Emma Bull is a writer who sees the mythic in startling and unexpected places. Her debut novel War for the Oaks (1987) is one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy, finds magic in modern-day Minneapolis. Since then she has become one of the key authors in the genre, creating the shared world fantasy setting Liavek with husband Will Shetterly and writing short stories and a novel set in Terri Windling’s Bordertown setting. She has also written, sung, and played music with folk-rock band Cats Laughing, alongside fellow urban fantasy pioneer Steven Brust, and goth-folk band The Flash Girls. These varied passions and interests inform and shape her adventurous approach to writing.
Bull’s stories rarely stay in one place, mixing together disparate elements in ways that create an exciting new whole. War for the Oaks is both a tale of battling Fairie courts and a vivid account of life in a working band. Bone Dance (1991) weaves together cyberpunk noir and post-apocalypse survival fiction with Voodoo magic and the tarot. Territory (2007) is a secret history of the Wild West in which Wyatt Earp is a sorcerer. Bull’s own magic lies in how she makes these surprising genre hybrids feel utterly natural. To get a better sense of how this works, let’s take a look at two of Bull’s most celebrated novels, War for the Oaks and Bone Dance.
War for the Oaks
This city is alive with the best magic of mortal folk. The very light off the skyscrapers and the lakes vibrates with it. If the Unseelie Court takes up residence here, this will be a place where people fear their neighbors, where life drains the living until art and wit are luxuries, where any pleasant thing must be imported and soon loses its savor. (71)
War for the Oaks is a wonderful novel, and despite urban fantasy becoming a hugely popular subgenre since its original release, it still feels remarkably fresh. Much of this is down to Bull’s lovingly rendered hometown of Minneapolis, where the novel takes place. From the opening, where protagonist Eddi McCandry runs down Nicollet Mall pursued by supernatural forces, Bull immediately situates the reader in the recognisable (then) present day of the city, the familiar world of shopping districts and restaurants in a big American city anchoring the story and making the fantastical elements seem more magical by comparison. And in turn, the magical elements highlight the hyperreal elements of city lights—the rush of huge numbers of people crossing paths as they live their lives, the glittering lights in the skyscrapers, the seductive illusions of shops, bars, and restaurants. But this is no idealised reflection of Minneapolis—Bull’s characters are struggling working-class musicians who are always worried about how they’ll cover the rent for their meagre apartments, playing the dingiest of bars to build an audience and get recognition.
The novel follows Eddi, a guitarist and singer who has just broken up with her boyfriend Stuart and left his band when she is followed by the Phouka, a creature of Faerie who looks like Prince and can shapeshift into a big black dog. He drafts her into the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, the conflicting sides of Fairie, who are battling for control of Minneapolis and need a mortal on the battlefield to allow them to spill immortal blood. The Phouka becomes her guardian, protecting her from the forces of the Unseelie Court so she can play her role in the battle.
Eddi at first resents this intrusion to her life, but soon it becomes clear that the charming and loyal Phouka has another agenda—with the aim of ending eras of Fairie class war—and the two of them grow close as Eddi forms a new band with her best friend and drummer Carla, keyboard whiz Dan, and new Faerie recruits, bassist Hedge and lead guitarist (and Sidhe royalty) Willy Silver. Eddi and the Fey, as they call themselves, soon find themselves drawn into the great conflict between the Lady and the Seelie court, representing the good side of magic, and the Queen of Air and Darkness of the Unseelie court, who represent decay and destruction.
If the balance initially seems stacked against our human hero, Eddi soon learns that she has a magic of her own—music. As the Phouka explains to Willy Silver, who is surprised when Eddi is resistant to his glamour:
She has her own glamour, Willy lad. All poets do, and all the bards and artists, all the musicians who truly take the music into their hearts. They all straddle the border of Faerie, and they see into both worlds. Not dependably into either, perhaps, but that uncertainty keeps them honest and at a distance. (175)
After all, music, like magic, can affect us invisibly. It makes sense that the human the Faeries would choose to stand for them in battle would be a musician; the fey are well known for their love of music, and indeed much of the folklore that we have passed down about them is from the old traditional ballads. Bull draws from these ballads, particularly “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer,” for much of the mythology of the novel, and the romance between humans and fairies depicted in these songs serve as a sinister counterbalance to the loving and supportive relationship into which Eddi and the Phouka’s romance develops.
The novel’s relationship to music also reflects Bull’s masterful mixing of fantasy and reality. While Eddi’s band have their share of literal magic to draw upon, they also play dingy basement bars for little pay, spend far too long discussing possible band names, and have to lug their own equipment around, with the Phouka acting as their roadie. These scenes, familiar to anyone who’s played music or read about the mundanities of touring life, are drawn with a convincing realism, as is the camaraderie between the members of the band. Eddi and the Fey even cover a range of recognisable songs by famous artists, from—naturally—Minneapolis native Prince, to Peter Gabriel and the Beatles. Some of Bull’s own songs from Cats Laughing even make an appearance. These realistic elements, like the geography and character of Minneapolis which Bull so wonderfully captures, serve to anchor the story and play off the magical elements. It’s only fitting that the ultimate battle between the warring Courts is decided by a musical showdown between Eddi and the Fey and the Queen of Air and Darkness.
Bone Dance
Once there had been people who stole the prerogatives of the loa, who forced their way into other people’s minds and possessed them. They were a fantasy from silly novels and B-movies come alive. They were harnessed by the military—but who harnesses gods? In the end, they betrayed their side, betrayed everyone: they pushed the Button. Over half a century ago. (93)
Bone Dance remains perhaps Bull’s most complex and ambitious novel. Subtitled “A Fantasy for Technophiles,” it defies easy categorisation, instead favouring a genre hybridity that anticipates the New Weird of works by China Mieville or Jeff VanderMeer. The novel is written in a dense, future slang-heavy style that drops the reader straight into its unfamiliar world, much like the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson or Pat Cadigan. And like those novels, it explores ideas around identity through cyberpunk-ish motifs such as genetic engineering and mind hacking. However, Bone Dance is set in a postapocalyptic city—once again loosely recognisable as Bull’s beloved Minneapolis—after the world has been destroyed by nuclear Armageddon. And the novel is driven by the tarot and Voodoo, in a world infused with magic. Indeed, tarot so strongly informs the narrative of Bone Dance that it provides the novel with a structure—each of the eleven sections of the novel is named after a particular card, whose attributes shape that section of the story.
[SPOILERS AHEAD, for those who haven’t read the book…]
The novel’s commitment to hybridity and the deconstruction of boundaries extends to its protagonist, the streetwise, smart-talking Sparrow, who halfway through the novel is revealed to be agender. Sparrow is a cheval—an unsexed body built on demand for the Horsemen, psychic loa or gods developed by the military who can take possession of other people’s bodies—who has woken up self-aware. The Horsemen turned on their captors and launched the nuclear strikes that annihilated the world, creating the post-apocalyptic wasteland the characters inhabit. Because Sparrow’s body is different from how others expect them to be, they have lived their life closed off from others, running purely on the Deal, the system of commerce and trade that the City runs on, obsessed with the remnants of the dead civilisation that they collect through videos, CDs, and tapes. Following the revelation about their identity, the rest of the novel deals with Sparrow coming to terms with themselves, learning that they are indeed a part of humanity and can be part of a community. As their friend Josh tells them, it’s not what other people think they are that’s important, it’s what they personally identify as, which is under their control: “Identity magic is the oldest and easiest kind there is. It’s what language is for.” (210)
The novel’s complicated plot involves Frances, a repentant Horseman trying to make amends by tracking down and killing Tom Worecski, the most brutal of the Horsemen, who now rules over the ruins of the City from the shadows. However, underneath this all is a story about finding alternative ways of living to the destructive capitalist paradigm that works by reducing everything to restrictive and harmful binaries. In the ruins of the City, Sparrow must live according to these old ways, despite their very nature subverting the binary of male/female. Once outside the City, Sparrow becomes part of a community of “hoodoo engineers,” magical technicians who support each other living in communal suburban farms, whose spiritual beliefs embrace diversity and hybridity:
If you asked, you would find most people of the City—of the streets—know them. The loa, the saints, the spirits, the ancestors. There are many names, but you would find the principles similar, and the way they shape the world. The people in the towers don’t think about the spirits. They don’t know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two. (136)
It is only by rejecting the destructive binaries that demand humanity’s mastery over nature, that separates us from the natural and each other, that we can survive after the end of the world. Sparrow’s journey in Bone Dance is often dark and violent, with several viscerally upsetting sequences, but the book brings them through the darkness to emerge into utopianism, hope, and light. The novel ends with the ultimate act of self-reclamation—we discover that the book we have been reading is Sparrow’s autobiography: they have taken control of their own narrative by telling their story as they experienced it.
These ideas of hybridity follow Bull throughout her career, from the gonzo space opera of Falcon (1989) to the Liavek anthologies, which bring together writers as varied as Gene Wolfe and Jane Yolen to explore their shared world. Bull’s great talent lies her ability to make us see both magic and humanity in the most unexpected places, whether the setting is modern-day Minneapolis, the Wild West, or the end of the world. It is this gift that makes her work so enduring, and allows her stories to make such a lasting impression on her readers.
Jonathan Thornton has written for the websites The Fantasy Hive, Fantasy Faction, and Gingernuts of Horror. He works with mosquitoes and is working on a PhD on the portrayal of insects in speculative fiction.
