“The thing to understand,” she said, “is that all life is about the stories we tell. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Remember, if they try, that is a story too. The story of doubt. Choose carefully the stories you believe.” (The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie, 38)
Above all else, M. Rickert is an author who understands the power of stories. M. Rickert, or Mary Rickert, as her name appears on her debut novel The Memory Garden (2014) and her most recent short story collection You Have Never Been Here (2015), writes modern fairy tales. But banish all thoughts of tweeness or preciousness. These are fairy tales very much unbowdlerised, full of blood and creepiness and nastiness. Characters frequently make terrible decisions and do terrible things and suffer the terrible results. Rickert uses fairy tale motifs to confront grief, loss, and human misery. All this might make reading her stories sound like a miserable experience, but nothing could be further from the truth…
Rickert’s facility with language means that each one of her stories is almost a prose poem, every word meticulously chosen. And then there is that underlying love of story and what it can do. Like the fairy tales they draw on, Rickert’s stories resonate by tapping into an oral tradition of storytelling. Her stories frequently involve nested narratives, people within the stories telling their own stories to other people. The act of narration becomes its own form of recursive magic, revealing more about the characters and how they relate to their world…thus showing us something special about what reading this story tells us about our own relationship to the world. It is this that makes Rickert such a vital voice in modern fantasy. Although her output is currently slim—two novels and three short story collections, plus a couple of novellas—the powerful allure of her fiction is sure to leave any reader wanting more.
Rickert is best known for her short fiction, for which she has been nominated for and won numerous awards. In 2007 she won two World Fantasy Awards, one for her short story “Journey Into the Kingdom” and one for her debut short story collection Map of Dreams (2006), which also won the Crawford Award. Her short story “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece” won the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Fiction. Her first two collections, Map of Dreams and Holiday (2010), are currently out of print, but are well worth tracking down if you can find them. You Have Never Been Here, her third collection, is in print from Small Beer Press and collects highlights from Map of Dreams and Holiday along with three extra stories, all of which are good enough to justify owning the book even if you already have the first two.
“What does it matter to reality if you can reason it or not?” (Map of Dreams 51)
Map of Dreams opens with the eponymous novella, which immediately sets out Rickert’s stall as a storyteller. The novella tells the story of Annie Merchant, a woman whose six-year-old daughter is killed by a sniper during a family visit to New York. Annie becomes unmoored by the enormity of her grief, and as her marriage and friendships collapse, she begins to believe that there is a way to travel through time to save her daughter. Quantum mechanics and Aboriginal myths combine in a story about the rawness of grief, and the ways we struggle to work through it. In a typically Rickert-esque twist, Annie winds up becoming the framing device of the collection, as ghosts attracted to her grief unburden their own stories on her, which she records so they can move on, as she eventually does.
Holiday features an equally inventive framing device, with each story being linked to a particular holiday, where the uncanny and the fantastical become a way of commemorating the scars of the painful experiences we live through. The themes of loss and grief recur throughout both collections, and are a key theme in Rickert’s writing in general. Her characters are drawn to the fantastical and the strange as a way of coping with their trauma, but in Rickert’s stories, rejecting the real world does not allow an escape from loss and grief. Rather, because we retain our humanity, when we escape into story we take all our human foibles with us, often creating something unexpectedly sinister and frightening in the process. Thus, many of Rickert’s stories look as if they are going to use the fantastic to comfort us, only to lead us down unexpectedly strange and disturbing pathways.
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We see this particularly clearly in “Journey Into the Kingdom,” perhaps Rickert’s strongest story. Told through a series of nested narratives, the story is on one level a supernatural romance, in which a young man called Alex meets Agatha, a girl he is convinced is a ghost due to the story she writes as an explanation for her paintings. Across multiple levels of narrative we get a series of charming stories about ghosts and humans who fall in love with each other despite their differences, yet the overall narrative takes a turn for the violent and disturbing, ending on a decidedly ambiguous note. Rickert expertly strips away the cosiness of the supernatural romance to expose the morbidity and implied violence that underscores all such romances between the living and the undead, making the reader question the type of story they thought they were reading, and their reaction to it as the story expertly plays with emotions and expectations.
Violent and upsetting things frequently happen in Rickert’s stories, despite their delicate poetic beauty. “The Machine” is a meditation on just that:
“How do stories help us solve the terrible riddle of being human? How do we take all our suffering, the rapes, and wars, and children dying, and turn it into something like a bird song in the night? How do we become better than we’ve been? And how do we get from here to there, when the gods seem so reluctant to help? Could it be, even they don’t know the answers?” (Holiday 62)
Suffering, grief, and loss are an essential part of human life, and so naturally find themselves reflected in stories. In Rickert’s hands, fairy tales become the medium through which we can explore our traumas and our sadness, and, if not negate them, at least create something beautiful out of them. In “Leda,” a couple come to terms with the unexpected pregnancy when the woman is raped by a swan. “The Chambered Fruit” again returns to the loss of a child, where a local goth girl helps a grieving mother by letting her speak to her murdered daughter. “Holiday” is the story of an unemployed clown who cares for the ghosts of murdered and disappeared children. And “Moorina of the Seals” uses the selkie myth to explore colonialism and genocide. All of these stories are powerful because of how Rickert uses the fantastical to expose the uncomfortable truths of humanity.
The Mothers of Voorhisville, a novella and one of the extra stories collected in You Have Never Been Here, takes the fantastical concept of a small town where all the babies are born with wings and expands it into a brilliant and continuously surprising exploration of storytelling, perspective, cults, witch trials, outsiders, and the pressures that break both families and communities. In the story, one of the characters, a fantasy writer, offers to become the chronicler for the mothers in Voorhisville. When asked to explain why she, as a writer of fantastical fiction, is qualified to document the truth, she answers in this way:
She explained that the word fantasy comes from the Latin phantasia, which means “an idea, notion, image, or a making visible.”
“Essentially, it’s making an idea visible. Everyone knows what we did. I thought we were trying to make them see why,” she said. (You Have Never Been Here 214)
This is how the fantastical operates within Rickert’s stories, as a way of exposing aspects of human nature that we would perhaps rather not see. At the same time, Rickert always reminds us that stories are invariably told with an agenda. Stories have the power to change the way we perceive the world, and as a result we should always be careful how we trust them. As Agatha says in “Journey Into the Kingdom”:
“I was trying to put a story in a place where people don’t usually expect one. Don’t you think we’ve gotten awful complacent in our society about story? Like it all the time has to go a certain way and even be only in certain places. That’s what this is all about.” (Holiday 40)
To become complacent about story is to let someone else control the way the truths of the world are revealed to you, which is always a dangerous thing. Many of Rickert’s own characters are storytellers, and the stories they tell reveal much about both themselves and their intended audience. In Rickert’s most recent work, the novella Lucky Girl: How I Became a Horror Writer: A Krampus Story, the protagonist Ro is a bestselling horror author who is also the sole survivor of a horrendous home invasion. Gathered together with a group of strangers to celebrate Christmas, she suggests they each tell a ghost story. This leads to a classic Rickert situation, in which the stories the characters tell each other operate across multiple layers of intent and deceit, mythology and lie, creating a dizzying web in which it becomes dangerously difficult to spot the real monsters. In the short story “Cold Fires,” the stories told by two lovers stranded in an empty house over a snowy winter reveal truths about themselves and each other that go far deeper than the tall tales they intend to convey.
Although best known for her short stories, Rickert is also an accomplished novelist. The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie (2021) is an astonishing work of fantastical fiction that shows she can sustain her singular talents over the course of an entire novel with aplomb. The novel is expanded from her short story “The Shipbuilder,” which is included in You Have Never Been Here and offers fascinating hints as to how Rickert developed the idea. The novel tells the story of Quark, a well-intentioned but doomed giant who returns to his home town of Bellfairie on hearing that the Old Man who raised him has gone missing.
Quark is in many ways a quintessential Rickert protagonist, someone who wants to do good in the world but is so damaged by his own trauma that he is unable to perceive the damage he does to others. Traumatised by his abusive upbringing, Quark discovers the hidden truths behind the man who raised him but is ultimately unable to make peace with his painful past. Rickert’s prose is gorgeous as always, her lyrical prose countering the darkness of the narrative. Bellfairie, a crumbling seaside town inhabited by stoic loners who believe they are descended from bird people, is a wonderful and utterly immersive creation, populated by believably drawn characters. Rickert deftly mixes tragedy, comedy, and horror to create a truly unique novel, and it’s impossible not to warm to Quark and his errant attempts to understand the world around him.
Rickert’s approach to the fantastic is rooted in the idea that fairy tales require darkness, that stories about people must embrace human fallibility to be meaningful. But for all that her stories are frequently dark and disturbing, her tales retain a distinct warmth in the way they persistently embrace the humanity of their protagonists. However horrendous their actions or the things they inadvertently bring to pass, Rickert never loses sight of this. She sympathises with the strange outcasts that populate her stories. She makes us feel empathy for their grief, sorrow for their suffering, sadness at their descents into evil or self-destruction. This is the rare quality that sets her work her apart, the startling richness and poignancy that keep us returning to her stories, and seeking out more of them.
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.
