Who Goes There?

(It seems that my review schedule for the rest of November will be a big case of “when it’s done.” I’ve had my best friend and one of my partners come visit me, both from out of state, for a few days each. Turns out it’s very hard to get work done when you’re with someone you love.)

Elizabeth Hand was born in 1957 in New York, and has been active in the field since the ’80s. She’s been a regular contributor to F&SF as fiction author and reviewer for the past 35 years. Her most recent novel, A Haunting on the Hill, is a sequel to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—only not quite. “Last Summer at Mars Hill” may give the impression, going by its title, that it’s planetary SF, but it’s really a different kind of story altogether, being arguably fantasy and set on a then-present-day Earth. According to the introductory blurb in F&SF, Hand wrote this story as a change of pace, “a heartwarmer written to keep her good karma.” The tactic worked, as it would win the Nebula and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. I don’t like it quite as much as other people did, at least at the time, but while it’s a bit overly sentimental for my taste it’s also a curious time capsule of semi-rural American life in the decade following HIV/AIDS being made public knowledge, one in which Hand plays fast and loose with genre boundaries. This was a story I had been meaning to knock off my list for a while. and I can’t say I was too disappointed.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Nebula Awards 31 (ed. Pamela Sargent), The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Gordon Van Gelder), and the Hand collections Last Summer at Mars Hill and The Best of Elizabeth Hand.

Enhancing Image

Moony and her boyfriend Jason are high school sweethearts who have returned to Mars Hill, a spiritualist commune founded in 1883 in Maine (that state where seemingly a lot of weird supernatural shit is prone to happen), and where both their parents live. Moony only has her mom while Jason has his dad, the latter having in the past come out as gay and who’s been living with HIV. “Two years before Jason’s father had tested HIV positive. Martin’s lover, John, had died that spring.” Ariel, Moony’s mom, is also revealed to have stage-four breast cancer, and she had not only hesitated to tell her daughter about this but had delayed in getting it treated, such that now the case looks to be terminal. So both their parents are dying. Mars Hill itself is all but the corpse of a once-thriving community; there are only two year-round residents in the commune, one being the enigmatic Mrs. Grose, a very old woman who was also a medium back in her youth, being one of the many “casualties” from Harry Houdini’s search for a genuine medium. Of course, Moony realizes that, the story taking place in the ’90s, “If it really had happened, it would make Mrs. Grose about ninety or a hundred years old. And she didn’t look a day over sixty.” And then there’s the mystery of “Them,” or the Light Children, mythical beings who lurk in Mars Hill’s environs and who were the reason the place was settled all those decades ago, though they’re more talked about than seen.

“Last Summer at Mars Hill” has a double meaning in its title, one in referring to something that happened in the past, as in last summer, and also perhaps Moony’s last summer visiting Mars Hill, the place of her upbringing and the double-edged sword that has clearly influenced her life up to this point, for good and ill. “Moony” is a nickname Jason calls her, and her “regular” name is Maggie, although her actual birth name is the rather embarrassing hippy-dippy Shadowmoon Starlight Rising. Naturally she doesn’t like to be known by that name. Moony descends from a line of proto-hippies, but she now lives in the era of flannel, of grunge music and professional skateboarding (a character wears a Pearl Jam shirt at one point), and she wants to live something close to a normal life. This is a story partly about time, but it’s also very of its time, both regarding the time it’s set in and the implicit attitude of how Hand tells her story. From what I can tell Hand is a straight woman, which seems to have influenced how she wrote Moony and Jason, who are both presumably straight, although Jason’s dad is openly gay. HIV/AIDS very much casts a shadow over the story, so it makes sense that there would be at least one explicitly queer character; but at the same time I couldn’t shake the feeling that Hand was writing about what was then a devastating epidemic from an outsider’s perspective, albeit sympathetically. Of course, there are far worse positions to take than being a cishet ally, especially since Hand wrote this story in the early ’90s. There were quite a few SF stories inspired by the AIDS epidemic in the late ’80s into the ’90s, mostly by authors who were not directly impacted by said epidemic. (Nancy Kress’s “Inertia” is a very good example of this, both as a story and as a commentary on the public reaction to AIDS and those hurt most by it.)

I suppose a quibble I have here is that while Moony’s POV is by no means invalid, I would rather read from the viewpoint of Jason, or especially Martin, since he’s a queer character who is dealing directly with impending doom. You could say it would make more sense to tell this story from Ariel’s POV since this story is more concerned with her terminal illness, but the basis of the conflict is that we’re not sure why Ariel did what she did—why she didn’t tell Moony sooner or why she waited this long to seek treatment. The history of Mars Hill is itself another point of conflict as much of it remains mysterious for Moony, a 16-year-old who has memories of the place but who clearly feels disconnected from the adults who stay there, not to mention her boyfriend feels the same way. There’s definitely a generation gap at work—in fact more than one, between Moony and Ariel, the latter being in her forties; and then there’s Mrs. Grose, who may be in her sixties or may be close to a hundred. To a degree I understand why Hand wrote from the perspectives she did, since the focus characters are all women (Moony, Ariel, and Mrs. Grose), while Jason and Martin, while important, are also men and thus relegated to supporting roles. This is a story about dealing with grief and impending loos, but it’s also a story about women of very different ages, in a place that seems to be out of step with the times. You may of course be wondering if “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is SF or fantasy, which is the story’s mystery on a metafictional level and which Hand deliberately refrains from answering clearly.

There Be Spoilers Here

The passage of time is sort of ambiguous, but Moony and Ariel have been at Mars Hill long enough that eventually the latter does get miraculously get a visit from the Light Children. Moony, not knowing what the hell the Light Children are capable of, is understandably spooked when Ariel leaves a note one day, fearing her mother might commit suicide or get into trouble; but instead she finds that her mother’s been healed. Her cancer is in recession, despite that being a medical impossibility. And if Martin still has HIV then it seems to be asymptomatic. Indeed a miracle has happened, which worried me because it made me think we might get a happy ending that would have been unearned. Thankfully Hand goes for something more bittersweet. We also are stuck with an unanswered question: Just what are the Light Children? It’s a question Hand leans into, maybe a bit too much, as if to tease us about what genre the story we’re reading belongs to; but then again it’s a question that doesn’t really need an answer.

So says Mrs. Grose:

“Well, many things, of course, we have thought They were many things, and They might be any of these or all of them or — well, none, I suppose. Fairies, or little angels of Jesus, or tree spirits — that is what a dear friend of mine believed. And some sailors thought They were will-o-the-wisps, and let’s see, Miriam Hopewell, whom you don’t remember but was another very dear friend of mine, God rest her soul, Miriam thought They came from flying saucers.”

For my money, “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is fantasy. There’s no SFnal explanation given for the Light Children being able to heal Ariel and Martin, so their healing powers may as well be magic. This does raise the question of why Mars Hill was called that in the first place, since the founders (this is the last quarter of the 19th century, mind you) could not have known where the Light Children came from, nor did they probably think much about life on other planets. The War of the Worlds was still more than a decade off. Still, not every question needs an answer.

A Step Farther Out

I do sort of recommend “Last Summer at Mars Hill,” but also reading it thirty years after publication I felt like I was gazing into a time capsule, and not entirely in a good way. The fight for queer liberation has both come a long way and not progressed nearly enough since 1994, in no small part because there are still plenty of people who believe the AIDS epidemic was basically queer people’s fault, and these same people have had their abhorrent views vindicated by those in power repeatedly. This is a story that evidently spoke to vaguely left-leaning readers when it was published, but I’m honestly not sure if it would be as warmly received now.

See you next time.