http://www.kjbishop.net

K.J. Bishop is an artist. One of her art nouveau styled pieces
graces the cover of her novel. It's a perfect accompaniment for
what's between the book's covers. It's an elegant and ornate
etching, with a passing nod to early 20th Century surrealism. The
novel features an epigram from the most mysterious of the symbolists,
the proto-surrealist Lautremont. The influences of art and poetry
snake through "The Etched City," a brilliant first novel.

It's a "fantasy" novel only by the whims of marketing niches. But it
defies such easy categorization. Perhaps China Mieville's
term "weird fiction" is more appropriate. Or maybe not. It's up to
the reader to decide.

The book starts out in the Copper Country, a desert landscape
littered with ghost towns and wandering nomads, a cross between the
Old West and the Arabian Nights. We met our (anti) heroes, the
expert gunman and assassin Gwynn and the world weary doctor Raule.
Both are refugees from a failed revolution. Gwynn is an enigmatic,
amoral figure, equal parts Byronic hero and ennui-filled
existentialist. Raule is a burned out female doctor, with the ghost
of a conscience. Both characters are tired of being on the run.
After a barely surviving another pursuit by the victor's forces, both
decide to immigrate to the city of Ashamoil, where nobody knows them
and they can start anew. The novel follows the path that their lives
take in this phantasmorgic, tropical city.

Gwynn, in a move like the poet Arthur Rimbaud, becomes an outlaw—the
lackey of a Mafiosi-like gun runner and slave trader. The underworld
life, with its flashes of brutish, doesn't quite fulfill this would-
be philosopher. So he spends some of his evenings debating theology
with a priest (who visits whorehouses), and wooing his strange,
beautiful paramour, the artist Beth. Raule, rejected by the medical
establishment, becomes an unlicensed doctor in a poor section of
Ashamoil, in an attempt to regain her phantom conscience.

The literary novel's task is to document the spiritual change of its
characters. The fantastic novel's task is to provide the reader a
sense of wonder. "The Etched City" succeeds on both counts. It's a
novel of character, in which the spiritual states of Gywnn and Raule,
and the secondary characters are reflected in the haunted city of
Ashamoil. A man can grow insects in his hand; an artist's dark
visions become real; a plague of monstrous mutant stillbirths appear
with increasing frequency. The grotesque and the miraculous, the
sacred and profane exist side by side in Ashamoil. The city mixes
the decadent elegance of Tanith Lee's Paradys and Mieville's crowded,
sinister metropolis of New Crouzbon to wonderful effect. But Bishop
simply isn't after an exotic background; the machinations of
Ashamoil's magic are essential ingredients character development.
Bishop's novel has a much in common with the fictions of Paul Bowles
or Lawrence Durrell as it does with the "hothouse" fantasy tradition
it mines (e.g., Clark Ashton Smith). The beautifully crafted, clear
prose (perfumed by laconic wit) creates what is essentially a new
genre—"Literary Weird Fiction."

--Craig L. Gidney