Overhead doors

[asakiyume]

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.

Comments

[cmcmck]

What we call an 'up and over' door.

Not sure how divine they usually are though! :o)

[asakiyume]

"Divine" just goes nicely with the notion of "overhead" ;-)

"Up and over" is a better description of how the doors actually work!

[osprey_archer]

Every Heart a Doorway sounds like it has a fantastically cool premise, but everything I've heard about it suggests that it doesn't do it justice. Which is too bad!

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?

[asakiyume]

I didn't get far enough to discover if the book posits a single underlying cause, but it's just trying to have all the experiences coexist in the same world that I mean. In a meta way, that doesn't do justice to the very different things writers are doing when they use the conceit of having a child travel to another world, and putting them all together--for me--is mashing too many styles and intentions together.

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).

[osprey_archer]

I think a good author might be able to make something thematically coherent out of having people who have experienced different kinds of portal experiences meet - but it would be hard, and it would become exponentially harder the more portal experiences you add to the mix.

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.

[asakiyume]

The portal is such a vivid storytelling technique, and one that's used so widely, that it's natural to think of stories that use it as sharing something (and I mean they do: they all use that technique)--but the stories are just so different. Alice in Wonderland skewers humorous things in society and plays games with ideas... it's not even really much of a story. Taking Alice, turning her into a real girl who really experienced those things, and then having her meet up with Polly or Lucy or Susan from Narnia? You can't: she's not real in the same way. I guess, technically speaking, she doesn't have the same degree of character development.

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.

[sovay]

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.

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.

[asakiyume]

"Onion" sounds just beautiful. Is it available for standalone purchase?

[sovay]

"Onion" sounds just beautiful. Is it available for standalone purchase?

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!

[asakiyume]

I should definitely be able to borrow one of those--thanks!

[kore]

Onion is amazing, like nearly everything Kiernan writes. I remember reading it standing up in a B&N when it was in that Best Of anthology and nearly passing out right there.

[asakiyume]

I'm going to try to get one of the anthologies from my library or on interlibrary loan.

[osprey_archer]

The funny thing is that Alice was based on a real girl, so you'd think she'd have more heft and solidity, but as a character - she's really just a viewpoint, isn't she? A transparent eyeball for the reader (to borrow a phrase from Emerson.)

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.

[asakiyume]

I think you're so right about not needing characterization for people who are right there.

Ughh, I just can't stand the difference in tone, though.

[osprey_archer]

This happens with crossover fics a lot, I've noticed. There are a lot of crossovers that sound interesting in theory, but once you try to actually write them then the differences between the two stories/worlds make it impossible. The characters in one world are more developed and it makes the characters from the other look thin or even incoherent. One of the stories functions on that slightly absurdist sitcom logic that doesn't fit with a more down-to-earth canon. Or the world-building is just incompatible.

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.

[marycatelli]

Well, all those hearing the story probably read the Alice they knew into it.

[selidor]

I think it's more (having read this and the next one) that the whimsy is put there in a very particular sense: to have every character's experience in their own personal world explicitly validated by the text. So the other characters react in-keeping to a person whose world was in the Nonsense part of the world-space, because that's how they need to communicate.

(If it helps any, there aren't any whimsy characters past the first quarter or so of this one).

[asakiyume]

That *does* help. Posssssibly I'll go back and give it another try.

[asakiyume]

You know... I think part of it is that the issues that come together to be dealt with in this story really don't exist all together in very many portal stories. I'd be willing to bet, in fact, that only the Narnia series has the particular combination that gets people's goat:
(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.

[sovay]

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.

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.

[asakiyume]

First off I have to confess that having only read 10 percent of the novella, I'm not 100 percent sure that the Narnia filter is being applied--I'm just guessing that from the fact that the protagonist is a young person who spent time in a Netherworld realm that she yearns for but can't get back to--the school is for kids who are messed up from this, and if they could get back to their realms, they wouldn't really be messed up (it seems to me)--but who knows! Maybe some of them can.

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.

[sovay]

--but who knows! Maybe some of them can.

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.

[asakiyume]

Re: Dorothy, yes, absolutely! And not just Dorothy and her family, but the other visitors, like Trot and Betsy Bobbin and Button Bright and the Shaggy Man.

Yeah, I do wonder if the story addresses that. I don't wonder hard enough to read the rest of the story though.

[sovay]

And not just Dorothy and her family, but the other visitors, like Trot and Betsy Bobbin and Button Bright and the Shaggy Man.

Good point! There is a lot of traffic between Earth and Oz.

[asakiyume]

Every Heart a Doorway isn't using actual our-world fantasy story characters, though, so it's possible it just doesn't acknowledge that in some cases people get to stay in the other world. I suppose even if it does, that fact just serves to embitter the kids for whom that's not possible /supposition.

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.

[sovay]

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.

That's fair. I don't want to put you in the position of arguing either for or against something you have not read!

[selidor]

The rest of the novella does in fact address all these concerns: examining returning and its possibility (and happening) motivates all the plot. I totally empathize if it didn't pull you in enough to stay with though asakiyume :)

[asakiyume]

I'm just being a fussy reader! And I really, really dislike cutesy whimsy. But what you say in the other comment makes me think maybe I should give the book more of a chance.

[marycatelli]

That was, however, not his original conception. He had to go on write Oz books because nothing else pulled in the money. One notes he manages to introduce major inconsistencies between even the first and the second book.

[asakiyume]

*nodding* --but speaking as someone who was an enthusiastic Oz reader as a kid, those things don't necessarily intrude.

... 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.

[marycatelli]

Oh, yes. In the book she wants to go home from the get-go, and never wavers. Learning this was something the movie tacked on. (And didn't integrate. For instance, why was she going to see the wizard if not to go home? Why not just stay put? Or have adventures?)

[sovay]

One notes he manages to introduce major inconsistencies between even the first and the second book.

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.

[marycatelli]

It does complicate the treatment of it.

[osprey_archer]

Now that you mention it, I don't think I have read any other stories that have that particular combo. In Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy, the kids fix it so that no time passes while they're gone - but that's because they've read Narnia; and in any case they're only gone for a few weeks, IIRC.

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.

[asakiyume]

I just thought of another portal fantasy--Drujienna's Harp It takes place in no time, and a lot takes place while the kids are gone--but not a whole lifetime's worth.

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.

[osprey_archer]

You've mentioned Drujienna's Harp before. I've gone ahead and put an interlibrary loan on it; it must be worth reading if it left such an impression on you.

Plus it's been a while since I read a portal fantasy, and all this discussion of them is giving me a yen.

[asakiyume]

I have to warn you that it's got a very uncomfortable-to-me mix of whimsy and seriousness in the first third or maybe even half, but then (from my perspective) picks one tone (seriousness).

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!

[osprey_archer]

I looked Ellen Kindt McKenzie up, and it turns out I've read one of her other books! Stargone John, which popped up in the library database when I searched for books about gifted children lo these many years ago.

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!

[asakiyume]

The two other things I read by her were Taash and the Jesters and Kashka, which form a duology. I need to get myself copies of them.

(I think I read one other thing as well, but those are the two I really liked--other than Drujienna's Harp)

[kore]

Aww, that's lovely.

[asakiyume]

Oh, and for a portal story in which time *does* pass, and with the adult ban, there's of course Peter Pan

[sovay]

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).

*drive-by +1*

[marycatelli]

There's always the whole metaphysical aspect of it -- how on earth are all those worlds possible?

A nonsense world implies that anything can happen. If so, why not in other worlds?

[sovay]

Now, it seems that "overhead door" means a garage door that rolls up, but my thoughts went like this

I like that!

I would also accept an angelic garage.

[asakiyume]

I would also accept an angelic garage

That's where you hire two Raphaelite cherubs to lift and close the door, obviating the need for an electronic push button.

[queenoftheskies]

I love your sketch!

[asakiyume]

Thank you!

[zyzyly]

Haha my first thought was Andy Devine.

[asakiyume]

Who I had to look up! Cowboy doors in the sky for the win!