1/18/2024 0 Comments Beasts of prey cannibalsThe timing - late ’70s - and the place would’ve been about right. In “Strange Merchants,” I recount how my father once bought a leather trench coat, at a Bolivian airport, from an older German immigrant who may have been a Nazi in hiding. In that same paragraph, I recall my mom’s other storytelling obsessions: Trotsky, the exiled Marxist who died by an assassin’s ice axe Travis, the pet chimpanzee who gnawed off a woman’s face and Rosie, the 10-year-old girl from our northern Virginia suburb who was kidnapped, smothered, and dumped beneath a pine tree.Īfter “The Guineveres,” my essay “Strange Merchants” proceeds through Barnhill’s interrupted tale. “Don’t ever get into a stranger’s car,” she warned my younger sister and me. Throughout my childhood she’d recite the serial killer’s murderous steps like a mantra - the arm sling, the dropped stack of books, the women Bundy shoved into his white Volkswagen Beetle. My mother’s always marveled at Ted Bundy’s charisma, his trick with the fake injuries, his voluminous hairdo. On the next page, my essay “The Guineveres” starts: They billowed and swelled and spiraled in the air. Xan could see the tendrils of magic fluttering behind her like ribbons. She flitted toward the ground, leaping from leaf to leaf, guiding the other children safely behind her. “Come down this instant, young lady,” the Witch hollered. “The Guineveres” explores my mother’s penchant for telling macabre tales at the dinner table, while “Strange Merchants” riffs on the theme of “the stranger.” In the mutant novel - the Frankenbook - Kelly Barnhill’s work stops after the following paragraphs: My essays - “The Guineveres” and “Strange Merchants” - consume pages 55–87 of Jodi’s daughter’s book. At the end of the novel, Luna emerges from her stasis to save the people of the neighboring village, the Protectorate, from a fascist council of elders and an evil nemesis-witch. Xan needs more time to teach Luna how to wield her lunar gifts. “All that power - the great surging ocean of it - was leaking out.” The well-meaning Xan casts a spell to stunt Luna’s magic, temporarily cocooning the girl, like a moth or Sleeping Beauty, so the young witch won’t set the forest on fire or turn her loved ones into rabbits. “It was starting early,” Barnhill writes of the girl’s intensifying magic. The Girl Who Drank the Moon - aimed at children 10 to 14 - is advertised as “an epic coming-of-age fairy tale.” Throughout Barnhill’s nearly 400-page book, Luna’s adolescence looms as an allegorized threat that recalls many familiar tropes about “uncontrollable” women: moons and madness, lunacy and menstruation. The child then developed supernatural powers that grew increasingly turbulent as Luna approached her teens. In trying to revive the baby, Xan mistakenly gave Luna a drink of potent moonlight instead of mellow starlight. Xan had rescued baby Luna from a barbaric ritual in which a group of village elders had left the infant in the forest to die. Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon features a spunky little witch-girl named Luna who lives in the woods with her adopted family: Fyrian, an ecstatic, Chihuahua-sized dragon Glerk, a serene, poetry-quoting swamp monster and Xan, a loving yet grumbly old witch. At some point during the binding process, my book’s third signature - a unit of bound pages - replaced the third signature of the children’s novel. Two essays from my nonfiction collection appear as chapters in Jodi’s daughter’s edition of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, by fantasy author Kelly Barnhill. My writing, I learned, had inadvertently cannibalized a New York Times best-selling children’s novel. The situation involved a literary switcheroo: a bizarre accident at a book bindery. Jodi told me that I’d stolen her young daughter’s innocence, that I needed to do something to stop other children from losing their innocence, too. Several months ago, I received an email from a stranger named Jodi, who wrote to notify me of my act of accidental cannibalism. I’ve been thinking about books eating books. I’ve been thinking a lot about cannibals lately. To receive the Quarterly Journal, become a member or purchase at our bookstore. This piece appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: The Occult, No.
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