The Essential Patricia A. McKillip by Patricia A. McKillip (book review)
‘The Essential Patricia A. McKillip’ was my introduction to this author. She comes highly recommended, having won several top awards for fantasy novels and was hailed as ‘one of the most accomplished prose stylists in the fantasy genre’ by Brian Stableford. I’m impressed by the fact that she wrote standalone novels rather than series. She also dabbled in short stories which have been collected here for your delectation and delight. Mine, too.
After an introduction by Ellen Kushner about how much she likes McKillick, the stories kick off with ‘Lady Of The Skulls’. Six warriors ride across a plain seeking treasure. A lady watches from the parapet of a tower, which is the ‘only water source on the entire barren, sun-cracked plain’. She grows plants in skulls using a dragon’s claw for a trowel and ‘the bronze helm of some unfortunate knight’ as a watering can. The door to the tower is only visible at night. On entry, the men must choose what to take from the treasure but if they choose wrongly, they die. The ending was obscure but the prose is definitely stylish. That sums up a few stories here.
‘Wonders Of The Invisible World’ is Science Fiction, though you wouldn’t think so at the start. Disguised as an angel, a time-travelling researcher goes back to visit Cotton Mather in Salem, Massachusetts. Mather has been starving himself to provoke visions and so expects one. This was an interesting piece in both the past history and the portrayal of the future.
A rich merchant is tricked into handing his youngest daughter over to a vampire in ‘The Lion And The Lark’, a long fairy tale that wasn’t really my cup of tea.
Next up is ‘The Harrowing Of The Dragon Of Hoarsbreath’. In Hoarsbreath, gold miners toil inside a dark mountain that’s freezing for eleven months of the year, yet they seem content. Dragon Harrower Ryd Yarrow tells them that the reason for the perpetual winter is the dragon wrapped around them, so they are caught in his freezing breath, except for that one month of the year when he swims away to look for a mate. He can drive the dragon away, but should he? Setting is important in fantasy and this had a fascinating one with good characters, too.
‘Out Of The Woods’ is about Leta, ‘not as pretty as some, but strong and steady as a good horse’, who goes to work as housekeeper and cleaner for Ansley, a scholar practising to be a great mage. He lives in a cottage in the woods left to him by his great-grandmother. Leta works hard for long hours and her husband, Dylan, a woodworker, seems to grow distant, spending more time in the tavern. Magical events occur. I enjoyed the prose and the characters again but the ending left me unenlightened.
Merle, a pickpocket and petty thief, steals a set of cards from an old lady collapsed in an alleyway and uses them to tell fortunes for rich customers. ‘The Fortune Teller’ was a pretty little tale with a neat conclusion.
‘The Witches Of Junket’ has a modern American setting. A bunch of women are witches and get called together by Granny Heather when a trout tells her to send for Storm’s children because the thing inside Oyster Rock isn’t going to stay there. Storm is Granny Heather’s daughter and her children are so special that ‘hands fly to mouths, coffee cups are dropped and prayers muttered’ at the prospect of their arrival. A fine story with many interesting characters.
‘Byndley’ is a village. The wizard Reck has to find Byndley because it’s meant to be an entrance to the Otherworld and he needs to go back there to make atonement for a youthful sin. A heartwarming fairy tale with a nice ending.
‘Jack O’Lantern’ is about the lives of women before their liberation and the misleading information about sex. To procreate, ‘you just lie still and think of the garden’. The closeness of sisters is also a theme and it’s all wrapped up in a story about a village wedding. Jack O’Lantern, who leads the unwary into a swamp, supplies the fantasy element.
‘The Stranger’ makes music that conjures up huge fire-breathing birds in the sky and brings trouble to farmers on a small island. He offers to stop the attacks for a price. The story is about a lady named Syl, creative in her own way, and her fascination with the stranger. I didn’t quite know what to make of it but the prose and descriptions are beautiful.
‘The Gorgon In The Cupboard’ isn’t so much in the cupboard as in a painting which is kept in a cupboard. Harry Waterman is one of a group of painters in a town and he’s obsessed with Aurora, the wife of his friend and mentor Alex McCallister. From memory, he paints her mouth on a canvas and it starts to talk to him, telling him it’s the Gorgon and appears when invoked, having some sort of immortal spirit form despite Perseus cutting her head off long ago. Harry begins a new painting with a street girl called Jo as a model. She’s had a very hard life. All the artists seem to be fairly well-off and have cooks, servants and so on, even if they’re not successful. This is not at all the sort of story I would have picked up voluntarily but I really enjoyed it. Moving and poignant. Painters aren’t such a bad lot, really.
In ‘Mer’, a witch is possessed by a goddess for a hundred years and when released, moves her spirit into a wooden mermaid in Port Dido, which three lads try to steal, so she turns into human form and wanders into town. A roller-coaster of strangeness and imagination.
‘Weird’ starts with a man and a woman in a bathroom eating snacks while there’s some noisy commotion going on outside. He wants to know the weirdest thing that ever happened to her and she tells him. The meaning eluded me but many modern stories do not fulfil my old-fashioned yearning for a clear plot and conclusion. It’s deliberate.
Dawn Chase and her brother Ewan are city folk lost in the wilds in ‘Hunter’s Moon’. They’re on holiday at Uncle Ridley’s cabin and he’s a hunting, shooting, fishing kind of guy. They meet a strange young man with bright red hair who doesn’t say much. Many Americans are mad for hunting but I get the impression Patricia McKillip is not so keen.
‘Undine’ is a charming little story about a water nymph. Her kind take mortals as husbands, briefly, but when her turn comes, the world of men has changed and she gets involved with an environmentalist.
Perhaps the best story in the book is the last one, ‘Knight Of The Well’. The Knights of the Well come to the port of Luminium in their pale green and ivory barge as part of the royal procession for the Ritual of the Well, which will honour and placate the waters of the world, especially those in the Kingdom of Obelos. A tale of kelpies, water nymphs, naiads, nereids and undines causing trouble, but no one knows why. The Knight of the Well is Garner Slade, who’s madly in love with Damaris, the Minister of Water. She will soon belong to another. I liked the magical setting and the clever point of view switches that carried the tale along.
To conclude, there are two non-fiction essays by the author: ‘What Inspires Me’ the Guest of Honour Speech at WisCon and ‘Writing High Fantasy’, both of which will be of interest to fans. I think I am one now. Some of the stories are rather whimsical and not as plotty as old men prefer but there are plenty of plot-thick epic fantasy novels for that sort of thing. Short stories offer a chance to do something different and McKillip’s prose is enchanting enough to carry off almost anything. I might check out her novels, too. ‘The Essential Patricia A. McKillip’ is well worth a look for fantasy fans.
Eamonn Murphy
October 2025
(pub: Tachyon Publications, 2025. 320 page hardback. Price: $28.95 (US), £25.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-61696-448-1.
check out websites: www.tachyonpublications.com and https://tachyonpublications.com/product/the-essential-patricia-a-mckillip/
