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

[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.