First Impressions Review: The Wonderful Stag, by Kathleen Jennings & L’Esprit de L’Escalier, by Catherynne Valente

 


These two short stories (free on Tor.com) both feature men who think love and the desire for possession - or the desire for someone to love them - are the same thing. Both pay some kind of a price, though whether they’ve learned anything is up for debate.

 

‘The Wonderful Stag, or the Courtship of Red Elsie’ is set in a remote village in the woods. In those woods lives a stag that carries many gold rings on its antlers. If you can coax it close and get one of those rings, the villagers believe, your relationship will be blessed and happy. If you don’t…well, it probably wasn’t meant to be! But one man is obsessed with obtaining a ring, thinking it – or the gold he thinks the deer carries inside it – will finally earn the hand of Red Elsie, the girl who wants nothing to do with him. In order to get it, he carries out a heinous act. And when the villagers decide to punish him, Red Elsie knows just what he deserves.

 

‘L’Esprit de L’Escalier’ is named after the French term for the clever thing you realize you should have said or done after the conversation is over and you are halfway up the stairs. It is a re-telling of ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ in which Orpheus doesn’t turn around and lose his wife’s spirit but successfully brings her back to the land of the living. Well, semi-successfully: the new Eurydice is a zombie who has to drink lamb’s blood and who has a tendency to rot without constant maintenance. And Orpheus is kind of a dick about it because his quest to “save” Eurydice was never about her. I like the modernized interpretations of the various Greek gods and goddesses, and the way dead Eurydice is done catering to Orpheus’ self-centered fantasies about her.

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