Magic For Beginners (2014).

One of the long-term goals here at the Scriblerus Club is to see if it's possible to dig up a lot of long forgotten names, and see if they can't have their day in the spotlight.  It's an amusing bit of trivia to keep in mind when it comes to talking about today's artist.  In many ways, she almost functions as a kind of ironic inversion, or maybe even a subversion of one of the aims of this site.  I get the impression that Kelly Link is some kind of household name.  By that I mean that it's easy to get the sense that her reputation as an author has made her something of a well known enough figure in the book world so that she has a fairly decent and devoted fan base to keep her name in the spotlight.  It's not one of the major cultures within fandom.  She's probably never going to reach the heights of a J.R.R. Tolkien or Alan Moore.  Still, she seems to have carved out enough of a niche to be able to say that she's done okay for herself.  The irony about an author like Link comes from the way she almost subverts the goals of a blog like this, perhaps without ever meaning or trying to.  When it comes to the work of a writer like Kelly Link, it is possible to offer all sorts of conjectures about the possible meaning of any one of her stories.  The punchline is that while I'm able to do my job as a critic in terms of a proper examination of narratives, I'm not sure I can tell you much about Link as a human being.  That's because all the relevant biographical information on her life is hard to come by.

When I set out to write this article, one of the first things I did was head over to Wikipedia (say sorry) for a brief rundown of her personal biography.  From there, I could go searching through other online resources to gain a greater picture of such things as what books she liked to read growing up?  What were her favorite stories, in other words?  What kind of shaping influence did these works of fiction have on the development of her own artistic Imagination?  How did all this effect the way in which she told her own stories?  Where did the ideas for her penchant for playing with narrative conventions come or stem from?  Why did she decide to let this be one of the defining features of her stories?  What sort of general outline of her life would help us to gain an understanding of her growth as an artist?  These are all the sort of questions and background details that any critic worthy of the name should want to have at his disposal when it comes to getting as clear a picture as they can on whichever artist or artwork that comes in for a viewing under the microscope.  So of course, she gives me nothing to work with.  I've been unable to glean much information about either Link's life, the books she liked, or how it all went together to shape the writer she's become.  I'm left having to critique from a blank slate.

That's sort of the last thing I was expecting to happen here.  I can also appreciate how this sort of plays havoc with the goals I've set up for this site to be able to enjoy a good laugh at my expense.  It also means that a lot of the focus for this article will have to remain on the artistry, almost at the total exclusion of the author.  I can't help wondering if Ms. Link might have preferred things this way.  Whatever the case, it means that best place left for me to start with in practice is with a description of what kind of generic author she is.  It helps to bear in mind that this marks the first time I've read any of Link's work, yet the good news about that is I was able to make an after-the-fact smart choice about it.  I stumbled upon just the right sort of introductory text that was of such a quality as to serve as the perfect gateway introduction to the kind of stories Kelly Link likes to tell.  The type of story where the contents of the narrative go a long way toward giving the reader as full a picture as possible of what sort of writer and tale they've got on their hands.  With this in mind, the first solid thing I can tell you about Link is that her writings belong to a very specific coterie, or group of writings and authors.

The one bit of biographical trivia I was able to dig up was that she was born in 1969.  That's an important date, because it signals her as belonging to either somewhere in the middle or in the immediate aftermath of what was then a New Wave within all the major genres of Popular fiction.  This was back during a time when a lot creative talents in the fields of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror were busy hammering out all the defining traits by which we know them today.  It was thanks to the efforts of writers like Harlan Ellison or Shirley Jackson that we begin to see the formation of the current tropes that still define the popular genres as we have them (for the moment, anyway).  The thing to keep in mind is that a lot of what now seems commonplace to us was (during the time period in which Link was born, and writers like Ellison and Ursula Le Guinn busy crafting a lot of it) brand new and astonishing in an era before the likes of Star Trek: TNG or Alex Proyas' Dark City.  This was the period of creative fermentation when the basic contours of the Popular Fiction began to take their final shape.

It was a moment of collective realization and creative potential for the Fantastic genres, and the artists who became aware of this possibility all began to stretch the legs of their artistic capabilities.  It's how we got films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or novels like I Am Legend, or Our Lady of Darkness.  Even a book like Salem's Lot has a good claim as both a groundbreaker and a trendsetter.  When Stephen King published his novel of a supernatural evil encroaching on a small New England town (no spoilers here!), it may not have been original in the strictest sense of the term, and even the author would be the first to admit that.  There had been various attempts at revitalizing, or breathing new life into one particular and long familiar type of monster in the Horror genre.  Richard Matheson can be spoken of as having beaten King to the punch twice already by the time the Lot hit the retail shelves.  The first time was the aforementioned Legend text.  The other came in the form of a somewhat obscure, yet still remembered ABC TV Movie of the Week.  It was called The Night Stalker, and was broadcast way back in January of 1972.  It featured the Old Man from A Christmas Story as he went up against an otherworldly creature of the night on the streets of Las Vegas (again, no spoilers!).  The point however, is that while these efforts may count as the true trendsetters, it was King's work that caught the pop culture imagination in a big way.  It was books like his that helped the genres all move forward.

There's perhaps more than a certain amount of unfairness involved there when an artist like Matheson gets lost in the shadows cast by King's later achievement.  At the same time, the irony of how things shaped out is that it provides a good look into what is able to grab the audience's attention enough to the point where their collective, shared enthusiasm is enough to turn both an artwork and its author into icons of pop culture.  It's what happened to King, and while Matheson has thankfully never been fully neglected, there is a sense that his own efforts have come to be regarded as stories that walked so that efforts of writers like King could run.  It may not be fair in the strictest sense, yet it's what the audience has decreed.  The point of all this passing trivia is to give a sense of the literary melting pot into which Kelly was born, and which she later went on to participate in.  It makes sense to label this moment of creativity and artistic growth as the formation of a kind of movement, and it's one I've talked about before.  In my opinion, Kelly Link belongs to a group of authors known as the New Wave Fabulists.

The closest anyone has ever come to a good definition of the writers who comprise this informal literary collective, and the type of stories they have to tell comes from the the mind of American Gothic writer Peter Straub.  While he can't give us a complete an idea of New Wave Fabulism, he does make a crucial first tentative step when he explains, "It would be easy but misleading to account for this in evolutionary terms. That is, it is not really accurate to say that over the past two decades the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been, unnoticed by the wider literary culture, transforming themselves generation by generation and through the work of each generation’s most adventurous practitioners into something all but unrecognizable, hence barely classifiable at all except as literature. Even evolution doesn’t work that way. The above process did take place, and it was completely overlooked by the wider literary culture but it did not happen smoothly, and the kind of post-transformation fictions represented here owe more than half of their DNA and much of their underlying musculature to their original genre sources. Contemporary, more faithful versions of those sources are to be found all over the place, especially in movie theaters and the genre shelves at Barnes & Noble. 

"Gene Wolfe, who is necessary to this volume, was producing fiction of immense, Nabokovian rigor and complexity thirty years ago, alongside plenty of colleagues who were satisfied to work within the genre’s familiar templates. Now, writers like Nalo Hopkinson, John Kessell, and Patrick O’Leary, for all of whom Gene Wolfe is likely to be what Gary K. Wolf calls a “touchstone,” are still publishing shorter fiction in magazines like Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction, and so is Kelly Link. (Jonathan Carroll, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand, John Crowley, and China Miéville seldom write short fiction, and we are are fortunate to have stories from them.) Strictly on grounds of artistic achievement, these writers should all along have been welcome in thoughtful literary outlets (web)".  An explanation that gets us closer to a definition of New Wave Fabulism is to claim that all it amounts to is what happens when any author comes up with the bright idea of fusing the techniques of any of the popular genres with the styles, vocabulary, settings, and vernacular of so-called Realist fiction.  This means that a proper label for this kind of story is to claim that it is one of technique, more than it is anything else.  It's a genre story told in a style or fashion of contemporary "Literate" fiction.

In other words, all New Wave Fabulism really seems to be is any effort at a story of Horror, Science Fiction, or Fantasy that attempts to wed the generic tropes and templates associated with all three of the narrative kinds listed above with the level of novelistic sophistication that you might find in the pages of a periodicals such as The New Yorker.  In other words, it's taking the basic setup or imaginative scenario that you might find in the works of someone like John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, John Updike, or Edith Wharton, and give it all a fantastical twist.  To give an example of how this applied technique could shape the contours of a Fabulist narrative, Stephen King once wrote a short story called "Graduation Afternoon".  Everything about the piece until the last page or two puts the reader in mind of one of the author's more slice-of-life, Stand By Me type or oriented narratives.  Those stories where it seems like King has set aside things going bump in the night for a moment to focus on the type of story that could happen in a more realistic setting.  Then the denouement arrives, and the nature of everything we've just read up to that point gets reshaped as the fantastical nature of the story and its characters begins to become apparent as we reach the finish line.

This is an illustration of the New Wave technique in its shorter forms.  An even better example of what this type of story amounts to is the idea of an ordinary suburban protagonist going out to play in his or her backyard, and discovering that somehow their house is located somewhere near the foot of Homer's Mount Olympus.  That's perhaps the closest I can ever get to a definition of New Wave Fabulism.  It's the type of story with a vested interest in trying to bring the realm of the old gods and archetypes down to mingle and mix in with our modern settings and situations.  Another term that might apply to this type of fiction is what's known as Urban Fantasy of various varieties.  At least it grants a further step closer to the type of stories that authors like Kelly Link tell for a living.  In fact, the idea of fantastic happenings in the suburbs is a very good description of the plot of her story, "Magic for Beginners".  

The Story.

Does anyone remember this old TV show?  I think it was called The Library, or something like that.  It wasn't an old show, by any means.  We're not talking here about the kind of treasured TV memories that made up the fabric of our lives as 80s kids, here.  The one I'm thinking was of a much more recent-ish vintage.  If I'm recalling things right, this one aired at some point during the early 2000s.  This would make it what I tend to think of as one of the last of an ancient breed.  These are the kind of series that were almost like the leftover remains, or relics of the older analog era when Network and Cable TV still had something like a purchase on the viewer's attention.  From what I recall, it was the kind of show that's best described as belonging somewhere along the middle rung of the ladder.  I don't recall it as ever being all that great in the ratings scale.  It never got the kind of widespread approval and acclaim as that of a show like Lost, for example.  Then again, considering the fallout that came from J.J. Abrams' little Mystery Box brainchild, maybe it deserved a better chance than it got.  I'm talking about one of those shows that probably enjoyed what might be termed a Firefly reputation.  It was the kind to series that could never really make it big, yet still managed to carve out a devoted following for itself.  Perhaps that's also a good explanation for why it's so obscure, almost counting as a form of lost media.

What was The Library about?  Well, here's the part where things get kinda tricksy.  I can't say now whether I'm thinking of the same show, or else I'm just misremembering two separate TV series and somehow conflating them together.  Maybe it'll help if I describe each component of my memories one at a time.  I'll start with the most attention getting premise.  Imagine if someone took Jorge Luis Borges' concept for the Library of Babel, and turned it into a TV series.  No, I can't recall the name of who developed this show anymore, say sorry.  I just know for certain that whoever it was took Borges basic idea of an entire universe, or secondary world composed of nothing except one vast, and endless repository of the written word.  In other words, an entire time and place where there was nothing else, except for the Library, and the people and books who lived there.  It's one of those off-kilter concepts that's kind of cool even if, or maybe even because it doesn't make all that much sense.  It's the type of setup that could only exist in a fairy tale setting of some sort.  So of course the showrunners were aware of this, and used the basic conceit as an excuse to let their Imaginations run wild by playing up the Fantasy potential to be had in a world like this.  I just wish I could remember what the plot of the show was about, now.  I know it was the typical hero on an adventure setup; the details are murky, though.

In terms of what it was like to watch the whole thing is where things get difficult.  While I have answer for that, it's also one of those cases where a bare description never quite does the real thing justice.  This is one of those "You really had to be there" type of deals.  With that in mind, the best description I've got is through a basis of comparison, and it goes like this.  There's an old mid 1940s Looney Tunes cartoon that takes place in somewhere in a bookstore after hours.  The plot (such as it is) revolves around what happens after it's lights out, and the staff has left for the day.  Once the last employee has checked out, then all of the characters from the books on display (whether famous, obscure, old, or new) begin to emerge from or underneath the covers of their respective texts, and begin to mix and mingle together in a way that suggests that this is a regular, albeit very surreal occurrence.  It's like all the fictitious figures within the bookstore's inventory have somehow created a literal community of texts within the walls of their retail establishment.  From there, the whole thing turns into a precursor to the kind of parody and satire of the pop culture of Hollywood's Golden Age.  Most of it is just sight gags involving the titles and characters of classic literature.  It was all done very tongue in cheek.

The title of the cartoon was Book Revue.  It's got Daffy Duck in it.  Pretty fun, all things considered.  Basically, the whole cartoon is precursor to what later TV shows like Animaniacs would continue and bring forward into the 90s generation.  In fact, the makers of that later staple of childhood were such big fans of that old Bob Clampett directed short that they decided to create their own sort of homage sequel to it, this time updating the setting to the current status of pop culture as it was in a time Blockbuster Video was still the reigning champion of media distribution.  That'll give you a good marker of how old the episode I'm thinking of is.  It was called Video Revue, and it was set in a fictional video rental store which is meant as a clear expy of the long gone chain store.  The premise is the same as Book Revue, only this time it's character from all your favorite movies from the 80s and 90s, or even further back coming to life and basically goofing off together with the Warner Bros. (and their sister, Dot) after dark.  I bring all this up to give you the best idea of what The Library was like as a TV series.  It was basically the ideas Book and Video Revue spliced in with Jim Henson's Labyrinth for good measure.  

I know at least two things for certain.  (1) The series had an entire living Library as its setting, and (2) the action mostly tended to center on the various kinds of adventures that the main cast of characters would have, or get into.  Sometimes it was your typical adventure of the week, though I think there was also like this over-arching quest narrative underpinning it all.  If that's case, then let me apologize here, because for the life of me I can't remember who, if anybody, was the main bad guy on the show.  Information like that just tends to vanish into the murky the haze that is Dali's much vaunted Persistence of Memory.  What I do recall is this one interesting quirk about the show.  It's cast was always changing.  I don't mean that there was nothing like a fixed set of main protagonists and accompanying side characters.  Those parts were all baked in, like they should be in any solid story.  What I mean is that while the characters remained the same, the actors responsible for portraying them would almost come and go, like on a constant system of rotation.  I'm not sure how that must sound, or even how to explain it.  It would be like seeing Shatner and Nimoy playing Kirk and Spock for one episode, and then the rest of the time, the roles of the Captain and the Chief Science Officer of the Enterprise would be taken over by different players each week.  This is how the Library was.

Yes, I am being serious about that part.  No, I'll swear "I'm not making a word of this up".  That really was just how things were handled on the series.  Don't ask me why that should be, because I don't have a clue.  I meant it when I said this show counts as a form of lost media.  I haven't even been able to find anything in terms behind the scenes trivia.  The best I could do was just a handful of production stills that were posted online.  None of them really help to suggest the aura of wonderful strangeness the series was capable of.  Anyway, this penchant for trading faces was "one of the best things about The Library, the way the cast swaps parts, all except for Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing, who are only ever themselves. Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing are the love interests and the main characters, and therefore, inevitably, the most boring characters (web)".  In a way, though it is frustrating, it's also one of the most comforting facets about this show.  Not that it's necessarily a good thing when the star heroes are upstaged by the supporting cast.  It's just that it stands as a good marker of the series' concreteness.  Letting your heroes be reduced to a bland ciphers is one of the worst mistakes that any artist can make.  The fact that The Library suffers this same problem is a very human trait to have.

It's how you know you were dealing with a show made by flesh and blood human beings.  Just a bunch of nerds with enough of a smattering of shared talent among the air between their collective skulls to put out a product of at least some meritable artistic quality.  Still, the validity of the criticism remains.  The major problem with The Library stemmed from one specific problem on the showrunners part.  They couldn't tell the difference between the who they thought the main characters were, and the one who should have been the lead.  This is something I'm not alone on.  Almost every fan of The Library that I've talked to (what scattered handfuls there are of us) all seem to agree on one thing, it's that the Fox really was the actual hero of the series.  No matter what else we've disagreed on, all of us are willing to admit that she's the one who kept stealing the show.  Nor is that such a bad thing.  It's just a shame the producers never seemed to have realized it as well.  All it was is one of those common occurrences that can happen with any possible story.  A side character became the audience favorite.

It's something that's happened at least twice before, that I'm aware of.  I started to say there were three examples.  However, the more I thought it over, I realized this was a fate that the aforementioned Mr. Spock was spared from during the original Stark Trek run.  That series is a case where everyone knew they had rich vein of character gold to mine on their hands.  And it's to the credit not just of Gene Roddenberry, but also writers like Gene Coons, D.C. Fontana, and Theodore Sturgeon that they were all able to find ways of fleshing out everyone's favorite, logical Starfleet officer into the pop culture icon that he remains today.  That counts as an example of how to handle what's known as an ensemble dark horse in the right manner.  The second time this happened occurred within the same franchise.  When Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine debuted on Voyager, for instance, no matter how controversial a move it was (even leaving it at the fact that she was a late season addition) it's difficult to deny that she began to sort of pull the focus of the show in her general direction.  Last I checked, it's still one of those out of the way debates that appears to rage on within fan circles, all the while never even managing to be a blip on the larger radar of life itself.  The last time I can recall this happening was in a Fantasy book series.

I'm thinking now of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.  At one point, the author stumbled upon the character of a werewolf girl.  What always struck me as interesting about this figure is how she keeps reading as the most extra-dimensional character Pratchett has ever created.  What I mean is that while the vast majority of the characters in his secondary world all tend to fit in with the surrealist-absurdist tradition of Pythonesque humor that makes up British Satire, this one wolf girl figure scans as the single element that could, if she wanted, be able to step outside the series' boundaries of parodic mockery, and find a way of playing the entire narrative in a straight manner.  In other words, if Pratchett were to hand this character over to a writer like J.R.R. Tolkien, or Peter Beagle, then any of them could have concocted a more prototypical Fantasy around her, without having to change a thing about the character's personality or mannerisms as they were already outlined.  I've chosen to focus in on this last example of an ensemble dark horse, because it's the closest corresponding case to that of the Fox, in The Library.  It's the problem of what happens when a character starts to take on a life of her own?

After looking at just a handful of episodes for myself, I'm able to say that this is very much the case with the character of Fox.  It's clear enough the writers, or someone, created her with no other intention than for her to be one of those occasional side figures who pops up now and then to help out the main protagonists every other episode or two.  Instead, Fox turned out to be one of those fictional creations that come equipped with her own narrative voice.  It doesn't seem to have taken that long for her to assert herself on the program.  Or at least that's what I can gather from what little I've seen.  Or at least from what I can remember of the show  "You always know Fox by her costume (the too-small green T-shirt, the long, full skirts she wears to hide her tail), by her dramatic hand gestures and body language, by the soft, breathy-squeaky voice the actors use when they are Fox. Fox is funny, dangerous, bad-tempered, flirtatious, greedy, untidy, accident-prone, graceful, and has a mysterious past...And she's always beautiful. Every episode you think that this Fox, surely, is the most beautiful Fox there could ever be, and yet the Fox of the next episode will be even more heartbreakingly beautiful (ibid)".  I know for a fact that this is what another character, Jeremy Mars happens to think, though he'd never say it.

Here's the part where things get tricksy again.  This is where the images in the picture frames of the halls of memory begin to cloud over.  Which means I really can't tell you how many layers of salt you should apply to what I'm about to say next.  Remember how I said a minute ago I couldn't be sure whether I was watching two separate TV series that have just sort of merged together in my recollections, or if I was in fact recalling two aspects of the same show?  Well that's how it is for me whenever I consider life and times of Jeremy Mars.  I know he's a fictional creation, yet I'll be burned if he had his own show, or belonged as just another part of The Library proper.  All I can say for certain is if this was the case, then that series an even bigger mind screw than Twin Peaks, which is saying something.  It might have been possible that the fantastic adventures of Fox and her friends were, like, maybe a show within a show?  Like it was the Fantasy equivalent to what Itchy and Scratchy were for the imaginary Simpsons household.  If so, then it just adds to the oddity.  Because I seem to recall entire episodes that were set within the world of The Free People's World-Tree Library, while others would take place in the Anytown USA setting of Jeremy's neighborhood.  There might have been episodes focused on Jeremy where it was possible to catch glimpses of The Library playing on TV in the background?  At least I think that's what happened.  Like I said, it's the part where it gets strange.

Most of Jeremy's adventures consist of the typical slice-of-life shows you've seen before.  It fits in very well with programs like The Wonder Years or Freaks and Geeks.  You've got the story of this nebbish growing boy who is also something of a nerd, and is sort of forced to carry that particular badge of honor with him wherever he goes.  I think that made him the target of bullies, sometimes, maybe?  That's one of the details I'm sort of foggy about.  Not too sure if that was part of things, or not.  What I do know is that he came from a quirky household.  His father is Gordon "Strangle" Mars, and it's clear he's meant as an expy of a famous Horror novelist.  The fact that he made a name for himself writing novels about giant spiders who feed off human kind should be a clue.  His mother, meanwhile, has a mysterious past, on account of growing up an orphan.  There's more to talk about on that score.  However, rounding out the cast are the circle of Jeremy's friends: Karl, Elizabeth, Amy, and Talis.  

There's this sort of back and forth tension between Jeremy in his relationship with Elizabeth and Talis.  Basically the kid finds himself caught in the same conundrum as that of Archie whenever he found himself confronted with Betty and Veronica.  This causes a bit of friction between Mars and Karl.  It gets awkward enough since the two of them have been best friends since Kindergarten.  Liz and Amy meanwhile seem to fulfill the role of the ingénue and the chatterbox, respectively.  Talis is the most interesting of the side characters, along with Karl.  She's a Goth girl who likes to keep her thoughts to herself.  To give an example of what I'm talking about, there's this one episode where she and Jeremy are alone together, and this happens.  " Talis is in the kitchen, making a Velveeta-and-pickle sandwich. "So what did you think?" Jeremy says. It's like having a hobby, only more pointless, trying to get Talis to talk. "Is Fox really dead?"  "Don't know," Talis says. Then she says, "I had a dream."  Jeremy waits. Talis seems to be waiting, too. She says, "About you." Then she's silent again. There is something dreamlike about the way that she makes a sandwich. As if she is really making something that isn't a sandwich at all; as if she's making something far more meaningful and mysterious. Or as if soon he will wake up and realize that there are no such things as sandwiches.

"You and Fox," Talis says. "The dream was about the two of you. She told me. To tell you. To call her. She gave me a phone number. She was in trouble. She said you were in trouble. She said to keep in touch."  "Weird," Jeremy says, mulling this over. He's never had a dream about The Library. He wonders who was playing Fox in Talis's dream. He had a dream about Talis, once, but it isn't the kind of dream that you'd ever tell anybody about. They were just sitting together, not saying anything. Even Talis's T-shirt hadn't said anything. Talis was holding his hand.  "It didn't feel like a dream," Talis says.  "So what was the phone number?" Jeremy says.  "I forgot," Talis says. "When I woke up, I forgot (ibid)".  Karl, in contrast stands out in a way that's a lot more fun.  It's not so much that he's the audience surrogate.  It's just that the writers allowed him to be the most self-aware and genre savvy of the entire gang.  You got the sense that Karl was always aware he was a character in a John Hughes style sitcom.  It made for an entertaining sense of snarky humor whenever he and Mars got into a fight.

Now comes the real mind screw.  It's the part where I cannot guarantee that I'm misremembering things to the point where I'm unable to say that any of this ever happened in the show, or am I getting two separate programs confused again?  Here's what I remember.  There's a plot point where Mom learns a bit about her past.  She's inherited this piece of property somewhere out in the desert surrounding Las Vegas.  It's this old, disused chapel and a nearby phone booth.  It causes a bit of an upheaval in the family, as it means Mrs. Mars has to go out to Sin City, look over her new inheritance, and decide what's to be done about it.  The catch is Jeremy has to go with her for some reason.  I'm not sure why this was.  It might have had something to do with a clause in a will somewhere that stipulated the boy had to be a part of it all.  Whatever the case, the show soon veers off into this other course where we start to follow Jeremy and his mother on their journey towards a phonebooth next to a mysterious church, and the secrets that await them there.  What those secrets are, I don't know.  Though I think I recall one or two details that at least throw an interesting light on where things were headed.

Sometime before The Library (if that even is the show I'm remembering anymore) switches the setting of Jeremy's story out into the desert, the nerdy Mr. Mars has a very strange dream.  Again, I can't be sure this is what happened on the show, yet this is what I recall.  "Jeremy dreams that he's sitting beside Fox on a sofa that his father has reupholstered in spider silk. His father has been stealing spider webs from the giant-spider superstores. From his own books. Is that shoplifting or is it self-plagiarism? The sofa is soft and gray and a little bit sticky. Fox sits on either side of him. The right-hand-side Fox is being played by Talis. Elizabeth plays the Fox on his left. Both Foxes look at him with enormous compassion.  "Are you dead?" Jeremy says.  "Are you?" the Fox who is being played by Elizabeth says, in that unmistakable Fox voice which, Jeremy's father once said, sounds like a sexy and demented helium balloon. It makes Jeremy's brain hurt, to hear Fox's voice coming out of Elizabeth's mouth.

"The Fox who looks like Talis doesn't say anything at all. The writing on her T-shirt is so small and so foreign that Jeremy can't read it without feeling as if he's staring at Fox-Talis's breasts. It's probably something he needs to know, but he'll never be able to read it. He's too polite, and besides he's terrible at foreign languages.  "Hey look," Jeremy says. "We're on TV!" There he is on television, sitting between two Foxes on a sticky gray couch in a field of red poppies. "Are we in Las Vegas?"  "We're not in Kansas," Fox-Elizabeth says. "There's something I need you to do for me."  "What's that?" Jeremy says.  "If I tell you in the dream," Fox-Elizabeth says, "you won't remember. You have to remember to call me when you're awake. Keep on calling until you get me."  "How will I remember to call you," Jeremy says, "if I don't remember what you tell me in this dream? Why do you need me to help you? Why is Talis here? What does her T-shirt say? Why are you both Fox? Is this Mars?"  Fox-Talis goes on watching TV. Fox-Elizabeth opens her kind and beautiful un-Hello-Kitty-like mouth again. She tells Jeremy the whole story. She explains everything. She translates Fox-Talis's T-shirt, which turns out to explain everything about Talis that Jeremy has ever wondered about. It answers every single question that Jeremy has ever had about girls. And then Jeremy wakes up —

"It's dark. Jeremy flips on the light. The dream is moving away from him. There was something about Mars. Elizabeth was asking who he thought was prettier, Talis or Elizabeth. They were laughing. They both had pointy fox ears. They wanted him to do something. There was a telephone number he was supposed to call. There was something he was supposed to do (ibid)",  From there, the strangeness begins to pile on.  It all culminated in a moment that's always stood out to me about this TV series, even if I'm no longer sure it even exists.  In the episode I'm thinking of, the following event happens the night before Jeremy (or Germ as his friend s call him) heads out for the Desert Southwest with his mother.  While everyone else is asleep, the boy from the house of Mars tiptoes over to the family landline, and begins to dial a number.  "He picks up his phone. Maybe he can call his phone booth and complain just a little and not wake Karl up. His dad is going to freak out about the phone bill. All these calls to Nevada. It's 4 A.M. Jeremy's plan is not to go to sleep at all. His friends are lame.

"The phone rings and rings and rings and then someone picks up. Jeremy recognizes the silence on the other end. "Everybody came over and fell asleep," he whispers. "That's why I'm whispering. I don't even think they care that I'm leaving. And my feet hurt. Remember how I was going to dress up as a Forbidden Book? Platform shoes aren't comfortable. Karl thinks I did it on purpose, to be even taller than him than usual. And I forgot that I was wearing lipstick and I kissed Talis and got lipstick all over her face, so it's a good thing everyone was asleep because otherwise someone would have seen. And my dad says that he won't shoplift at all while Mom and I are gone, but you can't trust him. And that fake-fur upholstery sheds like — "  "Jeremy," that strangely familiar, sweet-and-rusty door-hinge voice says softly. "Shut up, Jeremy. I need your help."  "Wow!" Jeremy says, not in a whisper. "Wow, wow, wow! Is this Fox? Are you really Fox? Is this a joke? Are you real? Are you dead? What are you doing in my phone booth?"  You know who I am," Fox says, and Jeremy knows with all his heart that it's really Fox. "I need you to do something for me."  "What?" Jeremy says. Karl, on the bed, laughs in his sleep as if the idea of Jeremy doing something is funny to him. "What could I do?"  "I need you to steal three books," Fox says. "From a library in a place called Iowa."  

"I know Iowa," Jeremy says. "I mean, I've never been there, but it's a real place. I could go there."  "I'm going to tell you the books you need to steal," Fox says. "Author, title, and the jewelry festival number — "  "Dewey Decimal," Jeremy says. "It's actually called the Dewey Decimal number in real libraries."  "Real," Fox says, sounding amused. "You need to write this all down and also how to get to the library. You need to steal the three books and bring them to me. It's very important."  "Is it dangerous?" Jeremy says. "Are the Forbidden Books up to something? Are the Forbidden Books real, too? What if I get caught stealing?"  "It's not dangerous to you," Fox says. "Just don't get caught. Remember the episode of The Library when I was the little old lady with the beehive and I stole the Bishop of Tweedle's false teeth while he was reading the banns for the wedding of Faithful Margaret and Sir Petronella the Younger? Remember how he didn't even notice?"  "I've never seen that episode," Jeremy says, although as far as he knows he's never missed a single episode of The Library. He's never even heard of Sir Petronella.  "Oh," Fox says. "Maybe that's a flashback in a later episode or something. That's a great episode. We're depending on you, Jeremy. You have got to steal these books. They contain dreadful secrets. I can't say the titles out loud. I'm going to spell them instead."

"So Jeremy gets a pad of paper and Fox spells out the titles of each book twice. (They aren't titles that can be written down here. It's safer not to even think about some books.) "Can I ask you something?" Jeremy says. "Can I tell anybody about this? Not Amy. But could I tell Karl or Elizabeth? Or Talis? Can I tell my mom? If I woke up Karl right now, would you talk to him for a minute?"  "I don't have a lot of time," Fox says. "I have to go now. Please don't tell anyone, Jeremy. I'm sorry."  "Is it the Forbidden Books?" Jeremy says again. What would Fox think if she saw the costume he's still wearing, all except for the platform heels? "Do you think I shouldn't trust my friends? But I've known them my whole life!"  Fox makes a noise, a kind of pained whuff.  "What is it?" Jeremy says. "Are you okay?"  "I have to go," Fox says. "Nobody can know about this. Don't give anybody this number. Don't tell anyone about your phone booth. Or me. Promise, Germ?"  "Only if you promise you won't call me Germ," Jeremy says, feeling really stupid. "I hate when people call me that. Call me Mars instead."

"Mars," Fox says, and it sounds exotic and strange and brave, as if Jeremy has just become a new person, a person named after a whole planet, a person who kisses girls and talks to Foxes.  "I've never stolen anything," Jeremy says.  But Fox has hung up (ibid)".  That's where my memory of this show ends, or just about, anyway.  So I'll just leave with the same question I started out with.  Does anyone else out there reading these words know about this TV series?  Does it even exist?  I sort of wish someone would be able to tell me, one way or another, the difference between dream and reality.

Conclusion: A Short Story as Invitation for Audience Creativity.

After giving it some thought, it becomes obvious that "Magic For Beginners" is a story that tells itself in three interlocking modes.  First time readers will come away from this story believing that they've seen two pieces of a puzzle being fit together.  On the one hand, we're given the mundane world of Jeremy Mars, as we witness the usual ups and down of what starts out sounding like a typical coming-of-age yarn.  It's the kind of thing we might expect from a film like Stand By Me, or a novel such as The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.  As the tale goes on, however, we keep getting hint after clue that the normal everyday of reality is being overtaken by the extraordinary.  It sounds as if a regular neighborhood Boy Next Door type is having his world turned upside down as the contents of his favorite TV show starts to come to life.  This is the most understandable conclusion that readers will take away from Link's story.  The reason for that is because whether or not it makes sense, it's the closest we're likely to get to a natural explanation of what's going on here.  It's not an unreasonable conclusion by any means.  It's more possible to understand the logic that makes the audience settle on this idea as an explanation.  It's also one that doesn't do a good job of reading what's in the text.

If you go back and look at Link's words again a second time, perhaps a few notes of peculiarity begin to sound off right in the middle of the opening paragraph.  "Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. But she will be, soon. She's a character on a television show called The Library. You've never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.  In one episode of The Library, a boy named Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old, sits on the roof of his house in Plantagenet, Vermont. It's eight o'clock at night, a school night, and he and his friend Elizabeth should be studying for the math quiz that their teacher, Mr. Cliff, has been hinting at all week long. Instead they've sneaked out onto the roof (ibid)".  It would be interesting to find out how many readers gloss over the words that we've just read without bothering to take in their full meaning.  An even greater question is how did they not notice the big giveaway that was staring us in the face, right at the start?  Whatever intentions the author may have had, what can't be denied is that the narration tells us flat out that all we're seeing is episodes from a TV show.  The characters of Jeremy and the Fox are both singled out as being nothing more than figures on a stage, or rather just images on a screen.  There's a lot of metafictional play at work here, as well.

On the one hand, we all know "Magic for Beginners" is just a work of make-believe.  That's sort of the reason any of us picked it up to read in the first place.  At the same, this is something that either the writer is aware of herself, and this allows her to have a bit of creative fun playing with the levels of reader awareness when it comes to the way we relate to fictional characters.  Or else this method of metafictional play is just something that comes naturally baked in to the plot, just a normal part of the story's bells and whistles, in other words.  Whatever the case may be on that score, the result remains the same.  We're dealing with a narrative that is at pains to emphasize the inherent fictionality, or artificial nature of its characters.  Kelly's yarn, in other words, begins on a note of narration as observational commentary.  It all stops short of being anything like an honest critique, yet it is close enough to those borderlands to the point where it becomes obvious that the description is sort of asking the reader to always be alert to the fictional nature of what we're about to read.  This is a story that encourages you to read with a certain amount of critical alertness, if never outright detachment.

In other words, Link seems to have found a way of taking the type of creative methodology that's to be found in, say, a decent episode of The Simpsons, and apply it to the literary format of Magical Realism.  Much like the brainchild of Matt Groening, "Magic for Beginners" is the kind of story that rewards you for paying attention.  If I had to pinpoint the major difference between the two, it's that Link's story seems to be after bigger game than just a half-hour of a few good laughs.  It's almost as if the story or the author wants us to think about what it means to be a reader or a creator in relation to the stories we either enjoy or tell to one another.  This is the kind of literary conceit that is always forced to walk on a tightrope.  The major threat with any narrative of this caliber is that it runs the risk of devolving into the kind of empty headed naval gazing that sacrifices the importance of story for a message that is so convoluted and personal that it becomes impossible for it to be relatable to anyone else in the audience.  The good news is that Link seems to be very well aware of this hazard, and never ventures into the kind of territory where such dangers would cause her fictional account to suffer for it.  She remains a professional who realizes that the story must always come first and last, before anything else.

It means we get to enjoy what happens to Jeremy as he begins to make his slow realization that his life is turning into the kind of adventure he used to enjoy watching on his favorite TV series.  So the reader might be prone to conclude that we're dealing with a premise in which a fictional world has begun to take on so much of a life of its own (as all really good stories are prone to do, sooner or later) to the point where the line between Imagination and reality, and the world of the fiction has begun to encroach on our own.  It's a fictional conceit, or literary "device" that an author like Stephen King has focused on in his own writings.  He's done this at least four times that I'm aware of.  The best examples of King using this "device" can be found in works like "Secret Window, Secret Garden", and The Dark Half.  Kelly Link seems to be paying a visit to these same imaginative stomping grounds with "Magic for Beginners".  The one element of originality that she's able to give the idea is to frame it as all taking place within the confines of a make-believe TV show.  This twist in the formula is interesting.  It creates what I can only describe as a double layered effect to her narrative.  If you keep in mind how the short story is written, then on one level, the fantastic is invading the normal.  At the same time, no it's not.  That's because we the audience are just sitting back and watching events unfold on a TV series.

In other words, the trick of Kelly's tale is that on one level it sounds like the beginning of the type of Fantasy novel that you might expect to crop up for a time on bookstore shelves sometime during 80s to early 90s.  The type of children's yarn that's partially inspired by the works of Suburban Fantasy from the likes of guys like Spielberg, Jim Henson, and Joe Dante.  On a further level, however, we find the author has sort of flipped script on us by introducing the conceit that the entire plot is contained within various episodes of the kind of TV show that would have existed somewhere on a spectrum between Sea Quest, Amazing Stories, and Babylon 5.  The type of show, in other words, that could only have existed for brief span of time during the 80s and 90s, before shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos pretty much shook things up and re-arranged the nature of what television was capable of telling.  At least that's how it was until the advent of streaming came along to knock everything into a cocked hat.  If Link's imaginary series was ever a real show, in other words, it would be the kind that would exist as an odd curio piece.  A little engine that wanted to, and instead wound up getting dwarfed by the likes of more successful fair such as Seinfeld, Cheers, and Deep Space Nine.  It means that all the action takes place within this fantastic world, which is also a fiction within yet another fiction.

There's this odd recursive effect that the author is going for here.  Link kind of wants to play mind games with the expectations of her audience.  She gives us what sounds like it could a typical Harry Pooter knock-off, and then manages to dig up the right kind of narrative trick which lends a nice twist to the action we're reading about.  This is all just a matter of playing with the format, however.  It's not the real heart of the story itself.  If we want to go for any of that, then the real question to ask here is twofold.  What happens in the story, and is it any good?  Here's the part where Kelly gives us one final mind screw to chew over.  To start out simple, I'd have to say that I liked what I read.  At the same time, there is this odd sense of incompletion to the story.  We have a promising beginning where it looks as if the content of Jeremy's favorite TV shows is about to come to life on him.  Another way to put it might be that we're watching a couple of opening episodes for The Neverending Story: The Series.  Just like that much loved bit of 80s trauma fuel, things seem to be gearing up to the point where Jeremy is about to find himself drawn into the world of his favorite artistic creation, and that's where everything stops.

I'm not making a word of that up, either.  When we last see Jeremy Mars, he's sitting down in a room somewhere in an old, gothic church which has been refurbished to look like something out of The Addams Family in order to catch the latest episode of The Library.  Everywhere there's this great sense of anticipation.  A lot of strange, yet fantastic stuff has been happening, and now it looks as if we've arrived at the moment that's going to provide the viewers the answers to any questions that have been sparked off in our minds up to this point.  The TV gets turned on, the latest episode of The Library starts and...The End.  Just like that.  The capping irony of this moment comes from the following realization.  The whole thing concludes in a freakin' church!  Out of sheer curiosity I decided to check the publication date for this bit of narrative tease.  Link's short story first saw the light of day in a collection of the same type in the year 2005.  The final episode of Lost was broadcast on May, 23rd, 2010.  This means Link's work somehow provides a perfect pre-empt for the fallout of that entire show.  The punchline is that I can see how the way her own Fantasy ends could wind up being described as polarizing.  The key difference is that J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelöf gave viewers a complete story with a beginning and end.  The whole thing is best described as a convoluted and botched mess.

Kelly Link, meanwhile, has written a short story that reads very much like it's just the beginning of a longer Fantasy novel, and I'm wanting to know more.  That seems to be the biggest takeaway I've got from pouring through this endeavor.  That I've just received an invitation to this quirky, yet fascinating secondary world, and then being left with the sense that you can just sense the author encouraging us to wonder what happens next.  According to blogger Matt Hilliard, this might almost be sort of the point to the whole thing.  He starts out his review of this short story by highlighting that most of the commentary on Kelly's has centered around questions of its overall meaning.  Matt doesn't deny the importance of this aspect of the story, yet he gives an interesting reason as to why figuring out what the story of Jeremy Mars and the Fox is all about won't really happen until readers get a better grip on what the story is already telling us about itself.  He tells of how "Abigail Nussbaum has written about how the story captures the experience of fandom and done a better job than I would, so just read that if you haven’t and then come back. However, while the fandom aspect is a major theme and probably the root of the story’s appeal, I think that the story has a far broader scope. It’s really about fiction: stories, the people who create them, and the people who enjoy them. It’s easy to imagine a great Kelly Link story about the ups and downs of being an intense fan of a television show, not least because that story is embedded in this one, but “Magic For Beginners” is after bigger game right from the first sentence of its second paragraph (web)". 

From there, Matt goes on to outline the same territory already covered so far in this article.  In that sense, a lot of the content of this review is dependent and inspired off of what he has to say.  With that insight in mind, I do encourage you to go and read his own take on Link's story, as he's the one who gave all of the avenues to explore here.  At the same time, the rest of his blog, Yet There Are Statues is worth checking out on its own merits.  While there's a lot of overlap between my take on this short story and his, there are one or two places where my own thinking veers off from that of Hilliard's.  For one thing, I'm pretty much "Up in the Air" about whether I'd go as far as saying that Fox is also a character in the novels of Jeremy's father.  I just wasn't given enough information by the text itself to justify that kind of theory.  At the same time, it's like you can just see where Matt is coming from on this, and even while I don't subscribe to the idea, it is still one of those kind of intriguing conceits that you have to admit would be cool to see if someone could develop it further.  It's this idea of the author encouraging the fans to pick things up where she left off that comes as my greatest takeaway from Kelly's story.  I almost want to say it's like being handed a pen and paper, then being told to takeover from here.  

This is something I could very well be imagining, however, this is the first piece of fiction I've ever read where it sounds like the writer is eager to see if her readers might just have their own spark of creativity necessary to continue on the saga of the Martian, the Fox, and the Library.  Come to think of it, depending on which direction the reader could take things in their Imagination, that would make for a very good alternate book title.  As it stands, the name that Link has chosen for her short story remains suggestive enough.  It's the kind of title you'd expect to see on a children's novel written by Ursula K. Le Guinn, or Diana Wynne Jones.  Everything we're given in the text itself points in the direction of a very familiar setup.  It's here where I start to build upon Hilliard's thesis above.  Much like Harry learning about Hogwarts, Kelly's story shows all the signs of wanting to be a quest narrative about this ordinary suburban kid who goes on a journey into a fantastical world, which also happens to be the setting of his favorite TV show.  It even sounds a hell of a lot like the premise of an actual Saturday Morning specimen called Captain N: The Game Master.  Something tells me, however, that in the case of Link's tale, there's a whole lot of room for better characterization, action, and world building.

If I had to take a guess where a setup like this could go, well, I might have an idea about this.  However, it's so vague and nascent that the good news is it really can't get in the way of others imagining what happens next.  The best I can offer is that it would have to start out where Link leaves off.  Jeremy has just settled into to watch the latest episode of his show.  Fox would make a reappearance, and sooner or later the characters on the screen would start addressing him through the television monitor.  Fox starts to ask the boy for help.  Jeremy can't quite believe this is happening, at first.  Fox assures him its real, and that the inhabitants of his home away from home aren't just regular people in monster masks, but actual Creatures of the Night, or something like it.  Maybe then would be a good time for there to be like some sort of attack on the church, and Jeremy has to make a run for it.  He gets separated from his mother in the process, and the Night Creatures basically escort him through some kind of portal to escape.  The next thing he knows, there's Fox, alive, kicking, and waiting to greet him.  From there, the basic premise is simple.  In order to get his old life back, Jeremy will have to follow his favorite TV character on a quest to save the Library from some sort of threat or destruction.  He'll need to learn magic to do it.  The only way to do that is to learn how to do magic, and he's very much a beginner.

As far as story bibles go, that one is so damn basic its almost a cliche.  However, it's best I've got.  The good news is that a prototypical setup doesn't automatically have to be a bad thing.  What counts with a scenario like this is how well you are able to build a whole world, it's characters, and above all, it's plotting in order to tell a good story.  As far as that last, and most important qualification is concerned, I'd have to say Link passes the test with high marks.  What we've got here is an unbridled flight of fantasy with a good natured heart at its center.  There is a sense in which the author might be spoken of as playing with the kind of storytelling formulas as that found in stories like Harry Potter.  Everything about the plot reads like a lead up to the moment when the the protagonist is about to be given a full-fledged introduction to the world of magic, before everything cuts off.  Prior to that moment (more of which anon) there is still the suggestion that we've been here and seen everything before in another format.  If Link is unable to claim artistic originality as one of her strengths, she's still able to make up for it for two important reasons.  The first is down her consummate skill with creating this atmosphere of depth and weight to her own secondary world.  She's able to give us this idea of a lived in stage.

While it may be true that it's not as well mapped out as Hogwarts Castle and its surrounding environs, it doesn't stop Link from being able to pull off the same creative trick that Tolkien was able to achieve with Lord of the Rings.  She leaves her audience with enough hints and clues to help paint this picture of a hidden world that hints at a greater backdrop of story somehow baked into it.  The best part about this aspect of the short story comes from trying to figure out whether that's meant to be the case, or if the writer has just pulled a very clever and fun hat trick on her readers by creating the literary equivalent of the hall of mirrors technique.  Something tells me it's supposed to be seen as more than just a superficial stylistic game.  Like any good artist, Link writes her story in a way that means business, and aims to play for keeps.  We're meant to take the story of Jeremy and the Fox seriously.  Even if Kelly's story is meant to be played straight, that's not the same as claiming that it isn't meant to be fun.  This brings us to the second strength of "Magic for Beginners".  It's easy to pick up on the infectious fun the writer had in crafting her plot, and that she has a great deal of affection for her characters.  A lot of this comes through in the many colorful and imaginative descriptions we're given the story's main setting.

Take for instance, the delirious invention on display in the following passages.  " In the previous episode of The Library, masked pirate-magicians said they would sell Prince Wing a cure for the spell that infested Faithful Margaret's hair with miniature, wicked, fire-breathing golems. (Faithful Margaret's hair keeps catching fire, but she refuses to shave it off. Her hair is the source of all her magic.)   The pirate-magicians lured Prince Wing into a trap so obvious that it seemed impossible it could really be a trap, on the one-hundred-and-fortieth floor of The Free People's World-Tree Library. The pirate-magicians used finger magic to turn Prince Wing into a porcelain teapot, put two Earl Grey tea bags into the teapot, and poured in boiling water, toasted the Eternally Postponed and Overdue Reign of the Forbidden Books, drained their tea in one gulp, belched, hurled their souvenir pirate mugs to the ground, and then shattered the teapot, which had been Prince Wing, into hundreds of pieces. Then the wicked pirate-magicians swept the pieces of both Prince Wing and collectable mugs carelessly into a wooden cigar box, buried the box in the Angela Carter Memorial Park on the seventeenth floor of The World-Tree Library, and erected a statue of George Washington above it.

"So then Fox had to go looking for Prince Wing. When she finally discovered the park on the seventeenth floor of the Library, the George Washington statue stepped down off his plinth and fought her tooth and nail. Literally tooth and nail, and they'd all agreed that there was something especially nightmarish about a biting, scratching, life-sized statue of George Washington with long, pointed metal fangs that threw off sparks when he gnashed them. The statue of George Washington bit Fox's pinky finger right off, just like Gollum biting Frodo's finger off on the top of Mount Doom. But of course, once the statue tasted Fox's magical blood, it fell in love with Fox. It would be her ally from now on (ibid)".  I'm pretty sure that leaves a clear impression of the kind of Fantasy Link is writing for her readers here.  A lot of it falls under the heading of Magical Realism, yet in another sense, I'd argue it can be spoken of as all part of the broader definition of New Wave Fabulism.  One of the occasional tropes of this type of narrative is the easy, almost casual use of surrealistic touches and the logic of dreams as a storytelling tool.  It's the kind of Romantic approach as that found in the work of Jonathan Carroll.

Not too way back on this site, I took the time to give reader an introduction to the latter author mentioned above by reviewing his novel Bones of the Moon.  It's a work that's a bit more straightforward than Link's, and yet it's also a book where you'll find the author utilizing the same techniques as those employed in the passages from Kelly's story above.  If you ever decide to pick up a copy of any book by Carroll, you'll see what I mean.  It won't take long to realize you're in the hands of the kind of Imagination that's at home with the idea of a half-human fox like creature duking it out with a living statue of George Washington.  Perhaps that very image, in and of itself, should stand as a good emblem from what can happen in a story like this.  I think another critical term for this kind of practice is to claim it as an example of Slipstream fiction.  The sort of plot, in other words, where all the elements of the story are placed into a generic blender, and if the experiment works, then the best possible result is the kind of Fantasy that harkens all the way back to the work of writers like Lewis Carroll.  It's very easy to imagine the creator of the Wonder and Looking-Glass Lands taking one look at a concept like The World-Tree Library, and wanting to see if he could do anything with it.

That's the fundamental nature of the magical realm at the heart of Kelly Link's story.  Perhaps it helps if we label it as an example of the Wonderland Fantasy.  The type of fiction revolving around secondary worlds where the logic of dreams rules over everything.  If such a label helps you to get a better grasp on this form of narrative, then be my guest.  Think of it as a helpful way to ease newcomers into the particular charms of a story where can read the following: "On television, it's night in The Free People's World-Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, tucked into their coffins, their scabbards, priest-holes, buttonholes, pockets, hidden cupboards, between the pages of their enchanted novels. Moonlight pours through the high, arched windows of the Library and between the aisles of shelves, into the park. Fox is on her knees, clawing at the muddy ground with her bare hands. The statue of George Washington kneels beside her, helping (web)".  I find it easy to get drawn into that approach to storytelling.

Beyond the Magical Realist aspects of the plot, it also shouldn't be forgotten that Kelly is also good writing three-dimensional characters that you can care about.  That's not the same thing as calling them realistic, however.  Jeremy Mars and his friends make up a very relatable group of nerds united by their shared love of pop culture.  This is very much the sort of phenomena that has become a commonplace of modern experience.  It's also something Link needs to take and give a necessary heighted, slightly larger than life dramatic quality if it's ever to work in a piece of fiction.  As long as we're talking about creative writing, then while it may be possible to create a dimensional cast of characters, it will forever by a misreading to claim that this dimensionality makes them in any way real, either in terms of behavior or situation.  Vladimir Nabokov once claimed that all writing was one, big matter of telling fairy tales to ourselves, and I think that's a helpful lens to keep in mind when reading any story that would claim to be "realistic".  Even if Jeremy and his struggles with growing up aren't "down-to-Earth", it's still not the same as claiming its all unrelatable.  On the contrary, it seems as if it's in the Wonder Years slice-of-life segments were the themes of Link's story are at their strongest.

In terms of what is the meaning of this fragment of narrative, I tend to agree with Hilliard that Nussbaum's take is basically the correct one.  It's a story about the enthusiasm for stories, and how the sharing of these aesthetic interests can sometimes help form a community of friendship.  Another way to say it is that it counts not so much as a love letter to any particular fandom, but more just to the very idea of Fans as a concept and social phenomenon.  Figuring out this message today has made Link's story into something of a perhaps necessary tonic in an era which has seen a series of rifts develop between fans and artists.  The story winds up acting as a reminder of what the creation and enjoyment of art are supposed to be about, and that each can amount to more than what things have become.  It's clear that Kelly has a genuine liking for people who become fans, and as I've said, a lot of the inconclusive nature of this story begins to make sense if you realize it might be the author's way of nudging her readers to see if they can make the giant leap from fan to artist in their own right.  To create a fiction that acts an encouragement to greater spurs of creativity.  It's an inspiring way to tell a story if this is true.

Beyond any commentary upon the value of fandom, I'd like suggest that the passage of time has revealed one further prophetic element to the tale of the Fox and Mars, and it goes something like this.  If there's a sense in which Kelly's story has its antecedents in setup conceits like that found in the TV version of Dungeons and Dragons (where characters from an imaginary version of our world find themselves thrust into a fantastical magic realm), then it's subsequent legacy has been in what might considered the accidental co-creation of a very prevalent form of storytelling.  It's a method of telling tales which has gone on to become an extra-literary phenomena, a practice whose reach now extends all the way into the digital domains.  I'm talking here about the phenomenon known as the ARG, or Alternate Reality Game.  This is the title it has been given within the circles of online fandom.  It's accurate enough, so far as labels go.  Though a much better term to describe the most ambitious specimens of this new artistic genre is to call it a form of Interactive Storytelling.  That's because most ARGs exist for the same reason as Shakespeare's plays.  The artist was minding their own business, and then the Inspiration for a tale worth telling came along, and it was too good not to put down on paper.

All anyone is dealing with here is the storytelling instinct finding or creating outlets and methods for itself as our technology advances.  An ARG is really no more than a normal story (mostly genre oriented, with most of them falling into the Found Footage, or Horror category) which allows for a certain amount of greater participation by the audience.  It's a digital storytelling practice that makes an active effort to encourage the readers and viewers not to remain as mere passive observers of the narrative.  Instead, ARG authors tend to go out of their way to draw their audiences into helping drive their plots along by a narrative technique that's become something like the pattern, or standard formula for this type of digital yarn.  The first part involves the presentation of a snippet of the plot.  Due the Gothic nature of most ARGs, each revealed part of the plot tends to be written and presented in such a way as to guarantee the maximum amount of shock effect.  What it means in practice is that you'll get a lot of setups reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project.  Most of these scripted moments revolve around a near faceless protagonist behind the lens of a camera stumbling upon something that goes bump in the night.  The scenes usually end once the Horror of each sequence is brought on stage, complete with rubber zipper running down the monster's back and all.  From there, the second part of ARGs come in.

ARG authors will then leave little hints behind for the audience to figure out.  These hints come in the form of clues to be followed and tracked down, or else puzzles to be solved.  This is the part where the audience has to play its part in the narrative.  Each puzzle or clue left behind by the Interactive Writer is designed so that the only way the Alternate Reality play can continue is if the viewers and readers can piece together the fragments of story carefully concealed away in these clues and hints.  In other words, it's up to us as audience members to help the story go forward by assembling it, in a manner of speaking.  The serendipitous part of this whole storytelling process is that it's a surprisingly close correspondence to what the character of Jeremy is forced to do in Link's short story.  Much like an audience participant in an ARG, Mars has to head toward a specific location and go on a bit of a treasure hunt for items that will be crucial in carrying forward the plot of the story he's caught up in.  

The other tie between Jeremy's situation and that of the average Alternate Reality Gamer is that Link's protagonist is unsure whether or not he likes being the hero of his own Fantasy story.  In that sense, Kelly's snippet of Magical Realism can act as a literary precursor for this relatively new digital storytelling format.  Nor does the resemblance end there.  There are at least two examples of Interactive Storytelling that share the same basic premise as the of "Magic for Beginners".  These two are known as Candle Cove, and Angel Hare.  Each deals with TV shows taking on an unearthly life of their own.

The former Creepypasta was created by online author and content creator Kris Straub, while the latter series is the work of an indie production known as the East Patch.  All of the three project just listed are able to stand on their own as separate artistic entities, each with their own unique identities.  Straub's work counts as a straight up Tale of Terror for the digital age, while the East Patch production is able to have fun applying a bit of further creativity to the same format pioneered by the likes of of artists such as Straub, and finding ways to carrying it off into further fields of artistic innovation.  This grants Angel Hare a greater sense of creative leeway, allowing the ARG to straddle the boundaries of several genres.  It manages to incorporate the tropes of Analog Horror found in Straub's work, while at the same time never quite tying itself to them.  This allows the East Patch series the chance to belong to a greater field of genres, while also granting the possibility of transcending such categorical limitations.  Both stories focus on a set of protagonists recalling the TV shows of their respective youths.  The shared twist is that a little digging reveals that the programs of each story are revealed to be receptacles for supernatural and otherworldly entities who are trying to make contact with out reality.  The nature of these televisual entities ranges from the malignant to the creepy yet also possibly benign.

After going over the basic gist of "Magic for Beginners", it should be easy to figure what it shares in common with the efforts of Straub and the East Patch.  What we have here is a trio of stories centered around otherworldly creatures showcasing or disguising their presence in the form of some perhaps less than normal TV series.  In addition to the similarity of premise, each story then goes on to recount how their main characters find themselves getting drawn in to exploring the nature of these phantasmagorical shows.  

The further they dig into the mysteries they are confronted with, the more the ground of what they thought was their normal reality begins to shift and change, until it seems as if there is no longer any distinction to be made between fact and fiction.  That's a great deal of coincidence for a number of art projects done several years apart from each other.  At the same time, I can't just leap to conclusions and claim that Straub and the East Patch production company were all inspired by Link's efforts.  For one thing, there's no telling what the precise inspiration for any of the three stories discussed here might be.

At the same time, this is one of those cases where the similarities between otherwise seemingly disconnected narratives was striking enough to be considered worthy of comment.  The final reason for lumping each of these three narratives together like this is because of the way it allows the observant reader to make the tentative suggestion that we might be witnessing the development of a trope.  Kelly's story seems to be playing around with a number of concepts that have been around for a while.  One of them is the idea of fictional creations coming to life, while the other is the notion of technology being haunted or otherwise possessed, or used as the container for unearthly and ethereal forces and lifeforms.  These are all themes and ideas we've had an opportunity to discuss at least once before on this site.  We've gone into an examination of the Haunted Tech trope, and how this plays into the format known as Found Footage Horror once before.  In the process of looking into the history of these creative ideas, we've learned that pretty much all of the concepts that we now associate with the cinematic and digital spaces to have taken off in the wake of films like Blair Witch, have all in fact originated in the realm of analog page and text Gothic fiction.  This remains a revelation to me, as it means that the intertwined concepts of Found Footage and Augmented Reality Games are literary plot devices, as opposed to being the pure brainchild of what might be termed the cinematic outlook.

All that artists like Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez, Kris Strauch, and the East Patch crew have done is to give these bookish concepts a new home in the digital age.  Link, meanwhile, has sort of brought them all to forefront of print writing once more in a way that furthers the creative possibilities of what any potential writer is capable of doing with such material.  "Magic for Beginners" thus acts as a sounding board that more or less points out how it is possible to stretch the creative capabilities found in the notion of Paranormal Technology into realms well beyond those of the Found Footage format.  Another way to say this is to point out that Kelly might just have given the creators of digital ARG stories the chance or opportunity to branch off into further pathways of genre exploration and melding.  It's sort of a surprise that no one has ever thought to take the techniques and practices found in works like Marble Hornets or Echo Rose, and apply them to the tropes of Fantasy.  At the same time, the very idea still remains such a novelty as of this writing, that it's no wonder so few have ever thought to uncover, much less try and travel down this road not taken.  Nonetheless, one of the great things about Jeremy Mars and his journey into the realm of his favorite TV show is that it can do two things.

On the one hand, assuming that Link meant her story as an invitation to her audience to try and grow their own creative potential by picking up the threads of her story where she leaves off, then it makes perfect sense for any eager and enterprising online content creator to see how possible it is to bring the journey of Fox and Mars to ARG life.  Why not turn "Magic for Beginners" into the kind of web series that attempts to blur the lines between reality and a make-believe TV show?  The best part is you don't even need anything like a major Hollywood budget in order to pull this sort of thing off.  Most of the action can be conveyed in a cost effective manner, whether through the use of Analog screen text, or else bits and scraps of physical clues designed to tease out the nature of the plot.  Other methods for for conveying the idea of the fictional encroaching on the real world would be to provide the audience with photo stills of locations either displayed or hinted at in Link's story.  All you'd need to do is either create sets or better scout out real world locations that have just the right quality to them to to make perfect stand-ins for, say, the outside of Jeremy's family church, or author photos of his dad, Gordon Mars, along with fictional mock ups of copies of his books.  You might even throw in artwork of characters like the Fox, and even an imaginative snapshot or two of what looks like her fleeing from the camera.

If you want, you can even through photos that show sightings of her and Jeremy in random locations as they make their way through their quest.  The attempt at conjuring up this alternate reality would also extend to pictures of the Mars family, make-believe stills and behind the scenes captures from The Library TV series.  As for any actual broadcast portion of the program, part of the beauty of ARGs is their trans-medial quality.  They never have to be limited by the confines of budget constraints, or the nightmares that have become modern Hollywood production schedules or demands.  ARGs can easily bypass such roadblocks through the use of alternate film and production techniques.  Given the ethereal nature of a story like "Magic for Beginners", perhaps the best way to go could be to limit any dramatizations of the plot to snippets of "uncovered audio files" of Library episodes were it becomes clear that Fox is still very much alive, and that Jeremy has now taken his place within the show as its main hero.  If anyone decides that it's best to give the audience at least something in the way of footage from Kelly's imaginary series, then perhaps its advisable to take a lesson from the East Patch Kids, and go with an affordable animated version of events.  However, if it is possible to do these elements in live action, then feel free to give it your all.  Angel Hare shows how it can be done both here and here.

One of the reasons I'm willing to be so positive about the potential for taking the basic premise of "Magic for Beginners" and turning into an ARG chronicle is because this is exactly the sort of thing guys like Kris Straub have been up to with his own creative properties.  A tale like "Candle Cove" is something that no longer exists in a vacuum.  Instead, much like Tolkien's Middle Earth, it has gone on to become just one leaf on a much bigger story tree.  It first appeared on Straub's Ichor Falls website in 2009, and from there began to make the rounds in Reddit forums and Creepypasta pages.  From there, Straub launched his ARG showcase, Local 58.  What many of this online Horror series missed at first for the longest time was that it served as a continuation of the Horrors on display in "Candle Cove".  More than that, Straub then went on to leave hints and clues that his web series was tied into other media he had created such as his now seemingly defunct Broodhollow online comic.  In an interesting twist of serendipity, that's yet another written work that has been broken off right in the middle of the action.  Combine this with the fact that Kelly's short story was published a mere three years before "Candle Cove" helped inaugurate the ARG boom, and she comes off as an unheralded inspiration for it all.  This is mere conjecture, however Straub and the East Patch show where her story can go from here.

I think all of this can go a long way towards showing just how much of a quality story Kelly Link has given her readers.  Leaving it on its own terms, what we've got on our hands is a charming little Fantasy that's perhaps not just for adults, but also discerning younger readers of a specific near Teens and above age.  It's a demonstration of what I can't described in any other way than as an example of Packed Simplicity.  It's a story composed of several levels of evolving complexity that continues to reveal itself the further you explore it's components.  This comes from the rich generic heritage that's to be found in the otherwise simple yet quirky and enjoyable aspects of its plot.  It's the type of story where a little bit of thought begins to unravel the threads of the narrative, and all the ways in which it connects to various other types of tales and genres.  It's this inner thematic richness which makes "Magic for Beginners" something of a minor marvel.  On one level, it's just a simple short story about a boy on the cusp of great adventures.  On another, it's a rumination about what it means to be a fan, and the ways that good storytelling can shape and impact your life.  On a final level, it's a story about stories.  Link's tale displays an easy awareness of the many elements it contains, and this is all part of the fun.

It's a the kind of story that stands as an example of the mad genius that can be had with Inspiration.  Kelly's Imagination has allowed her to bring together a number of generic and storytelling strands in such a way that they are able to accomplish two feats at once.  On a thematic level, each of the major elements underlying the plot are able to telegraph where they come from, and how all of these strands coming together are able to unite in such a way as to enrich the sense of literary sophistication in a manner that is willing and able to reward the smart and attentive readers out there.  It's a story that is fascinated with its own invention in the best way possible.  At the same time, it never forgets that the first and last job of any narrative always remains the same.  It's here to be an entertaining read, and is able to pull off the most important job on multiple levels.  This is the kind of short offering that is able to work as both a sly and affectionate commentary on the nature of fiction, and also as just a plain fun adventure yarn for young and old.  It make Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners" well worth a recommendation for its efforts.