Errantry: Strange Stories

by Elizabeth Hand

No one is innocent, no one unexamined in award-winner Elizabeth Hand's new collection. From the summer isles to the mysterious people next door all the way to the odd guy one cubicle over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true.

“Ten evocative novellas and stories whisper of hidden mysteries carved on the bruised consciousness of victims and victimizers. Memories and love are as dangerous as the supernatural, and Hand often denies readers neat conclusions, preferring disturbing ambiguity. The Hugo-nominated “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” marries science fiction and magical realism as three men recreate a legendary aircraft’s doomed flight for a dying woman. A grieving widower in “Near Zennor” unearths a secret of spectral kidnapping in an ancient countryside. “Hungerford Bridge,” a lesser piece, shares a secret that can only be enjoyed twice in one’s life. Celtic myth and human frailty entangle in the darkly romantic “The Far Shore.” The vicious nature of romantic love is dissected with expressionistic abandon in the dreamlike “Summerteeth.” Hand’s outsiders haunt themselves, the forces of darkness answering to the calls of their battered souls. Yet strange hope clings to these surreal elegies, insisting on the power of human emotion even in the shadow of despair. Elegant nightmares, sensuously told.”
—Publishers Weekly


Table of Contents

The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Near Zennor (a Shirley Jackson Award winner)
Hungerford Bridge
The Far Shore
Winter’s Wife
Cruel Up North
Summerteeth
The Return of the Fire Witch
Uncle Lou
Errantry


Elizabeth Hand's novels include Shirley Jackson Award–winner Generation Loss, Mortal Love, and Available Dark.

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Magical Realism, Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction

286 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2012

About the author

A New York Times notable and multiple award– winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written seven novels, including the cult classic Waking the Moon, and short-story collections. She is a longtime contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She and her two children divide their time between the coast of Maine and North London.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started the first story, 'The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon', I thought I knew what I was getting. The protagonist, Robbie, begins by reminiscing about his first job, as a security guard at a museum of aviation, and remembering a particular gallery in which a projection of a disembodied head was the main attraction. But the narrative quickly moves away from the obvious creepy angle here and instead weaves a detailed and character-driven tale around Robbie and two of his ex-colleagues; it's certainly uncanny, but evasive about exactly how. The characters – like most of the characters in most of the stories collected here – are middle-aged, not inclined to fantastical speculation, and many of the most effective moments are touching rather than unnerving. 'The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon' is unusually lengthy for the first story in an anthology, almost a novella in itself, and it sets the tone for a collection in which the 'strange' is often not what you expect it to be, and the longest stories are the most rewarding and surprising.

'Winter's Wife' is told by a boy whose neighbour, the eccentric Winter, suddenly brings home an inscrutable young Icelandic woman as his wife. Winter meets her on the internet, and our narrator thinks she looks like Björk – it's these humanising touches that make Hand's stories so effective; we identify ourselves in the backdrops, if not the mysterious cloud of hummingbirds in the forest, or the character with an apparent ability to bend nature to her will. 'Uncle Lou' spends so much time establishing the relationship between the main characters, a woman and her flamboyant uncle, that the ending has powerful emotional clout, despite taking a real turn for the fantastic. The brief 'Cruel Up North' is memorable chiefly because it doesn't explain its mysteries – what, for example, might the 'lava fields' be?

There are missteps – or, at least, some stories are weaker than others. 'Hungerford Bridge' – a short scene in which an old friend introduces the narrator to a fantastic creature – feels too thin against the richness of many of the other tales; 'The Far Shore' contains some beautiful moments but goes in a predictable direction, the opposite of the clever feints performed by the strongest stories here; and 'The Return of the Fire Witch' is an oddity, the one slice of high fantasy among a set of what might otherwise, per the subtitle, be termed 'strange stories' in the Robert Aickman sense.

But the jewel in Errantry's crown is 'Near Zennor', a flawless work of art that has to be one of the best short stories (strange or otherwise) I've ever read. It starts with a discovery: Jeffrey, a 'noted architect', is organising clutter belonging to his late wife, Anthea, when he finds a tin containing a bundle of letters and a cheap locket. The letters are in Anthea's hand, all returned to sender; when he investigates the recipient, Robert Bennington, he discovers the man was a children's author later vilified as a paedophile. Disturbed by references to a meeting between Anthea and Robert, and tortured by the idea that she could have been a victim of abuse she never told him about, he journeys to her native England to meet with one of her childhood friends. There, he hears a story that will lead him on a journey through the places of Anthea's past; to Padwithiel farm, near Zennor, and to Bennington's abandoned home.

Everything about 'Near Zennor' is absolutely pitch-perfect. The Cornish landscape is lovingly described; there is a true sense of reverence, and an awareness of the power – and menace – of nature runs throughout the whole story. The revelations about Bennington's crimes and reminders of his pariah status mean there's also an underlying current of real horror that has nothing to do with unexplained phenomena. Hand captures the force of a disquieting experience endured in childhood, how the memory can magnify it, give it the status of a legend. Jeffrey's ordeal at Golovenna Farm induces pure terror without resorting to anything as prosaic as an explanation. And there is a final twist that is shocking, and almost grimly funny, but not histrionic. All in all, it achieves the strange, wonderful duality of feeling perfect and complete but also leaving you wanting more, and more, and more, and it feels so real that I was tempted to google Bennington's Sun Battles books and the Cliff Cottage B&B. (This short interview with Hand gives some fascinating context – not just the fact that she deliberately set out to write an Aickmanesque story (an aim at which, in my opinion, she has absolutely succeeded) but that the three girls' peculiar adventure was, in fact, based on an inexplicable childhood memory of her own.)

'Near Zennor' is the second story in the book, and after finishing it, I had to take a break – to absorb its greatness, and because I was so sure nothing else could even begin to live up to it, I wasn't sure I wanted to read on. It's one of those stories that's so good, it's worth buying the whole book for it alone. Errantry is a strong, unpredictable collection of stories, but 'Near Zennor' is a masterpiece.

[Althea Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, so good.
Short stories are truly where Hand excels, and this book includes some of her best work (though, no previously-unpublished stories).
She has a knack of leaving just enough of her strange and weird occurrences unexplained to make her tales eerily almost believable.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Errantry shares a subtitle with another collection of stories by Elizabeth Hand, Saffron and Brimstone; they are both labeled "strange stories." One remarkable thing about the ten strange stories in this book is that they differ so much from one another, in length and theme and style. Most of them are clearly fantasies. I think that "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" is basically science fiction. All but "The Return of the Fire Witch" are set, at least in part, in a world which appears to be the one in which we live.

"The Return of the Fire Witch" first appeared in the anthology Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honour of Jack Vance. The noted science fiction, fantasy, and mystery author Jack Vance had written a very influential book that was published in 1950, The Dying Earth, tales of a time so far in the future that science and magic are indistinguishable. Vance wrote a number of later stories set in that same world and others also wrote stories set in very similar milieus. Hand's story was an entry in the tribute anthology.

The world of The Dying Earth is steeped in violence, treachery, and death, and "The Return of the Fire Witch" is no exception. Saloona Morn is a kind of mycologist, who uses fungi for enchantments. Her not-too-close neighbor, the Fire Witch Paytim Noringal, is invited to a ball scheduled to follow the coronation of a new monarch. Noringal wants Saloona to go with her to assist with her plans for the ball. Saloona states that she "has taken a vow not to cause death by intent"; threats to her own life might change her mind.

This is a fine Vance-ian tale, liberally sprinkled with uncommon words and grim humor. An example of that is the following conversation, in which the first speaker is Noringal, explaining the heart of her plan:

"My intent is to destroy the entire lineage of [the new monarch], so that I will never again be subjected to their abhorrent notions of festivity."

"It seems excessive," suggested Saloona.

"You have never eaten with them."

In the very brief "Cruel Up North," a woman leaves a man sleeping in a hotel room and wanders through a mostly-deserted city, one ringed by "frozen lava fields." She comes across a dead bird-like creature. That's the entire story. The three pages convey an atmosphere of dread.

"Summerteeth" is another quite short tale, originally published under the appropriate title "Vignette." Like many of Hand's stories (and, I believe, much of her own life), it is set on a small island. A story of moths and owls and people and love. I don't really understand it or like it much.

In "Hungerford Bridge," a strange and wonderful secret is passed between two men in London. It concerns an amazing item of natural science - or, more precisely, natural magic. The implication, I believe, is that the second man, the narrator of the story, will indeed keep the secret. (But then, to whom is he telling the story? Himself? Or the next keeper of the flame?) Another brief tale, but I do like this one.

Perhaps the most traditional fantasy theme in the book is that of the story "Uncle Lou." Lou is an aging Londoner, a former travel writer, who has always been close to his niece Nina. On an occasion when Nina is visiting him, Lou asks her to accompany him to the zoo. A strange thing takes place, one that is more often featured in much less benevolent fantasies. This is not a great story, but it is sweet.

"Winter's Wife" is a story that I have read before and liked very much. Now I think that it is a good, sometimes amusing tale, but one about which I have moral qualms. Roderick Winter, a man in Maine always known by his last name alone, has befriended a single mother and her young son, who narrates the story. Winter meets a woman from Iceland on the internet and brings her back to Maine as his bride. She is very nice, but seems to have some unusual powers.

A very wealthy man in the story does a definitely bad thing; he has a majestic ancient pine tree on his property cut down, even though it is legally protected. The tree is one of three, and there is little doubt that the land owner will cut the others down as well. The issue to me is what action is justified to punish him and to stop him from further destruction. I think that what occurs is more morally questionable than Hand acknowledges.

Nonetheless, this is generally a fine story, with characters with whom the reader is likely to enjoy spending time. The pleasures and problems of rural life in Maine are well portrayed. The story was chosen for three different "Best of the Year" anthologies.

"Errantry" is the title story of this collection. The word "errantry" refers to wandering, especially roving in search of chivalrous adventure. This is an unusual but perfectly appropriate title for the story. Three fortyish friends, two men and a woman, are invited - in a way - to the home of the mysterious Folding Man, a person that they had never previously met, who frequently left peculiar little folded figures in the Old Court bar. Now one of the men, Tommy, has actually met the man in that bar and been given a map to his home. The story is narrated by the female member of the group, Vivian, a former assistant professor of Arthurian studies. The third person is Angus, Vivian's half-brother. Tommy, Vivian says, was "the one who always believed in things." Tommy says, "We're on a quest," and they go in search of the Folding Man.

They find the house. It is so filled "with junk that walking was nearly impossible." Angus finds a children's book that appears to be exactly the same as an important one from his past, with even the same page missing as in the copy he once had. Vivian finds a print of Uccello's painting, "The Hunt in the Forest," which has always represented the times of King Arthur to her. Tommy finds something yet more marvelous and magical. This is a fine story that, like all of these, rewards rereading.

When Philip in the story "The Far Shore" was a twenty-eight year old dancer in the corps of the New York City Ballet, he shattered a bone in his foot and could no longer dance professionally. For decades afterwards, he was a teacher with the company; then he was replaced by someone younger. Now it is not just a bone that is shattered but his entire life.

He calls an old friend, who offers him the use of a rural camp, Camp Tuonela, so that he might be alone "to clear [his] head." The camp was on land once occupied by Abenaki Native Americans; then a Finnish community had lived there. Philip had been "surprised to learn that the name Tuonela was Finnish, not Abenaki in origin." There are no other people there. Philip accepts.

Philip gets in the habit of walking in the woods, observing the many birds there. One day he comes across a teenage boy, naked, bruised and wounded, lying in the woods. He helps the boy get to the lodge in which Philip is staying and wants to help him further but the boy runs away. He returns and asks for Philip's help. Philip must trust the boy, to whom he is attracted. He goes through the snowy woods with him. His trust is rewarded.

Looking up "Tuonela" gives away some of the ending of the story. Tuonela in Finnish mythology is the land of the dead. Dead spirits take the shape of birds. I did not find that out until after I read the story, but I don't feel that the knowledge would affect the force and beauty of the ending

Three middle-aged men had once worked together briefly when they were younger at the Museum of American Aviation and Aerospace at the Smithsonian. In "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon," they now find out that Maggie Blevins, a woman who had been a supervisor at the museum (and the much-older lover of one of them), is dying of cancer. She had been fascinated by proto-flight, flight before the Wright Brothers, and had written a book, Wings for Humanity!, with the central premise "that millenia ago a benevolent race seeded the Earth, leaving isolated locations with the ability to engender human-powered flight." Blevins had long since been fired from the museum for reasons that are never made clear.

The museum had once owned a very short piece of film showing a flying machine, the Bellerophon, in its sole flight on an island in South Carolina in 1901, when both the machine and its pilot, Ernesto McCauley, had vanished, presumed lost in the ocean. The film had been destroyed in a fire. The man who had been Blevins' lover wants to recreate that film, using models, for Blevins before she dies. He enlists the help of the other men, as well as the son of one of them and a friend of the son's.

Strange things happen while making the film. This is a moving and surprisingly convincing tale. It won a World Fantasy Awards and was nominated for a Theodore Sturgeon and a Hugo Award.

"Zennor" sounds like the name of a fictional place to me. It is, however, in Cornwall in the southwest of England. "Near Zennor" is the most mysterious of the longer stories in this collection. The central character, Jeffrey, is an American whose originally English wife has just died suddenly. He finds five letters postmarked 1971 from his wife to a man whose name he does not recognize, all of which had been stamped "RETURN TO SENDER" and sent back unopened. His wife would have been only thirteen at that time. The letters begin with one telling the man to whom it was addressed how much she had loved the books he wrote. The other letters tell how she and two of her friends visited the author; she requests him to write back. The fourth letter mentions that Moira, one of the girls she had been with, had disappeared. Jeffrey looks up the author and finds that he had been a writer of popular children's books who in the 1990s had been accused, but not convicted, on charges of pedophilia and sexual assault. The author is evidently still living.

Jeffrey knows the woman who had been one of the two girls with whom his wife had visited the author, the one who had not vanished. He contacts her and goes to England to visit the woman and her husband. He tells her about the letters. She assures Jeffrey that the author had made no attempt to molest any of the girls. She says that the girl who disappeared never returned. And she tells Jeffrey a strange tale about the night before the girls had met the author, when the three of them had gone to a field near the author's home to carry out a ritual they made up. Three strange lights started coming toward them slowly from across the field. The lights had appeared to be eight or ten feet in the air, and did not seem to be flashlights or flames. The girls had fled. She shows Jeffrey a picture of the three young girls; he is struck by the unusual beauty of the one who vanished.

Jeffrey goes to Cornwall, booking a room in a farmhouse near the place where the girls visited the author. At the railroad station he sees a teenage boy and a woman who appears to be in her early thirties. The man who has come to bring Jeffrey a rented vehicle calls the woman "Erthy," explaining that she used to sleep outside near the St. Erth train station. Jeffrey will see the boy and the somewhat crazed woman again. Jeffrey locates the farmhouse and meets the friendly brother and sister who run it.

In the following days, Jeffrey wanders through the neighboring lands. He had been told by his wife's friend that the author had told them of a fogou on his property. (Wikipedia explains: "A fogou or fougou is an underground, dry-stone structure found on Iron Age or Romano-British-defended settlement sites in Cornwall. The original purpose of a fogou is uncertain today.") Jeffrey finds the author's farm and enters the fogou; things become very strange and frightening, but Jeffrey is able to leave and return to the farmhouse.

The farmer loans Jeffrey a collection of stories by the author whose land he had just visited. One of the stories tells of a very pretty young girl in Zennor who had agreed to live with a man and his son and take care of them. Eventually, she disobeys instructions from the man and is told that she must leave. She is to forget all that has happened. "When she returned home she found her parents dead and gone along with everyone she knew, and her cottage a ruin open to the sky." Time often moves at a different rate in stories set in lands of enchantment.

Jeffrey leaves to go home, encountering the thrtyish woman once again.

This tale combines the mundane and the mysterious. Some of the questions are resolved; others are not. I find the story truly fascinating. It won a Shirley Jackson Award and was nominated for a British Fantasy Award and a World Fantasy Award.

The book as a whole was nominated for a Stoker Award and a Shirley Jackson Award for the best collection in its field.

Elizabeth Hand is quite properly known for the elegance of her prose. I think that almost all of these tales are very fine indeed. There are many passages that I have considered quoting but I will just quote one, the opening paragraph of "The Far Shore," introducing Philip, the former ballet dancer:

In dreams he fell: from planes, trees, roofs, cliffs, bridges. Whatever awaited him below, the impact was the same. His right leg buckled and a bolt of pain flared from ankle to knee, so that even after decades he woke with his old injury throbbing, bathed in sweat and hands outstretched to restore his balance. The pain subsided as the hours passed. Still, he no longer stood in the studio while his students practiced their moves, épaulement croisé, balloté, rise, ciseaux, but sat in a plain, straight-backed wooden chair, marking time with an elegant silver-topped cane.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before this I'd read only one story by Hand, "The Boy in the Tree" in the Vandermeer's "The Weird" anthology. I remember it being a brilliant, incredibly original, and at times perplexing read. These stories are also subtle, often ambiguous and leave one with many questions.

There's some great stories in this collection, notably the first two and the last one, with some good and OK ones between. A part of me feels this book deserves a better rating, but it's just not to my personal taste as weird/strange fiction goes. I like a bit more menace, a bit more horror, even though I read very little "straight" horror fiction.

"Near Zennor" and "Errantry" hit just the right notes for me. "The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon" and "Winter's Wife" came close -- both are good reads and the former is full of memorable moments and is very affecting. Stories like "The Far Shore" and "The Return of the Fire Witch" ventured more into fantasy territory, I liked the setting and mood of the former, but the latter was a chore to get through.

The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon - This was an excellent story, really a novella. It certainly has strange elements that linger in the mind, but they're pretty subtle and milder than one might expect from most weird fiction today (if that's even what Hand is going for.) In that way it reminded me of the emotional stories of Helen Marshall a bit. It's great at building atmosphere and tension toward some high moments of emotional catharsis. A group of friends plan to re-shoot the original, lost footage of an early prototype aircraft crash for a dying friend.

Near Zennor - This is so good, probably the best in the book and something I think would be worth re-reading. For comparison's sake I would say it's a mixture of Aickman's strangeness and ambiguity and Machen's setting and dark folklore. It's emotionally affecting and also has some truly creepy moments. After the death of his wife a man discovers something she had packed away that lead him back to where she was raised, to uncover something strange from the past.

Hungerford Bridge - One of the shorter stories in the book and one of the simpler ones. Maybe because the story is partly about two gay guys and loneliness I found it quite affecting. A man reunites with an old friend who is going away, but first he shares a secret with him.

The Far Shore - I liked this one, primarily for the setting and mood of it and there's no denying it's very affecting but in comparison with the best here I'd put it in a second tier. It reminded me a bit of Blackwood's nature-based horror, even though horrific elements are mostly kept at the edges. A dance instructor, recently put out of a job takes up an offer from a friend to stay at an isolated camp for the winter.

Winter’s Wife - Another good story, not in my top two or three, but very good. It's got an Machen-esque feel with a focus on nature and folklore, but without as much menace. An eccentric but kindly man who lives in the Maine backwoods brings home a wife from Iceland who is hardly what she seems.

Cruel Up North - More of a vignette, a very brief, weird little story about a woman taking a walk in a foreign town.

Summerteeth - This the most dream-like story in the collection. It's short and reading it a second time through I think it's better but it could have benefited from a bit more clarity without ruining the effect. Two old lovers meet up on an island while the apocalypse goes on elsewhere.

The Return of the Fire Witch - A dark fantasy story, rich in detail and description. Probably my least favorite, but it has some memorable flashes. One witch is forced into the plan of another to use a very dangerous spell to destroy the king.

Uncle Lou - Certainly a strange story, but one of the more conventional ones by comparison. What I thought was most effective was it's tender, melancholy mood. A girl visits her aging uncle who has spent his life writing about the nightlife in various countries and accompanies him to an event at a zoo.

Errantry - This is a great story, beginning to end. It's got such a great concept and fleshed out, quirky characters, living in an ever-gentrified, mono-cultured world. The end has just enough vagueness to make it even more memorable. A group of friends try to find where a man lives who makes very odd little origami-like figures.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fixed typos. Ugh...where were my eyes?

This is a collection of (mostly) surreal short stories that I would suggest most closely resemble fairy tales. However, they're not the bowdlerized versions read to children. The older, less "safe" versions inspire Hand; the ones where Cinderella's step-sisters are cutting off their toes and ankles to cram their feet into the glass slipper and the wolf eats little girls wearing red hoods.

Except for "The Return of the Fire Witch," which is an homage to Jack Vance's Dying Earth, which Hand pulls off very nicely. And while it's not the most comfortable fit with the other stories in the collection, I can argue for its inclusion. Vance's fantasy worlds, particularly the Dying Earth and Lyonesse, owe a great deal to the idea of Faerie, and the dangers for mortals whose lives intersect with it.

And it's that theme that ties all these stories together - Even at its most benign (e.g., "Uncle Lou" or "Winter's Wife"), Faerie is dangerous and mortals who deal with it will pay a price.

My favorites are "Near Zennor," a tale about a widower who investigates an encounter with Faerie his wife had when she was a young girl in Wales, and "Winter's Wife," a tale about the titular wife, an enigmatic woman from Iceland who profoundly changes the life of a young boy.

A couple of stories are a bit too surreal for me (e.g., "Cruel Up North" and "Summerteeth") but overall I enjoyed the collection and would recommend it.

[Stefan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a lovely scene in “Errantry,” the title story of Elizabeth Hand’s newest collection of short fiction, in which a character finds a print of a painting she loved as a child and describes what she used to imagine about the world it depicts: “A sense of immanence and urgency, of simple things [...] charged with an expectant, slightly sinister meaning I couldn’t grasp but still felt, even as a kid.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that the same painting graces the cover of the book, because that quote is a perfect way to encapsulate the atmosphere of many of the “Strange Stories” in Errantry. The magic in Elizabeth Hand’s short fiction can usually be found at its edges, just slightly out of reach. It’s there for a moment, but it’s hard to see without squinting. If you blink, it might be gone—but you’d never lose the sense that it’s still there, pushing in on reality from the outside.

Read the entire review on my site Far Beyond Reality!

[Liz Argall · Rating 5 out of 5]

These short stories minutely examine the strangeness of the real and then turns over rocks to reveal scorpions with butterfly wings and tickets to a show you've visited in dreams.

[Sienna · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a woman in one of these stories who puzzles the teenage boy describing her to us, at once girlishly playful, pale and fragile, and ageless, carrying wisdom and the weight of the world in her unfathomable eyes. She guides our narrator into the forest without telling him why.

"Whoa," I whispered.

In the middle of the clearing was a bush. A big bush, a quince, its long thin branches covered with green leaves and small red flowers — brilliant red, the color of Valentines, and so bright after the woods that I had to blink.

And then, after blinking, I thought something had gone wrong with my eyes, because the bush seemed to be moving. Not moving in the wind — there wasn't any wind — but moving like it was breaking apart then coming back together again, the leaves lifting away from the branches and flickering into the air, going from dark green to shining green like metallic paint, and here and there a flash of red like a flower had spun off, too.

But what was even more bizarre was that the bush made a noise. It was buzzing, not like bees but like a chain saw or weed whacker, a high-pitched sound that got louder, then softer, then louder again.

[...]

"Do you see what they are?"

Elizabeth Hand is a fantasy writer, but not in the way you might think. What makes her stories so strange — certainly my most-used word to describe the works that have inspired and enchanted me for the last fifteen years — is not the escape they offer. Instead, Hand tells the truth slant and makes us see our own world anew: the otherworldly in the ordinary. The scene above from "Winter's Wife" is characteristic: no magic is required to decipher what Vala shows Justin, and yet that humming, thrumming, dizzying bush is undeniably bewitching. Even when she presents us with the inexplicable, it comes with strings attached. Hand's magic, appropriately, must abide by rules, just as we must make sense of them and the little we know.

Life did not work like this, love did not work like this. Philip knew that. Only stories did, where wonder trumped despair and desire overcame death. The fairy's kiss, the sacrificial faun; enchanted swans and shoes that sliced like blades, like ice. That was why he had become a dancer, not just to dream of fellowship and flight, but to partake, however fleetingly, in something close to ecstasy...

I loved this collection. Errantry compiles ten previously published stories ranging in length from the Hugo-nominated novella "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" (it should've won!) to "Cruel Up North," the weakest of the bunch in part because it cruelly drifts away after only a few pages. I had read "Bellerophon" and another piece, "Hungerford Bridge," once before, and both exceeded my memories of them. "Near Zennor" captures the same deep, haunted disquiet as forerunners like William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland." Fans of Hand's earlier works will be delighted to learn that the village of Kamensic — wabi-sabi incarnate in upstate New York — makes an appearance in the title story, which features some crossover characters with "Summerteeth." "Uncle Lou" matter-of-factly surprises and bemuses, while "The Return of the Fire Witch," the purest fantasy of the bunch, had me reaching cheerfully for a dictionary time and again in search of gorgeous archaicisms. My absolute favorite, though, was "The Far Shore," about which I can only say: Read it, and the one before, and the one after, and the one after that, and soon enough you'll have finished the book and found yourself wanting more. Thankfully, Hand has a generous back catalog to explore.

[Rory · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first exposure to Elizabeth Hand's work was her first novel, Winterlong. That book was like a wonderful delirium; I reread it when I want a total vacation from reality, to be a spectator of mystical wonders I know I'm never going to wrap my head around and I don't care. There's some of that in this latest book, Errantry, but there's so much more as well. This is a collection of short stories that runs the gamut from stark reality (that still manages to show you the fantasy that lives in what we think is the everyday world) to myth (that is never quite what you thought it was) to fever dreams that lead you off down a path of plausible oddity until you suddenly come to yourself and realize that you have no idea where you are. A wonderful book, and one I'm going to keep pulling down from the shelf, probably for as many years as I've been doing the same for Winterlong.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ten stories in Errantry range in length from sixty pages to three pages, with most falling somewhere in the middle, and, as the subtitle puts it, they're all "strange." Often, the strangeness is something unexplained or not fully resolved: a man goes to Cornwall in part to repeat a trip his now-dead wife took when she was a teenager, goes inside a fogou (an underground stone structure), and has an odd experience that parallels one recounted to him by one of his wife's friends who was on the Cornwall trip with her. Or a fantastical creature is living in a park in London. Or a woman explores a strange city and finds a dead bird that isn't quite a bird. Sometimes the strangeness is more explicit: there's a werewolf story, and a story that plays with Finnish myth/the Finnish land of the dead.

That story with the Finnish land of the dead, "The Far Shore," is totally my favorite: a middle-aged former dancer whose career was cut short due to injury, and who's just lost his teaching job, arranges to stay in the off-season at a camp in Maine owned by his oldest friend. Part of the appeal is the setting and mood, the descriptions of the winter landscape, an early storm and the wind and darkness, in passages like this:

No lights shone beyond the windows of his room. The reflection from the bedside lamp seemed insubstantial as a candle flame; the darkness outside a solid mass, huge and inescapable, that pressed against the panes. His room sat beneath the eaves, where the wind didn't roar but crooned, a sound like mourning doves. (141)

But "The Far Shore" also appeals because it's got elements of a love story and of myth and of fairy tale: it's about the strangeness at the edges of our world, but it's also about transformation: the appeal of a crossing-over that doesn't come with a crossing-back. I love this:

Life did not work like this, love did not work like this. Philip knew that. Only stories did, where wonder trumped despair and desire overcame death. The fairy's kiss, the sacrificial faun; enchanted swans and shoes that sliced like blades, like ice. That was why he had become a dancer, not just to dream of fellowship and flight, but to partake, however fleetingly, in something close to ecstasy—and how long since he had experienced that? (150)

In other stories, I was less interested in the characters or plot or even the strangeness, sometimes, but did appreciate Hand's lush descriptions: one story includes a trip to the Carolinas and describes getting out of the car at a rest stop after driving south, the transformation of the landscape into a place of honeysuckle and kudzu and the sound of frogs and insects, a world away from the story's start in DC; another has some vivid descriptions of central London in the snow; the story about Cornwall has this gorgeous bit about the view from the train window on the trip from Plymouth to Penzance:

He'd bought a novel in London at Waterstones, but instead of reading gazed out at a landscape that was a dream of books he'd read as a child—granite farmhouses, woolly-coated ponies in stone paddocks, fields improbably green against lowering grey sky, graphite clouds broken by blades of golden sun, a rainbow that pierced a thunderhead then faded as though erased by some unseen hand. Ringnecked pheasants, a running fox. More fields planted with something that shone a starting goldfinch-yellow. A silvery coastline hemmed by arches of russet stone. Children wrestling in the middle of an empty road. A woman walking with head bowed against the wind, hands extended before her like a diviner. (82)

I'm pleased to have read this, though I wish it had been proofread/copy-edited better: typos that made me wince included "soundlesss" for "soundless," "ever" for "every," "majety" for "majesty," "wanings" for "warnings," and more that I didn't bother to note down.

[Beth Cato · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.

"Strange Stories" is an apt subtitle for this collection of ten tales, ranging from the novella-length Hugo-nominated, "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" to the flash-length "Cruel Up North." Hand has a knack for creating vivid, flawed characters--very normal people--who encounter something extraordinary on the fringe of society. Often these encounters are rather disturbing. "Near Zennor" struck me as the creepiest, evoking the isolated moorlands of Cornwall and beings that drift from the beyond.

That said, I'm not into creepy. I appreciated Hand's realistic characters, but overall the anthology was a disappointment for me. Maybe my expectations were too high, as I've heard wonderful things about Elizabeth Hand for years and this was my first time reading her work. There was a pattern to how many of the stories ended: this strange thing happened, and that was that, and I was frustrated by the lack of explanation or finality in some cases. "The Return of the Fire Witch" didn't feel like it belonged in the collection at all; it fit the theme of strangeness, but was a pure fantasy work, not set on Earth like the rest.

I'm glad I read this, just to have read Hand's work, but I think my disappointment came down to personal taste. I would be hesitant to read more of her work in the future.

[Ctgt · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10

Stories that walk the line between real and unreal....

[Jon Frankel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth’s Hand’s Errantry is a collection of ‘strange stories’ (the subtitle of the volume). I have read, and loved, two of her Cass Neary novels, Generation Loss and Available Dark, but Errantry is even more accomplished and shows her extraordinary range as a writer. These are indeed strange tales as each of them has an element of either the supernatural or some inexplicable paradox. They are written in the 3rd, 1st and 2nd person, are funny, elegiac, frightening and Twilight Zoney. The stories are set in the US and in London. Many of her characters, like Cass Neary, are unrepentant but melancholy middle aged fuck ups, still drinking and getting high and acting like they are in their twenties, but with the baggage of divorces, death, child custody or simply failed lives. Hand has a particular empathy for characters like this. But she flexes well beyond them here, including a successful American business man visiting an old college friend in London who shows him a singular and astonishing site that he will never forget. There is the broken down dancer in the The Far Shore, a gorgeous story of cosmic transcendence and metamorphoses. The Return of the Fire Witch is outright fantasy, hilarious, surreal and freewheeling. It is amazing how she creates an entire fantasy world so quickly, packing a 700 page novel into 35 pages. Hand’s prose is visually precise. Her artist’s eye is so astute and her world so utterly absorbing it is easy to miss the grace of her narration.

[Ronald Barba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this is my first sampling of Elizabeth Hand's writing, you might consider me a future novitiate considering my having enjoyed most of the short fiction in this collection.

I had no expectations going into reading 'Errantry'. To be honest, I found it at the library, scanned it via the Goodreads app, and ultimately decided to go for it based on some of the reviews I read.

Most of the stories in this collection focus on completely mundane people (and thereby giving each tale some verisimilitude) whose lives are interrupted by some remarkable change in their accustomed existence (the reintroduction of an old friend, the death of a spouse, etc.). From there, Hand formulates faintly uncanny narratives (e.g. encounters with ghostly lights, the odd behaviors of migrating waterfowl) that often end with no real resolution or ending. Of course, this lacking of this sort of catharsis adds to the unease from reading each story, making it all the more enjoyable to read.

"Near Zennor" is probably my favorite story, with its unsettling supernatural elements. I also quite enjoyed the writing in "Winter's Wife." "The Return of the Fire Witch" was not to my liking--it felt like a combination of 'The Scarlet Letter' and a true fantasy book: the use of made-up words to describe niche lore and an overuse of SAT vocabulary.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

No surprise that I loved this. Elizabeth Hand is probably the most intoxicating wordsmith in modern fantasy. She does not bundle everything up in neat and tidy packages, but rather creates ghosts that dwell at the borders of your consciousness - almost visible if you turn your head the right way. But their existence is redoubtable and they are all the more haunting and magical for their invisibility.

Stories like "Near Zennor" and "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" filled me with dread and wonder while fuelling my desire to believe.

In "Hungerford Bridge", the author teases us with a brief glimpse through the curtain, and in tales like "The Return of the Fire Witch", we actually get to step on through to the other side.

With Elizabeth Hand the mystery is the magic. She puts words to the unspeakable and gives us the tools to imagine the unimaginable.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth Hand is an amazing writer. These stories are fantasy, but so finely drawn, and so deeply connected to the world, that the odd things that happen seem almost a natural outgrowth of the circumstances. Tales of love and loss, belonging and isolation, they evoke something deep and true. In my opinion, Hand is one of the great writers of this generation, within or outside genre.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Near Zennor," which I read in another collection, is my hands-down favorite in this one, but I also loved "Summerteeth" and the unabashedly silly "The Return of the Fire Witch."

Still feeling haunted by the title story. I just wish it had kept going. It's unusual for a Hand story to feel too short, but this one does.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Usual short story collection issues - a couple of standouts (Near Zennor, Summerteeth, the one with the weird, rarely seen creature on the bank of the Thames) and a couple of duds (The fire witch one, and the one where the injured ballet dancer winters in a Maine cabin). But enjoyable overall.

[Kalin]

The only story I could really connect to was "Winter's Wife," with its teen protagonist's voice.

Also, I was surprised by the near-absence of female characters in the collection. (On the other hand, the male ones sounded quite believable.)

[Sam Worby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful weird stories, beautifully written, very uncanny.

[Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The quotes at the back of the book pretty much have it covered. If you're terrified of the little secrets nature may hold, these stories aren't going to help with that.

[Jaime · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es evidente que Elizabeth Hand es una estupenda escritora, quizá es el tema de sus relatos lo que no me atrajo.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

This year’s Readercon I picked up an uncorrected proof of Elizabeth Hand’s short story collection Errantry: Strange Stories, for free, and therefore not in violation of my policy not to buy any more short story collections until I read the ones I have. On the urging of a friend I then actually read in record time for my Readercon acquisitions.

The stories in this volume are mostly surreal little hidden-world type stories, tales of normal people in what is ostensibly our world stumbling upon something uncanny. The rural and exurban landscapes of New England feature prominently in many of them, making it a better choice than I had realized to read while squirreled away in a lakeside camp in the woods in Maine, but there are also ones that take place elsewhere, in cities or in Europe or, in exactly one instance, in a fantastical world intimated to be some kind of post-apocalyptic Earth.

Most of the viewpoint characters are aggressively ordinary-by-litfic-conventions everymen–middle-aged sad sacks with drinking problems, largely, although a few are approaching elderly, and one or two don’t have drinking problems–which I do have to admit works pretty well for the types of stories being told here. The first and longest story, the novella The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, sees a former museum security guard catching up with his old colleagues during a downswing in his life and finding himself and his teenage son part of an inexplicable project. Probably the best story in the whole thing is Near Zennor, about a American man’s uncanny trip to Cornwall to follow up on a small mystery from his dead wife’s early teens that he found in her stuff. Some of the stories fell a little flat, but those were mostly the very short ones. I got a real kick out of The Return of the Fire Witch, the only foray into not-hidden-world fantasy of the bunch, which was funny and full of a sort of whimsical Mervyn Peake-like tangle of archaic and off-kilter vocabulary.

Overall this was a good short story collection, and Elizabeth Hand has been added to my list of authors whose novels I should check out one of these days!

Originally posted at Stories that are indeed strange.

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absorbing collection of surreal tales in which anyone is liable to shape-shift or burst through a portal at any time. That makes it sound madcap, but the stories are carefully constructed, with strong and sometimes unsettling buildup to a moment of disruption, either internal or external. My two favorites were "Near Zennor", which is very effectively creepy without overdoing it, and "The Return of the Fire Witch", which entertained me greatly by returning to the weird world-building and verbiage of her novel Winterlong, which was my first introduction to Hand's writing back in the '90s. But I also appreciated her deep identification with the landscape of Maine, and the recurring message that a primeval green energy waits to burst forth again from the human-blighted earth.

[Cory · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had forgotten that Elizabeth Hand is such a glorious sentence-level writer! Like any collection, this is a mixed bag, but the good far outweighs the not-as-good here. Settling in to let Hand spin you a yarn is a truly unpredictable feeling, in the best way: Sometimes you'll get deeply felt literary fiction about furthering the dreams of the dying, sometimes you'll get well-wrought fantasy about feuding elemental witches, and sometimes you'll get chilling uncanny horror. Those yarns may be full novellas, they may be mere sketches, or they may be something in-between, but as the title promises, they will always be strange and they will (almost) always be worth your time.

[Lauren Huff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't love all the stories in this collection, but the ones I did were so good that I'm giving it five stars overall. The stories were unsettling, capturing the creeping dread and confusion of a weird dream that maybe isn't quite a nightmare, but stays with you through the day.

The standout was The Return of the Fire Witch. The references to King Crimson were an unexpected delight, and even without that the story is so immersive and intriguing and completely different from the rest of the stories. The story has enhanced my enjoyment and interpretation of one of my favorite songs in such an imaginative way.

[Adam Ready · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this collection of short stories. For the most part a running theme I found is the fantastical emerging from everyday beautiful surroundings. The natural world is ever present in these stories. Dark undercurrents flow within some of them, but so much is left implied or unsaid that it barely and rarely transcends into horror.

Favourite story: really hard to pick, but it might have to be Winter's Wife
Least favourite story: The Return of the Fire Witch. I'm sure many people would enjoy this story, but to me it's the odd one out, and is worse for it
Special mentions: Summerteeth, Errantry

[Kendra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved the stories I finished, especially the ones that begin in ordinary life and then spin off into threats and wildness. But the pandemic hit when I was midway through the book, and I couldn't concentrate on anything but the news. Now that I can read fiction again, I can't bear anything so menacing or ominous as this. I guess I'll have to try again when life becomes calmer - but I wonder if it'll ever be calm again.

[Nexusjio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasantly surprised by this short story collection. a lot more sublte in it's strangeness and leans into the erry moments that seem almost possible to happen. Outside of 1 story thats pure SFF all of these are pretty much quasi-literary fiction and really dig deep into human emotions. I really enjoyed "Winter's Wife" & "Near Zennor" & "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerphon" & "Hungerford bridge" the most

[Julio Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cuentos favoritos: "Near Zennor", “Hungerford Bridge”, “The Far Shore”, y "Winter’s Wife". Éste es un libro de cuentos fantásticos sobre personas rotas casi perfecto. El cuento “The Return of the Fire Witch”, si bien es bueno rompe con la estructura del libro y la sutileza con la que lo sobrenatural se introduce en los demás relatos.