Every plague leaves its mark on the world: crosses in our graveyards, blots of ink on our imaginations. Edgar Allan Poe had witnessed the ravages of cholera in Philadelphia, and he likely knew the story of how, in Paris, in 1832, the disease had struck at a ball, where guests turned violet blue beneath their masks. In Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” from 1842, Prince Prospero (“happy and dauntless and sagacious”) has fled a pestilence—a plague that stains its victims’ faces crimson—to live in grotesque luxury with a thousand of his noblemen and women in a secluded abbey, behind walls gated with iron. At a lavish masquerade ball, a tall, gaunt guest arrives to ruin their careless fun. He is dressed as a dead man: “The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have difficulty in detecting the cheat.” He is dressed as the Red Death itself: “His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of his face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.” Everyone dies, and because this is Poe, they die as an ebony clock tolls midnight (after which, even the clock dies): “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
I used to imagine wanting someone alive would revive them, if caught right after dying. If I went after them, buoyed by reflexive hope, I might bring them back. Like losing something—a bracelet, a pair of sunglasses, a plastic sandal—over the side of a boat, seeing the outline dim as it sinks. I’d flood with instinct. Dive into the water right away, head first, to retrieve what was lost.
For people who are deaf the world is often split in two: A world where sound is taken for granted, and another with its own rich culture of deaf history and sign language.
Poet Raymond Antrobus has always had to navigate between these two worlds, something he examines in his debut collection The Perseverance, out in the United States just in time for National Poetry Month.
The Absolute Book is a tongue-in-cheek homage to these overblown literary detective stories as well as a triumph of literary fantasy, and this knowing, feisty, humorous contribution to the genre is a hefty piece of work. There is a lot to keep track of here, not only in terms of characters but in terms of worlds. As Taryn, Shift and Berger duck and dive between realities they encounter demons, fairy folk, the semi-immortal hybrids known as the Taken, human souls in Purgatory and godly entities in avian form. The strands of real-world myth, folklore and fairytale from which Knox weaves the philosophical rationale behind what is in its appearance and mechanics a classic portal fantasy are as richly diverse as her characters, revealing a fluent knowledge of her predecessors as well as a solidly practical grasp of magical storytelling.
The Marks on the Map leaves a lingering melancholy, a sense that the marks we want to leave on the world are fragile, more permeable than we thought.