“I have to support us now, Pipsqueak. So we’re going to live here. Mrs. Payne’s going to rent us the housekeeper’s cottage, and I’m going to write books.”

“What kind of books?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to start writing and see what comes out.”

Pip and the Fairies by Theodora Goss

What a glorious thing the Internet is… I checked the current issue of Rain Taxi to see if there were any good reviews to peruse over lunch, and I found a review of Theodora Goss’s new collection, In the Forest of Forgetting. I’d never heard of Ms. Goss, but the review sounded intriguing, comparing her to Kelly Link and Jeff VanderMeer, two writers I’ve recently discovered. So then I did a little Googl’ing, and found Ms. Goss’s website, which included links to several of her web-published stories. The first in the list was Pip and the Fairies, published in Strange Horizons in 2005. And I was immediately smitten.

It’s a short tale, but evocative and rich, about a daughter’s relationship to her mother, Susan, and the character the daughter inspired/played/became in her mother’s fairy stories.

In the story, Philippa (the “Pip” of her mother’s books) returns, after her mother’s death, to the house they shared after her father died, when her mother began writing the Pip books. Though the books have faded into obscurity and fallen out of print some years ago, a recent documentary about Susan has brought a resurgence of interest, and Philippa is often asked to autograph the books as Pip.

Philippa’s relationship to her mother and the stories is ambivalent. On the one hand, the books are decidedly less magical to Philippa than to their fans–they were, after all, a way for her mother to make a living; and her mother seems to have been (and with good reason, perhaps, as a single mother) obsessed with making money.

“What happened, Pip?” her mother asked her, lying in the hospital bed, her head wrapped in the scarf without which it looked as fragile as an eggshell. “You were such an imaginative child. What made you care so much about money?”

“You did,” she wanted to and could not say. And now she has taken that money out of the bank to buy Payne House.

But they also represent an important part of Philippa’s childhood, one that she cannot untangle from the books that bear her nickname.

How did it begin? Did she begin it, by telling her mother, over her milk and the oatmeal cookies from the food co-op that tasted like baked sawdust, what she had been doing that day? Or did her mother begin it, by writing the stories? Did she imagine them, Hyacinth, the Thorn King, the Carp in the pond who dreamed, so he said, the future, and the May Queen herself? And, she thinks, pulling into the drive that leads to the housekeeper’s cottage, what about Jack Feather? Or did her mother imagine them? And did their imaginations bring them into being, or were they always there to be found?

There’s enough packed into this little story for a much longer venture, enough rich backstory and characterization and that parallel fairyland to fill many more pages. Indeed, it reminds me somewhat of one of my favorite stories from Kelly Link’s latest collection, the titular “Magic for Beginners”, in that the story is both dense and restrained, managing to appear very slight for all the heft hidden within. Rather like that parallel fairyland.

I haven’t read the rest of Ms. Goss’s stories, so I can’t necessarily recommend them–maybe “Pip and the Fairies” is an odd aberration, though the trustworthy reviewers at Rain Taxi seem to like it fine. But I can say that this is a voice in the new school of fantastic writing (her first collection was published by Small Beer Press, a project with which Ms. Link is involved) worth listening to. In the Forest of Forgetting has shot to the top of my got-to-read list on the strength of this story alone.