Giant's dime of course. Read more>>>