62
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
LIGHT AND DARK, DARK, AND LIGHT a review by Warren Rochelle Fred Chappell. A Shadow All of Light. New York: Tor, 2016.
A Durham, NC, native, WA R R E N ROCHELLE earned his BA in English from UNC Chapel Hill. After working as a librarian for over a decade, he continued his studies at UNC Greensboro, earning both his MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English. Rochelle, currently a professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA, has had his short fiction and poetry published in such periodicals as GW Magazine, Charlotte Poetry Review, and Asheville Poetry Review. Additionally, his essays have appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Foundation, and in the essay collection More Lights Than One: On the Fiction of Fred Chappell (LSU Press, 2004). Rochelle’s “North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers: A Bibliographic Essay” opened NCLR 2001, which featured North Carolina science fiction and fantasy. A prolific author of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, FRED CHAPPELL served as North Carolina’s fourth poet laureate from 1997 to 2002. Born in Canton, NC, Chappell received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Duke University, and later became a professor of English at UNC Greensboro. Now retired, Chappell (who is the recipient of numerous literary honors, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and Yale University Library’s Bollingen Prize in Poetry) has written more than twenty-five books. Chappell’s poetry and prose have been featured often in both NCLR and NCLR Online.
Time proved her right. But, when I visited UNCG in the spring of 1989 and sat in on his fiction workshop, I found him more than a little intimidating. I read Dagon (1968), thinking that somehow that would help. Of all of Chappell’s books, this is my least favorite. Never mind that it won Best Foreign Novel in France and is considered by critics to be among the best horror novels written. I’m not a fan of horror. This dark, dark novel, described in an Amazon review as “an H.P. Lovecraft story written by [William] Faulkner,”2 I found disturbing and disquieting, feelings not alleviated by its beautiful prose. The rest of Chappell’s fiction I have enjoyed and loved (especially the Kirkman tetralogy), and his latest novel, A Shadow All of Light, is no exception, although its shadows can indeed be dark. Unlike much of Chappell’s fiction, often deeply rooted in the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina where he grew up, Shadow is set in “the Italianate, medievalesque city of Tardocco,” in the province of Tlemia.3 Shadows, their uses and procurement, as the key element of the fantastic, are at the novel’s center. As Chappell explained in his introductory remarks before a reading at UNC Greensboro, the novel has one core premise: “detachable shadows” that can be removed from the caster. Shadows become commodities; they are bought and sold and collected. And they can be and are stolen, often with a “quasilune knife,” a favorite of shadow thieves.4 Shadows are taken by
For someone born and raised and pretty much educated in North Carolina, I didn’t know much about Fred Chappell when I first heard about him, other than he was a Big Deal. Readers of the North Carolina Literary Review are, no doubt, much better informed than I was. I am sure many, if not most, nay, all know who Fred Chappell is – one of North Carolina’s most celebrated writers – and that his fame extends far beyond the state line. As novelist Lee Smith famously once said, “Anybody who knows anything about Southern writing knows that [Fred Chappell] is our resident genius, our shining light, the one truly great writer among us.”1 His list of accolades, awards, and honors is long, and includes the Bollingen Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the World Fantasy Award. He was North Carolina Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2002. I wince now at my ignorance. Granted, some of the accolades came after I met him, but still. It was my decision to go to graduate school for an MFA degree that allowed me to actually meet Chappell and study with him at UNC Greensboro. I decided to talk over the pros and cons of MFA programs with Doris Betts, who had been my freshman English teacher at UNC Chapel Hill. She suggested I apply to UNCG. She thought Chappell and I would get along. I am sure she was thinking we would find some common ground in our shared affinity for genre fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. 1
Quoted in Suzanne U. Clark, “He Still Haunts Us: Contemporary Southern Writers and Biblical Faith,” Faith for All of Life, Dec. 2000: web.
3
Faren Miller, “Locus Looks at Books,” Locus Apr. 2016: 17, 42; subsequently cited parenthetically.
2
“An H.P. Lovecraft Story Written by Faulkner,” rev. of Dagon by Fred Chappell, Amazon 12 Nov. 1988: web.
4
Fred Chappell Fiction Reading, UNC Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, 14 Apr. 2016.