Overhead doors
Jan. 8th, 2018 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
A truck was pulled up in a driveway in my neighborhood. It said "Devine Overhead Doors." (Here's a photo from the company's website, if you'd like to know precisely what it looked like.) Now, it seems that "overhead door" means a garage door that rolls up, but my thoughts went like this:
Devine Divine Overhead Doors

It reminds me of one of the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, where angels poke their heads out of windows in the sky.
In very slightly tangential news, I gave up on Every Heart a Doorway, not for any flaw on its part, but because I realized--belatedly--that I don't like sucking all portal experiences into one framework.

It reminds me of one of the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, where angels poke their heads out of windows in the sky.
In very slightly tangential news, I gave up on Every Heart a Doorway, not for any flaw on its part, but because I realized--belatedly--that I don't like sucking all portal experiences into one framework.
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Date: 2018-01-08 04:21 pm (UTC)Not sure how divine they usually are though! :o)
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Date: 2018-01-08 05:03 pm (UTC)"Up and over" is a better description of how the doors actually work!
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Date: 2018-01-08 04:45 pm (UTC)Although even if it did a better job overall, I'm not sure that would take care of the "sucking all portal experiences into one framework" problem. I guess it depends by what you mean by framework. Do you mean that the book suggests there's one underlying cause for all portal experiences? Or does having kids with different portal experiences meet make them all part of the same framework, even if the underlying cause is different?
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Date: 2018-01-08 05:00 pm (UTC)The protagonist girl has been to a land of death, and her roommate has been to a Nonsense world. Her roommate says upon meeting her "Are you a servant of the Queen of Cakes, here to punish me for transgressions against the Countess of Candy Floss?" --So, that style of whimsy sets my teeth on edge all on its own, but more broadly, a story with that sort of a premise and style is trying to do different things from, oh, say, Narnia, you know? And both are doing different things than what Corinne Duyvis is doing in Otherbound (which I haven't read but have heard a lot about).
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Date: 2018-01-08 05:15 pm (UTC)And I'm not sure that putting together, say, Narnia and E. Nesbit's nonsense worlds would ever come to much - there's no thematic weight to a nonsense world. Although now that I've said this, I think you might be able to do something with Narnia and Wonderland, even though Wonderland is probably the ur-nonsense world. It has some underlying structure to it, I guess?
But - swinging back around again - I'm not sure what a story would gain from that comparison. Maybe the idea of kids from multiple portal stories meeting is the kind of thing that sounds cool but just fizzles into nothing when you actually try it.
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Date: 2018-01-08 05:30 pm (UTC)The crazy thing is, since this story isn't dealing with actual extant portal story characters, it could avoid this problem all together, but it doesn't: even though it's creating all the various different portal experiences out of whole cloth, it still mixes whimsy with serious storytelling.
The more I think about it, the more other premises of the story bother me too... maybe it's a topic for a more in-depth post.
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Date: 2018-01-08 07:59 pm (UTC)Caitlín R. Kiernan's "Onion" has a similar premise of a support group for people who have each had some transient interaction with another world, but none of the worlds are drawn one-for-one from any kind of portal fantasy or paranormal experience, and part of the point of the story turns out to be that not everyone in the group even reacts the same way: the protagonist was shaken for life by his childhood glimpse of red cinnamon fields and strange things moving beneath a bruise-colored sky, but his lover lives for the moments when her own strange underwater world rises and wraps around her, trilling and singing and leaving their bathroom full of weird-looking seaweeds, and if someday she drowns in it, she'd rather that than the rest of her life stuck here. I love that story. Every Heart a Doorway sounds increasingly like the unsatisfactory YA version, which I am sorry to hear.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-08 08:25 pm (UTC)I don't think so: it was published originally in Wrong Things (2001) with Billy Martin, reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 15th Annual Collection (2002) by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, which is where I first encountered it, collected in To Charles Fort, with Love (2005), and collected again in Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan, Vol. 1 (2011). If any of these are in your library, go for it!
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 04:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 05:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-08 09:17 pm (UTC)I suppose when Carroll was telling the stories to Alice Liddell and her sisters he didn't need to add characterization with Alice sitting right there.
Lucy Pevensie IIRC is also named after a real child (the first Narnia book is dedicated to her), but not really based on her. That probably allows more scope for character development.
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Date: 2018-01-08 09:19 pm (UTC)Ughh, I just can't stand the difference in tone, though.
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Date: 2018-01-08 09:31 pm (UTC)I think this last one works against Harry Potter crossovers a lot. The worldbuilding has a distinctive weirdness to it that makes it hard to mesh with anything else.
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Date: 2018-01-09 01:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 10:15 am (UTC)(If it helps any, there aren't any whimsy characters past the first quarter or so of this one).
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Date: 2018-01-09 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-08 05:38 pm (UTC)(1) a whole life (or large portion of it) lived in another world, only to return to childhood in your own;
(2) the whole thing taking no time at all in our world (hence returning to childhood)
(3) being banned from returning after you reach a certain age.
It's that combination that's making for all the maladjusted kids that need the special school--but that's just not a combination I see that frequently.
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Date: 2018-01-08 07:48 pm (UTC)So the Narnia filter is being applied to all forms of portal fantasy, even when these conditions were not a factor in the original template. That sounds very . . . flattening. And like the thing that bugs me so much about neo-noir where the received version has become more real than the thing itself, and everyone treats it like the authentic thing and praises themselves for subverting it when the original was actually more subversive in the first place.
[edit] It would be significantly more interesting to have the different kids from different portal worlds actually have had different experiences, as opposed to the same kind of experience in different registers of whimsy or dark—the kid with the Wonderland experience of one hot afternoon's sojourn in a realm of rigorously logical nonsense might be messed up from it, or miss it, or keep trying to find a way back in, but they would not fundamentally understand the time-shock of the kid who spent twenty years in Narnia and neither of them would share much with the kid who goes down every winter to reign over the land of the dead and that's just how it is.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:17 pm (UTC)The healing angel said similar about the potential for interest if the heart of the story is kids not understanding one another's experience. I gather from reviews that what people complain about with this story is actually that it veers away from the whole return-from-a-magical-land-will-mess-you-up premise to a thriller-murder-mystery (I think? I think that's what I've read), which is just plain abandoning any attempt to examine the premise (if that's what the story does in fact do), but I think there are plenty of ways to go wrong even if you stick with the premise--but some of that may be just personal fussiness on my part.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:28 pm (UTC)At least one of them should be able to: Dorothy could. Dorothy eventually moves to Oz permanently, along with the people who comprise her home, so she doesn't even have to choose between them. If you don't take that into account in your modern portal fantasy remix, you have left out a major part of the tradition.
I gather from reviews that what people complain about with this story is actually that it veers away from the whole return-from-a-magical-land-will-mess-you-up premise to a thriller-murder-mystery (I think? I think that's what I've read), which is just plain abandoning any attempt to examine the premise (if that's what the story does in fact do)
That does seem like a very different sort of story.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:49 pm (UTC)Yeah, I do wonder if the story addresses that. I don't wonder hard enough to read the rest of the story though.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:50 pm (UTC)Good point! There is a lot of traffic between Earth and Oz.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:53 pm (UTC)It's looking more and more like I should either quickly skim the rest of the story or else just talk hypothetically, rather than in reference to the novella.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:53 pm (UTC)That's fair. I don't want to put you in the position of arguing either for or against something you have not read!
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Date: 2018-01-09 10:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 05:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 05:15 am (UTC)... I guess, though, we could look at how he wrapped things up at the end of the first book to see how he planned for a one-off portal fantasy to end. I seem to recall Dorothy's contented with being back home.
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Date: 2018-01-09 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 06:35 am (UTC)Agreed, but however reluctantly he took to it, it is part of the original Baum canon, not even a Ruth Plumly Thompson addition, and therefore I think fair game for being acknowledged by any engagement with the trope.
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Date: 2018-01-09 01:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-08 09:05 pm (UTC)In Delia Sherman's The Freedom Maze, the heroine is gone no time at all - but she grows a few inches while she's away, and that stays with her when she comes home. (Of course that's a somewhat different book, because she goes to the past rather than a fantasy land.)
Are Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books portal fantasies? I suppose technically they are, although I don't usually think of them that way. The characters are banned from traveling between worlds eventually, but not because they've reached a certain age (although honestly I thought it was even more unfair than the ban in Narnia. I know the series is meant as an anti-Narnia reaction but I think it ends up repeating a lot of Narnia's mistakes and adding a few of its own).
I haven't read Lev Grossman's The Magicians, but it also is engaging specifically with Narnia, so I'm curious if it follows this template too.
And of course there's Oz or Wonderland, which are both different again, or something like Fog Magic where the fog serves as a portal of sorts - but the heroine is never gone more than an afternoon.
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Date: 2018-01-08 09:17 pm (UTC)With Drujienna's Harp and I think many portal fantasies, it's a once-and-done thing: the kids are there to solve a problem, and when the problem is solved, they either stay there or return to our world, for good in both cases. Narnia and Oz are different in that the kids go back and forth.
Come to think of it, I suppose yes, the His Dark Materials books *are* portal fantasies.
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Date: 2018-01-08 09:24 pm (UTC)Plus it's been a while since I read a portal fantasy, and all this discussion of them is giving me a yen.
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Date: 2018-01-08 09:30 pm (UTC)It really did leave a big impression on me, though--the landscape of it and the characters.
I've corresponded with the author, though I haven't sent her a letter in ages and should really check to be sure she's still with us. After meeting her,** I read other books by her that I also liked a whole lot. Something she did in all her books, long, long before it was popular, was include neuroatypical characters.
**We met at a memorial for Lloyd Alexander--in fact, we started corresponding because of him. I enthused about her book to him when I met him, and he knew her and told her, and she wrote to me!
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Date: 2018-01-08 09:39 pm (UTC)I remember one scene very vividly - at school everyone thinks that he can't read or write at all, and then when one of his classmates is teasing him he writes "Jane is Bad" on the board. Not very nice, but definitely an exhibition of skill!
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Date: 2018-01-08 10:03 pm (UTC)(I think I read one other thing as well, but those are the two I really liked--other than Drujienna's Harp)
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Date: 2018-01-09 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-08 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 05:03 am (UTC)*drive-by +1*
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Date: 2018-01-09 05:07 am (UTC)A nonsense world implies that anything can happen. If so, why not in other worlds?
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Date: 2018-01-08 07:45 pm (UTC)I like that!
I would also accept an angelic garage.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:54 pm (UTC)That's where you hire two Raphaelite cherubs to lift and close the door, obviating the need for an electronic push button.
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Date: 2018-01-08 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-08 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 05:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 02:34 pm (UTC)