Later, he assembles from a kit a machine that is exactly the same in every way, but it’s not her. In the opening story, “Beatrice”, a man falls in love with the prototype of a flying machine, but he cannot purchase it.
And why not? Magic in the woods, anthropomorphic plants, machine/beast hybrids, and some intense body horror: it’s the stuff of dream and nightmares and tales told so many times we assume they’ve always been with us. There’s a timeless, old world feeling in these stories, a feeling that these sorts of things used to happen. Tidbeck’s work is horror because it’s scary, and it’s fantasy in the sense that it’s fantastic, but labels and categories hardly seem worth it, even as shorthand. Tidbeck’s work has appeared mostly in her native Sweden, with some English publications in Weird Tales and other purveyors of literary oddities. It’s best not to look back, but Swedish author Karin Tidbeck does more than look back, she lingers, and what she sees is recorded in the amazing collection Jagannath. Maybe it’s only a feeling that scares us away, or maybe it’s something we see, a dark reflection or ill-formed shadow. Fantasy isn’t just a realm we escape to, it’s something we often run from, eyes wide open, hysterical laughter bubbling up from our guts.
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