Fire and Hemlock

"Fire and Hemlock is actually based on two old tales, ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer.’ The two of them are, I would say, about 50-50 in that book’s DNA. My university thesis was on Tam Lin. Somewhere I’ve still got some cassette tapes of me singing every single verse that I could find, just so I would have an auditory reference point for some of the ways the story has changed over the years. It’s six and a half hours long. Fire and Hemlock is the story of Polly and Tom. Polly meets Tom when she accidentally commits a home invasion during a funeral as a child, something which makes perfect sense in the context of the book. You follow Polly from her childhood all the way into adulthood, and it’s about their relationship, as she grows up and tries to become a person on her own, and Tom tries not to get fed to hell by the Queen of Faerie. Their ages are always a little nebulous. Tom is probably about ten years older than Polly, which on the one hand makes it a creepy age-gap book, but on the other hand, means he was nineteen or so when the Queen of Faerie took him. And he’s just trying to survive. So there are a lot of questionable choices in that book that were a lot less questionable to me when I was younger, but can I say anyone would be any better under those circumstances? It is intricate. It is beautiful. Diana Wynne-Jones, as a writer, was incredibly fond of things that recontextualized everything. She puts in little things so that if you were looking at things one way, everything was fine; but if you looked at it from another way everything was awful, or magical, or whatever. She included a conceit in Fire and Hemlock of these vases which would rotate when you pulled a lever: sometimes they would say ‘now here,’ but if you got them at exactly the right angle, they would say ‘nowhere.’ And that blew my mind as a nine-year-old; that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen—and it is still impressive, from a literary standpoint. Fire and Hemlock is not an easy book. It’s complicated. It is urban fantasy mostly on a technicality, because it takes place in cities—mostly Bristol and London, and it’s a very accurate portrayal of both— and it’s some very old folklore. And it’s very respectful toward the Fae, which is most of what I ask for out of life. It is flourishing, which is very, very nice and makes me very, very happy. It thrives best at series length: there are very few completely standalone urban fantasies. There are some – like War for the Oaks by Emma Bull, or Tam Lin by Pamela Dean—but mostly urban fantasy thrives in a series. With publishing as unstable as it’s been in the last couple of years, a lot of those series will get one, maybe two volumes in and then be cancelled—even authors that are fairly well established. So I haven’t been reading as much urban fantasy as I would like to. For modern authors, right now I’d recommend T. Kingfisher , who is writing more fantasy-fantasy—a pseudonym of Ursula Vernon, who sometimes plays turtle bingo with me when I’m out in North Carolina. We drive around on the back roads, getting out of the car and rescuing turtles. She gets very antsy every time I want to save a snapping turtle; she says, “Your agent will kill me if you come back with fewer fingers than you left with.” But she’s a delightful human being, and she writes delightful books. Also Travis Baldree , who is another straight-up fantasy author. His debut came out last year, Legends & Lattes . He’s got a sequel coming very shortly called Bookshops & Bone Dust , which I have read and which is delightful. I like the Witches of Thistle Grove books by Lana Harper, which are paranormal romance, not urban fantasy—it’s important to recognize that distinction, because an urban fantasy will not play by romance rules, and a romance will not play by fantasy rules. You need to know what tropes are in play. And I’d say Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series. The trilogy has just wrapped up. It is three books, set at a magical school you really don’t want to have attended."