On a bank of the Big Sandy River in eastern Kentucky stands a sycamore that was once a woman. She chose it, decades ago, to get away from a judge’s son, using words her great-aunt taught her, and she has kept company ever since with a sour barred owl and the slow business of bark and leaf. Then a young woman is chased into the woods and pinned against her trunk, and the tree has to decide whether the old words are worth passing on. The Sycamore and the Sybil sits near the end of The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow, but it could stand at the front as a key to the whole book: a story about escape, about what it costs, and about whether a woman’s magic should only ever be turned against herself.
People Who Change Because They Have To
The idea that runs underneath these stories is transformation as survival rather than curse. Harrow returns to it again and again in The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow, and rarely tells it the same way twice.
Its fullest version is The Knight and the Butcherbird, set in a poisoned Appalachia three centuries after the old world ended. A seventeen-year-old town record-keeper named Shrike is hiding a terrible secret about her wife, and a famous demon-hunting knight from the Cincinnati enclave rides into the hollow with a hooded hawk on his arm. The story works as a revenge tale, a romance and an argument about who gets to call a changed person a monster, and it reads even better in company than it did on its own.
Dustbaby takes the idea back to the 1930s. On a Kansas farm buried by the Dust Bowl, a widow who has lost her husband and her newborn daughter finds a milk-pale, green-eyed infant lying in her wheat. The drought, in this telling, is something older than bad farming reclaiming the land, and the widow must choose between the town that wants the child gone and the strange green country on the horizon. The atmosphere is superb, though the plot is thinner than the weather.
The pattern holds even when the setting is invented outright. Do Not Look Back, My Lion takes place in an empire where wives go to war and husbands keep house, and follows Eefa, a lame healer married to the most celebrated warrior in the land. She has delivered four children and watched each receive the ritual scar that promises them to the war god, and the fifth pregnancy becomes the point at which she stops consenting. It is a moving story, but the reversal of roles is drawn a little too neatly, as if the premise were a diagram the characters had to stand inside.
Where Alix E. Harrow Lets the Light In
For all its grief, The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow is often very funny, and that humour does structural work. The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly is a run of one-way letters from a fairy queen who has stolen a toddler and keeps lowering her price when the mother does not call. The queen’s growing exasperation at tantrums, cups of the wrong colour and an ill-advised border war with trolls is delightful, and the turn from comedy to sympathy, once she understands why the mother is silent, is handled gently. It is slight, and its resolution is tidier than real life allows, but it gives the reader air between the heavier pieces.
The Long Way Up is a better example of the balance. A widow in coastal Maine is handed a card by an unlicensed therapist working out of an RV in a supermarket car park, and the card leads her down into an underworld assembled from cellars, bomb shelters and somebody’s grandmother’s television den. It is an Orpheus story that knows the reader knows the rules, and it uses that knowledge to say something sharp about how a marriage can fail to see the person inside it. The comic texture of that underworld makes the sadness bearable rather than diluting it.
The Mothers Who Keep Arriving
The collection’s weakness grows from its strength. Harrow’s preoccupations are unusually consistent, and in a book gathered over a decade, that consistency becomes repetition. A remarkable number of these stories turn on a grieving mother, a lost or stillborn child, or a woman who takes in somebody else’s. Individually each one earns its feeling. Side by side, in The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow, they begin to read as variations on a single wound, and a reader working through the book in a few long sittings may feel the emotional key change less than it should.
There is also a tendency, in the stories set in the future, to unload the world before the people have had a chance to move. Coined slang, invented institutions and the jargon of collapse arrive in the first pages and make the opening of the final story hard going. Both reservations are small against the book’s reach, but they explain why it is best read a story or two at a time.
The darker material is handled with care, and the book itself provides story-by-story guidance at the back, which readers will want: child death, suicide, sexual violence, war, persecution of queer people and frank sexuality all feature somewhere among these pages.
The Slantwise Histories Alix E. Harrow Is Keeping
Everything converges in The Last Archive, the most ambitious and angriest piece, and the one that finally explains the title. In a near-future eastern Kentucky run by a mining company, an old woman named Vex Lately, who once rode a mule through the mountains delivering books in the tradition of the Depression-era Pack Horse Library Project, sits down to tell two boys about the woman she loved and the records the company has done everything to destroy. Her voice is profane, mournful and furious in about equal measure.
What she offers them is the argument of The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow in a single gesture. When the paper record can be burned, flooded or eaten away, the truth survives as legend: history told at an angle, exaggerated and passed by mouth, but alive. Read in that light, the wolves, ghosts, changelings and fairy queens of the earlier stories look less like escapism and more like a counter-archive for people who rarely made it into official accounts.
The Writer Behind the Book
Harrow came to fiction as a historian. She enrolled at Berea College in Kentucky at sixteen, finished a history degree there in three years, took a master’s at the University of Vermont, and taught African and African American history as an adjunct at Eastern Kentucky University before writing full time. That training shows on almost every page of The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow, in the steel mills, ship’s ledgers and Depression farms, and in an obvious impatience with whose stories get kept. She grew up partly in Kentucky, which explains the hollows and creeks that run through the strongest pieces, and she now lives in Virginia.
In her acknowledgments she recalls being told, early on, that short stories would never earn her a book deal or readers, and admits she kept writing them out of stubbornness and pleasure. Readers who know her through novels such as The Everlasting will find the same sensibility here at its most concentrated.
Where It Leaves You
The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow is out now, and it confirms that the short form is where Harrow takes her biggest risks. Not every story lands with equal force, and the recurring figure of the bereaved mother wears thin, but the best pieces, especially the Appalachian ones, are as good as anything in contemporary fantasy. Readers who enjoyed Januaries by Olivie Blake will recognise the blend of romance, magic and melancholy; Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie shares its interest in grief carried through generations; and Ted Chiang’s Exhalation offers a cooler, more cerebral counterpart for anyone who wants their short fiction built around one idea at a time. Harrow’s stories are warmer and wilder than either, and they leave the impression that somewhere, a woman is still writing in the leaves.