“…remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn’t walked once within the soul of man.”
It’s retro book-review week at Pixelated Geek. (“Is that really a thing, or just an excuse to read something more than five years old?” “TOTALLY A THING, MOVING ON.”) Today we’re going all the way back to 2013 with Dreams and Shadows, the debut novel of C. Robert Cargill (author of Sea of Rust and We Are Where The Nightmares Go.)
Ewan and Colby are eight-year-old boys on an adventure. Ewan was kidnapped as a baby and grew up in the Seelie fairy court; Colby met a genie who granted him his wish to see “everything supernatural”. When Coby stumbles into the Limestone Kingdom and meets Ewan for the first time, the two instantly become best friends.
Ironic, since meeting each other ends up being both the best and the worst thing that can happen. For everyone.
It’s pretty surprising that this is Cargill’s first novel, since I really couldn’t find anything hesitant or amateurish in the entire book. There were only a couple of moments when I thought a description was a touch too flowerly, but those were few and far between. The rest of the book is a tightly-plotted story of fairytales and magical wishes that slam headfirst into some pretty horrific consequences.
This is a much older, darker version of the Fae, something leftover from the times when so many travelers disappeared without a trace that people had to invent a hundred different versions of “the faeries got them”: lured into a pond and drowned, danced to death in an enchanted circle, or turned into a goblin’s mode of transportation and ridden until their feet fell off.
There are many, many different types of supernatural creatures here, from several different cultures and centuries. The author makes it easier to follow by strategically dropping in excerpts from scientific journals that give the reader everything they need to know about a variety of monster, (but not why they need to know it). Cargill also puts his own stamp on some of these fairy tales, blending together two different versions of the Changeling myth (everyone knows that faeries will swap a human child for a changeling. Ever wonder where the changeling itself comes from? Or what it eats?), giving us some background on the Seelie Court’s Tithe to Hell, and a creating a surprisingly vicious story about a Jinn, with an intricate bit of cause-and-effect that leads to a unique kind of hell for a creature that always keeps its promises.
And then there’s Coyote. I love stories about the Trickster God, and my favorites are the ones where Coyote come across as fun-loving, kind of annoying, and most importantly dangerous. You never know where you stand with Coyote. Although if you’re smart you’ll stand as far away from him as possible.
“Trickster, if you’re up to something…”
Coyote stopped smiling and the very air around the court grew cold. “Redcap. When will you ever learn? I’m always up to something.”
The style of the first part of the book feels a little like a children’s fairytale, complete with a storybook romance and a tale of a clever genie and a wicked vizier. It’s most definitely not for children though, since it involves things like kidnappings and suicides, people getting torn limb from limb by a hunting party from Hell, and some poor schmuck caught out in the wilderness with terrible friends and the worst luck. But it still feels like a story where Colby and Ewan’s friendship will help them overcome everything life has to throw at them.
Then we jump fourteen years into the future and the writing style becomes more complex, and things get really dark.
There was no such thing as destiny, and no such thing as prophecy; there was only matter slamming into other matter like two toy trucks in the hands of a child.
This is a gritty, urban world of the supernatural that’s just out of sight of the mundane world of Austin Texas, where fallen angels (wings and all) try to drown their sorrows in a dive bar that only caters to the cursed, and bitter, angry changelings use pick-up artist techniques to leave a trail of bodies in their wake. Colby and Ewan’s adventures as children have led to them having terrible lives, and that’s not even taking into account their waiting list of enemies wanting to take them down.
Cargill has a lot of experience as a screenwriter, and that really shows in the fast-paced, back-and-forth dialog, and cinematic images like magic being dispelled in a “Paff!” of flower petals, or a scene with the Wild Hunt on the move, or a platoon of fallen angels being whistled into battle formation. There are also some impressive moments where Colby shows that he’s exactly as terrifying as the monsters, if not more so.
Mostly this book is relentlessly, deliciously grim. It’s definitely one of those “okay, just one more chapter” reads, even with bad things happening to people who don’t deserve it, good intentions leading to even worse outcomes, and evil, horrible people who have never been given anything their entire lives except more reasons to be horrible and evil. It’s a pretty bleak view of humanity in addition to being a very dark coming of age story, and it has a not very comforting theory about what it takes to try to save anyone.
If you demand a moral with your fairytale than the good news is that you’ll get one here! The bad news is that it’s delivered by Coyote, so you probably won’t like everything he has to say.