Stepping from the Shadows

by Patricia A. McKillip

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a girl named Frances, an "army brat," who lived in a world of make believe where cactuses were a giant's green fingers, the hills were full of unicorns, and the great antlered Stagman hid in the churchyard shadows. And then Frances grew up. But the Stagman wouldn't go away...

Now her fantasies follow her from the classroom to the streets, from singles clubs to golden beaches; and everywhere he waits. The barbaric mangod more sensual, more dangerous than any mortal lover.

Silent as a dream, the Stagman is coming for her. Stepping from the shadows. And all he demands is her sanity.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Historical, Contemporary

207 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Patricia Anne McKillip was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. She wrote predominantly standalone fantasy novels and has been called "one of the most accomplished prose stylists in the fantasy genre". Her work won many awards, including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.

Reviews

[Kalin]

Two glimpses of beauty and loneliness, loneliness and beauty:

He took me to supper when his shift ended. By that time the unspoken word passed back and forth between us with every breath, every spoken word. I sat, in the Japanese restaurant two blocks from my apartment, with my head bowed over a bowl of udon, trying to scoop foot-long noodles into a spoon, trying to make conversation, trying to think, while my left hand wanted to slide itself over the swell of breast and nipple under his shirt, and my right hand wanted to curve itself behind his head, feel the clean dark hair and warm skin, bring his head down, capture a word leaving his mouth between my lips. The noodles kept slipping off my spoon. I couldn’t eat. “Frances,” he said softly. “Frances.” I couldn’t look at him. My own name shot like a lightning pulse in my blood. I wanted him to say my name against me everywhere. To murmur it between my breasts, between my thighs, so that no private corner of me would be nameless.

He nodded, a little shy again. “I figured you for an artist of some kind. They’re different. A class of their own.” He gestured with the beer at the guitar player. “Like that one. You know the music?”
I nodded. Asturias, by Albénez. It was running through me almost painfully, with all its urgent mysteries. The mystery lay in the guitar player, not in the man beside me. But at that moment the small man beside me had something I needed more. He was watching me as I sipped wine and listened.
“You have a real pretty smile,” he said. “It’s nice and warm. But I get the feeling you haven’t been using it much. You’re locked out of your apartment until the managers get back, and there’s no one inside your house to let you in.”
I looked at him. Then I set my wineglass down carefully and said, “I think I’m going to cry.”
“That’s okay. That’s what bars are for.” He leaned over suddenly, put his arm around my shoulders briefly, and kissed my cheek. “That’s a hug. People need to be hugged.”
I wiped at tears with my cuff, half laughing. “Do you have a name? Or do you just go around hugging people?”
“Will,” he said. His voice, giving his name, was a comforting combination of shyness and strength. “Go ahead. Have some more wine and talk. You’re having a rough time in the city. Tell me about it.”

[Althea Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

McKillip is one of my favorite authors - but if she had asked me (which, obviously, she wouldn't have) - I would have counseled her to NOT publish this book. It's not that it's badly written - it's that it's extremely obviously autobiographical, and does not portray the author in a flattering light. Reading it, I kept thinking "I don't need to know this!"
Basically, it's about how she had serious mental/social problems as a child and teenager, grew up scared of/attracted to men, and stayed a virgin for a ridiculously long time, as well as being ridiculously unsophisticated. This is couched in a semi-fantasy/metaphorical concept of being haunted by a "stag-man" who is a dream lover, but it's mostly not a fantasy.
I don't know. Some things don't need to be revealed/confessed to the world.

[Melanti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a bit leery of this book since I just got through reading the disappointing Night Gift but this was absolutely gorgeous.

Stepping from the Shadows is one of McKillip's earliest novels (her first for adults) and is technically not fantasy. But the use of visions/imagination, fantasy imagery and a shadow person make it akin to magical realism in my mind. McKillip even references A Hundred Years of Solitude, so perhaps this resemblance is deliberate.

I'm not entirely happy with the term "shadow person" - that's what it's called on the flyleaf of my edition. But what else could you call it? Imaginary friend? That isn't appropriate. Split Personality? Probably the most accurate, but the least satisfying of them all. It's just so mundane.

However, it does have a couple issues - the biggest being that it's one of the most inscrutable books I've read in a long time. If I hadn't known from the blurb on the jacket that there was a "shadow person" and that she and Francis was the same person, I think it would have taken me a VERY long time to figure out what was going on. Maybe she felt she didn't have to explain events as much to adults and erred on the side of explaining too little?

Despite this, I love McKillip and I loved all the international and pagan imagery, and for me, this was more than worth the effort of figuring out exactly what everything meant. I got this from the library with ILL, but I'll now be hunting for a decent copy for my McKillip collection.

[Darren · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was a weird and unpleasant book. It combined many things that I dislike: the view that art (writing, in this case) comes from Special People who Suffer, the assumption that the libertinism of the late 60s and 70s is beneficial and liberating, and an unreliable narrator. Also, for being a book about finding poetry in nature, it was amazingly materialistic.

[Grey Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not easy to find this one, since it isn't in print and is one of her lesser-known books. But it's McKillip at her best, really. Luminous, and sad, and world-enlarging.

[Goran Lowie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was such a pleasant surprise! McKillip writes a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman with her usual imaginative prose. Not for everyone, but I really enjoyed it.

[Jai · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an early work by McKillip - a novel, not fantasy. I'm a huge McKillip fan but this was not my cup of tea. While McKillips lyrical, dreamlike prose is wonderful in a fantasy landscape it doesn't translate well in general fiction - I guess it can be seen as mystic realism but I don't think it worked well. The novel follows the growth of Francis, a young girl which an incredible imagination who moves around with her family from place to place. As she ages she sees or think she sees a mystical figure she calls the Stagman who follows her on her journey. My biggest problem with the book is it didn't feel like it went anywhere (well no where that interested me), and if I didn't read the cover blurb, I couldn't tell you why Francis moved around or who the other seemingly major character in the book was (not the Stagman, the girl who grew up with Francis). That's how vague things were. Too much to figure out, no reward for doing so. I LOVE McKillip, just not this one.

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

An imaginative girl grows up to be an imaginative woman. Who imagines stuff. And has issues with sexuality.

Further evidence (along with Fool's Run) that McKillip should stick with high fantasy.

[Leena · Rating 1 out of 5]

No, no, and no. This is marketed as a novel but it's painfully and obviously an autobiography. Self-indulgent, meandering, and boring, despite McKillip's always imaginative use of language. I can sympathize with her issues but it doesn't mean I want to read about them.

[Kimberly Karalius · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve come across a book that had similar vibes to Francesca Lia Block’s ECHO, so to say I enjoyed the journey would be an understatement. I wish there had been more closure at the end, as joyous as it turned out, but still full of questions. As usual, McKillip is a queen of imagery and description!

[Wetdryvac Wetdryvac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally not the story I thought I was reading when I started, and very nifty because and in spite of that. Lots of fun.

[SBC · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected a lush fantasy but this book is a psychological exploration. The book is about a young girl's coming of age, moving from childhood sin and imagination through teenage fantasy and confusion, into an adult acceptance of imagination and sex as not sinful. The blurb was misleading, but the book was very good nonetheless - beautifully crafted and written.

A young girl, the narrator, lives in the desert and goes to a Catholic school with other kids; at first it seems she has a younger sister, Frances, who embarrasses her a lot, but you soon become suspicious when people call her Fran-Anne and say something to Frances then look at/touch the narrator.

The first chapter is a good read, imaginative and real; each of the children has their own adult problems, Keith with his wild-child brother and incompetent mother, Lupe Ramirez with her numerous younger siblings to care for, Dennis with his moon-face and parents that don't like him. And Frances with her double identity and confusion and shyness.

Chapter 2 is also a very good read. We are suddenly in Germany, a dislocation in setting which at first seems too impossibly different but soon carries and enriches the story. She becomes friends with Helmut, a lovely German boy who makes her his girlfriend but grows strange, until we learn he has discovered what happened to Jews in his country and is deeply ashamed; there is a moment when quiet Frances with her low self-esteem might comfort him, might take the step into another world, but flees in fright of herself and him, hearing boars, and Helmut thinks it is because of what his people did to the Jews.

Next Frances is in England, where she seems to have buried herself inside herself and has no friends or companions; here she first sees the Stagman, separating herself from reality and longing so badly for such a thing that he comes to exist for her. I began to wonder in this chapter why her parents let her walk the English paths at night and haven't tried to help her over her shyness/through her teenage problems.

The next time we meet Frances she is at a girls' high school in America; Frances and the narrator have merged more clearly/obviously into the one person. She has a debilitating shyness, but a wonderful imagination, writing stories about the Stagman, but hating herself for them.

In chapter 5 she is at university; empty and lonely, she wanders around, tries to study, still terribly shy. One boy tries to ask her out and she likes him but is too shy to say yes; the war is an issue in this chapter and he disappears into it. She has begun to face front on her mental struggle, between herself and 'Frances' and the stagman; she doesn't know why she is as she is and what she wants from life. She runs him over in a near-death accident then steps out of herself/her shyness and starts to live.

In chapter 6 she is driving, a writer for a living but still despises what she does; arrives in a small town and suddenly sees him again, in person, in a bar.

In chapter 7 she sees stagmen in everyone. She is ready for sex now, and by blending her teen fantasy into men around her she comes to approach the idea of meeting with them for sex. Meets one man who ditches her before sex as he realises she is a virgin; then goes to the other extreme meeting two men whose sexuality is too open, perhaps even twisted. She keeps searching, but when she seems to have found it almost, abandons it for human warmth with a different man.

In the final chapter, 2 sisters, she has become one with herself at last. Goes to a writer's commune where she realises other people have self-issues too and accepts herself and her gift of writing/imagination and human connection. Seems to give up her quest for love/sex/Stagman, but perhaps that will come now she has accepted herself and is moving into the future. I would have liked to see her go back to her past - to the desert to resolve things, to see/help the other children she knew then - but the focus is on the future.

[Murray Ewing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a fantasy novel, Stepping from the Shadows is nevertheless drenched in imagination. An artistic coming-of-age and finding-yourself tale, it follows Frances Stuart from girlhood to young womanhood as she learns to negotiate the twin complexities of being in the world, and being herself — a task in itself, as Frances is both deeply imaginative and deeply sensitive. At the start of the novel, as a very young girl, she feels a complete division within herself — to the point that the story, though narrated in the first person, features a separate character called Frances, who sometimes wanders off and does her own thing, or gets lost in her own imaginings while the ‘I’ narrator is trying to deal with lessons at school, or playing with friends. It’s a neat little writerly idea, and works well, as the novel moves from Frances as a very young girl in a cactus-strewn American town, to her growing up in Germany and England, then back to America for her later teenage years, hearing the news of the assassination of President Kennedy, going to college during the Vietnam years, getting dragged into political marches, then going off to find herself by driving north.

It’s in England that Frances’ imagination really kicks into gear, in a wonderfully poetic chapter (being English, and reading it in Winter, when the chapter’s set, this really worked for me) when she has a vision of the Stagman, a creature that’s been worrying her storyteller’s imagination for some time. What is this strange, ancient, living man-creature that’s walked out of her head? It seems “un unsolvable problem in quest of an answer”, one the narrator struggles with and tries to reject: “Nobody else has a Stagman — why should I have one? I’m trying to lead a normal, ordinary, mediocre existence!” But it’s an undeniable part of her, essential to her awakening both as a writer and as a young woman, something she can’t reject, however troubling it is.

Stepping from the Shadows is a poetic novel, wonderfully capturing the early confusions and struggles in the life of a young, sensitive, imaginative soul with a creative destiny, trying to live in a troubling, troubled world. In ways, it reminded me of Hesse’s Demian, a novel about a young man on a similarly imaginative quest — and also, I have to say, with a disappointing ending. Stepping from the Shadows’ ending isn’t quite as disappointing, but I’d say this is a book that’s more about the journey than the goal, and not one with any clear-cut answers, more a gentle feeling of resolution.

[Stefanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably a 2.5, but I upgraded it since even when it's impossible to follow the narrative, McKillip writes such beautiful prose. Honestly though, this was a tough one. The beginning is completely obscure and I was only able to make sense of it after coming back here and reading reviews that indicated the two initial characters were actually the same person, which was actually a reflection of McKillip herself. Even then, the novel is more a series of vignettes of the main character struggling to become comfortable with herself and find a path into her storytelling.

I would only recommend this one to super fans of Patricia McKillip or those who've read much of her work and want to experience the author's fictionalized yet still extremely intimate account of her young life.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Francis is a dislocated child growing up lacking context, yearning to be 'normal' so she tries to reject her vividly creative and challenging imagination. However the Army posting her father to Arizona, Germany, England, and finally California only add to her disorientation with herself. They provide her imagination room but fail to give her a sense of security in order to accept and explore her odd sense of self and place.
The Stagman, born from a Guy Fawkes night effigy, prowls the perimeter of her life because she cannot excise her creative nature. With maturity Francis stops her fearful evasions and faces her visions, accepting herself, she begins the process of becoming an adult.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5 Stars)

This felt like a female Kerouac with a touch of Fight Club mixed in. The writing is beautiful and flowing, and the narrative is notable for being almost entirely internal. There is less of an arc and more of a gentle non-monotone slope. Although I was only partially able to relate to the narrator (at least at this point in my life), I enjoyed this. If I'd have read it when I was younger, I think I'd have found it more powerful. As is, I thought it was lovely but a tiny bit simple.

[CS Barron · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book feels like one of McKillip's early efforts, brushed up and reworked for publication. It's still not that good. It's plodding, unrhythmic, and well, dull. The writing doesn't sound like the mature McKillip whose superb fantasy books we know and love. This book is psychological and probably autobiographical. I put it down for good about halfway through.

[Senda · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual, McKillip's prose are breathtaking. Interestingly, although its billed as fiction, based on some of the character details and locations, I have to wonder if there's some element of autobiography here?

[Yune]

Okay, I vaguely remember reading this one before and not "getting" it. Same thing this time around, and I've run out of library renewals so I can't take this one slowly. Leaving it in my records as something to try in a different state of mind.

[Jeannine]

I read this 30 years ago...I still remember how the story made an impression on me.

[Krissquared · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really strange story, but I loved the pagan themes throughout.

[Isblue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not nearly as good as my younger self thought.