Welcome to the Midnight Circus
Theodora Goss
IN ITS THREE RINGS you will find a seal maiden and a queen of the sea, wolves that howl under the bed and wild girls who know how to fight for themselves, angels who are less than angelic, a boy who dreams of winter, a weaver of fates You may have seen some of the performers before (surely you’ve met Little Red Riding Hood?), but never quite like this. In this book, Jane Yolen weaves beauty and darkness, reality and the fantastic, imagination and the ordinary, as only she can.
I knew Jane from her stories long before I met her, so when I did finally meet her at a science fiction and fantasy convention where we were on the same panel, I was meeting that Jane Yolen. I was (don’t tell her) a little intimidated, particularly because she knows more about fairy tales and fantasy than most professors in the field. She is formidably intelligent and articulate, unafraid to challenge viewpoints that are not historically sound or backed up by solid evidence. But she is also deeply kind and supportive to other writers, as she was and has been to me.
I first read her stories in the wonderful anthologies edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow—the various fairy-tale anthologies beginning with Snow White, Blood Red, and, of course, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror volumes, which were such an important part of my teenage years. Now I teach them in classes on fairy tales and the fantastic, along with her novel Briar Rose, which has the same beauty and darkness as the tales in this Midnight Circus. It is the story of a young woman who discovers that her grandmother’s version of the Briar Rose fairy tale both hides and illuminates a dark secret. Like several of the stories in this volume, it is a tale of the Holocaust, told without any of the darkness diminished, but with the beauty of both the fantastical and of ordinary, everyday things. This is Jane’s magical elixir, with three ingredients: the transformative beauty of fairy tale, which J. R. R. Tolkien called faërie; the sadness and cruelty of human life; and the strong, solid reality of our world. However fantastical her stories, they are grounded in bread and butter and wine, the landscape of Scotland or Massachusetts, the inescapable truths of history. This is why her stories always feel real and true—and wise.
The stories in this collection remind me of a garden of dark flowers: the old rosa gallica Cardinal de Richelieu, tulip Queen of the Night, hellebores and monkshoods and snake’s head fritillaries, deep purple violets. They are darker than most of Jane’s stories, but that darkness is there in much of her work, both fiction and poetry, because her writing is grounded in history and human nature, which have a dark edge. She has been called America’s Hans Christian Andersen, and I can see why—Jane is as prolific and imaginative as the Danish writer of fairy tales. She has published so many books that you could read a new one every day for a year, and they are so different, in genre and subject matter and intended audience, that you would never feel as though she were repeating herself. She has also, by the way, won numerous awards, some of them multiple times, including the Nebula Award, Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Award, Golden Kite Award, Rhysling Award . . . the list goes on. However, for me, a Jane Yolen story is fundamentally different from one of Andersen’s tales in two ways. First, Jane is never sanctimonious. Her characters are sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes broken, but they are always treated as people, not vehicles for a message. And second, her stories contain a strong dose of her own common sense and pragmatism. They show us how we can survive in a difficult world and teach us what to value—in that sense, they are moral without being moralistic, wise guides to our lived reality. Andersen may sentimentalize, but she never does.
I have a personal list of favorite fantasy writers whom I read over and over again, because they capture what feels to me like true magic—both the numinous magic of fairyland and the ordinary magic of human life and love and hope. It includes such writers as Peter S. Beagle, Angela Carter, Susanna Clarke, John Crowley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hope Mirrlees, Patricia McKillip, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and T. H. White. And for a long time now, it has included Jane Yolen. She transports me to magical worlds and teaches me how to create magic myself through the ultimate spell, which is the one cast by a master storyteller. Her fiction and poems are a masterclass in craft. (Do, by the way, read the wonderful poems in the story notes. Jane is one of the rare fiction writers whose poetry is as rich and compelling as her prose.) I would recommend them to any aspiring writer, together with her wonderful book Take Joy on the pleasures and challenges of the writing life.
But you’re not thinking about that right now, are you? No, you want the stories themselves, and I don’t blame you. You want the mysterious Dog Boy, the man who worships owls, and the truth about Scott’s Arctic expedition. Here you stand at the entrance to the tent, ticket in hand. You’ve come to see a performance.
You want marvels and delights, and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Welcome to the Midnight Circus. Please take your seat. The show is about to begin.
Who Knew I Was a Writer of Dark Stories?
Jane Yolen
ACTUALLY, I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW, though I’d had several darkish stories in the Year’s Best Horror Stories collection, been nominated for horror awards, was in the Horror Writers of America for fifteen seconds or so, and read Tales from the Crypt comics as a young teen, huddled in the bathroom of our house, before creeping back to my bedroom with the (borrowed) comic safely down the front of my pants. And no, my parents never knew.
But while I have written the occasional vampire or werewolf story, three Holocaust novels, and a novella about the Russian Revolution with dragons, and books with ghosts and/or golems, witches (Baba Yaga appears in three different books—a novel in verse, a picture book for young kids, and a graphic novel), gargoyles, trolls, nasty fey princes, etc., I prefer my must-read dark matters to be somewhat limited. A frisson of terror rather than massive amounts of spilt blood. No pop-up all-devouring monsters, no bedwetting scares. No vicious and unrelenting tortures of women and children. No lusting after BRAINS!
Just plain old-fashioned M. R. James and that Other James—Henry, the author of The Turn of the Screw. Or more modern: The Haunting of Hill House, which is a 1959 gothic horror novel by American author Shirley Jackson. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, so that tells you something about the quality of the writing. It is still considered one of the best literary ghost stories of the 20th century.
And in a pinch I will reread the Mother of Gothics—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Barry Moser illustrated edition.
So once Tachyon agreed they liked the idea of Midnight Circus, I began to research my collections, magazines, and journals to see whether I had enough stories to fill the book. I started with our database and then reread stories of mine in Asimov’s and F&SF. Then I tackled the anthologies in my attic library. Must be well over a hundred such volumes, each with a story (or stories) of mine safely held within.
I made lists, annotated them. Sent what I considered my A and B stories to Tachyon to find out what volumes or magazines they already had and which stories we needed to copy here in my office. I must have started—after that early cull—with forty dark stories I still liked. Who knew?
Then I deleted any that had been in my first two Tachyon collections.