Vess, Charles: Book of Ballads, The

Another un-booklogged anthology, Charles Vess’s The Book of Ballads. This is a collection of thirteen ballads adapted as sequential art by Vess, mostly from scripts by writers other than himself; nine were originally published by his Green Man Press, two were published in other anthologies, and two are original to this collection.

The most important reaction I had to this collection, for purposes of you-the-reader, is that I’m more interested in a ballad retelling the more it does with the source, or the further it goes from it. So Neil Gaiman’s “The False Knight on the Road” and Delia Sherman’s “The Daemon Lover,” which as far as I can tell are entirely straight retellings, leave me cold. They’re very pretty, but I’m afraid that my main reaction is, “Why bother?”

(You may now commence jeering.)

(Another very straight retellings is Jeff Smith’s “The Galtee Farmer,” but I like the wonderfully comic art, so I’ll give it a pass.)

The rest of the stories work with the ballads in different ways. Sharyn McCrumb’s “Thomas the Rhymer” and Charles Vess’s “Alison Gross” extend the stories in time, but what interests me most about those ballads is motivations, not what-comes-next, and that’s not where the authors chose to go.

A number of the other retellings add or change motivations. Lee Smith’s “The Three Lovers” looks, at first, like a pretty straight retelling, made interesting by its presentation as a stage play (with the edges of the stage framing the panels), but it changes the killing insult from a racial slur to a broken heart. Charles de Lint’s “Sovay” and Jane Yolen’s “The Great Selchie of Sule Skerry” interpolate motivations: why dress up as a highwayman, why marry a gunner? Along the same lines, but much more extensive, are Midori Snyder’s “Barbara Allen” and Elaine Lee’s “Tam-Lin”. Of these, I really like Snyder’s story, which provides a complete backstory to explain why Barbara Allen scorns young William and laughs at his corpse. Lee reimagines Tam Lin as a Celtic sacrifice, bound to guard a well, who deceives Janet in order to be reborn as her child; however, I can’t get past the prose, which is set as blocks on the page facing a full-page illustration: “I am the chosen . . . the Holy Sacrifice! My blood nourishes, my life makes fertile, and my soul . . . guards this place. For such as me, there is no hope of rebirth!”

Two other retellings change or specifiy the settings. Jane Yolen’s “King Henry” specifies Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn as the main characters. And in what’s perhaps the most extensive re-imagining, Charles de Lint sets “Twa Corbies” in what’s almost certainly his imaginary present-day city of Newford: two crow girls listen to a dead homeless man recast his life story as the tale of an errant knight. (I believe the crow girls reappear in one of de Lint’s novels.) If you like de Lint’s work, you will certainly like this, as it’s entirely characteristic; I’m less enthusiastic about de Lint’s characteristic-ness than I once was, but I still enjoyed the story well enough.

And last, there’s my favorite, Emma Bull’s “The Black Fox.” This is actually a recent (1974) ballad by Graham Pratt, based on a fragment of a Yorkshire folktale; it tells of a fox hunt that’s not finding any foxes, until someone injudiciously remarks that they’d chase the Devil himself if he appeared. Out pops a black fox, and the chase is on. I like this one because in its sixteen pages, it has vivid characters, humor, sense of wonder, and an interesting little twist on the ballad. To my mind it’s the most satisfactory as a standalone story; the tension with the ballad is a bonus.

(“The Black Fox” was first printed in Firebirds, edited by Sharyn November; that might count as another un-booklogged anthology, except that I’m not sure if I ever finished it. I’ll have to fish it out and see.)