The Deep Ones: "Origin Story" by T. Kingfisher

"Origin Story" by T. Kingfisher

Discussion begins on September 29, 2021.

First published in Jackalope Wives (2017).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2201584

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Jackalope Wives

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://apex-magazine.com/origin-story/

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://apex-magazine.com/origin-story/

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Vernon
https://locusmag.com/2021/04/ursula-vernon-shiny-new-idea/
https://tinyurl.com/y9sutk3a

The publication date should be 2017.

There's an audio version on the same web page as the online version.

>2 AndreasJ:
>3 housefulofpaper:
Done and done.

Thanks :)

While badgering you, I should also point out that the touchstone goes to the individual short story Jackalope Wives, rather than the collection Jackalope Wives and Other Stories, which latter contains our story.

>5 AndreasJ:

Adjusted. I was close. At least I didn't link to a strange comic book I used to read:

As if a jackalope isn't uncanny or obscure enough on its own, ya gotta throw in some eldritch tentacles!

>7 elenchus:

Ha! I did pick that cover especially for the eldritch tentacles...

While weird and macabre, this didn't strike me as horror. Enjoyably strange, however.

The title had me suspecting that the creature would turn out to become some recognizable mythological or folkloric being, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Has Kingfisher/Vernon written anything more featuring it?

Was the beautiful one created specifcally as a bribe for the owner? I couldn't help but wonder if she shared the tendency to spread malice. I'd like to think the calf-eyes is a deliberate nod to Hera.

It's almost a horror story told in a deliberately non-horrifying way. Certainly there is plenty of material that could horrify, had the author wanted to provoke such a reaction. Evidently that's not her goal, observing almost lyrically the way some creations "mindless, ... scurried into the shadows, to spread malice and alarm" or simply noting that with other creations "the fairy grumbled because she knew that she had not quite got it right".

I love how the story was told, as much as the story. I liked especially that it's very Weird, but in a tone unusual for such stories. The humour, for example, didn't detract from the Weird though it did dampen body horror and tension.

I took it as a strong hint that the beautiful one was a bribe to the owner, and found it amusing when Kingfisher states "But this is not that creature’s story." I did not get the allusion to Hera, if that's what it is. And if it is, that really suggests the Origin Story here is more than a descriptor for the fairy creations. For if that's Hera, then the owner would be ... Zeus, making perhaps the charnel house an allegorical reference to the known World. (It doesn't quite fit with the rest of the setting: what would the city represent then? Or the other workers? But suggestive, nonetheless.)

I didn't mean the beautiful one is Hera, merely that her having calf eyes alludes to Hera's standing epithet "cow-eyed".

The story title is a term of art for superhero background narratives, and seems to suggest that the mare-woman is the protagonist of a series of later adventures.

I felt a little sad somehow that we never learned the name of the charnel fairy.

This story was an odd sort of match in tone (not content) for the Delany Tales of Nevèrÿon that I happen to be reading now.

I think there's a modern sub-genre of, not Adult fairy tales(!) but rather fairy-tales-told-for adults, and this story fits squarely into it. I have to confess to not knowing much about it. I think some Neil Gaiman stories could be classed as such, and some by Angela Slatter. These stories have a similar tone and narrative voice (The tone, to my ears, is different from Angela Carter's).

>12 paradoxosalpha:
I struggled through the second part of Triton, "Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus" (only the first part of a series, I now learn from Wikipedia) in my very early teens, and never read any more Samuel R. Delany.

>13 housefulofpaper:

The "Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus" continue in the Nevèrÿon books, and I have to admit, I really like them. I'm a Delany fan.

>14 paradoxosalpha:

I'd read Nova and really enjoyed it; and the same with the short story collection Driftglass, although I found that more challenging. I think I was just too young. I can't pin down exactly when I read Triton, but my copy was printed in 1977 and I bought it new. It could have sat in a warehouse or on the shop's shelves for a couple of years, maybe more, but even in 1981 I was only 13, and not precociously intellectual - certainly not to the extent of being able to dive into a semiotics text and not drown in it.

I think the first Delany I read was Dhalgren, in my early 20s. So a very different encounter!

Never read anything by Delany, I believe, although in my early teens I read a fair bit of speculative fiction without paying much attention to author names, so it's possible. (Authors I later encountered only to realize I'd already read something by them include Lovecraft, Dunsany, and Poul Anderson.)

Another one for the should-try-him-one-of-these-years list, I think.