What's Behind A Gathering of Doorways? A book review.

A Gathering of Doorways is the latest novel by Michael Jasper, author also of the science fiction novel The Wannoshay Cycle and the short story collection Gunning For the Buddha.

He’s been on the scene since around 2000, a product of the Clarion workshop and the Writers of the Future, and has had his fiction published in places such a Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.





In A Gathering of Doorways, Gil and Melissa Anderson own an operate an organic farm in the backwoods of North Carolina where Melissa runs a rehab program for stroke victims and Gil runs the country store. The farm has seen better days and they are under threat from pressures to sell out to a shady land developer.

As the land is sick, so too are there problems with the Anderson family. Communication between Gil and Melissa have broken down since the tragic miscarriage of their second child--a daughter that would have been named Sophie.

Their first child, five year-old Noah, is a bright and imaginative child.

A Gathering of Doorways

by Michael Jasper
Prime Books
January 2009

He becomes enthralled by the fantastical tales his father tells him which contribute to him taking on an ill-advised and self-imposed quest (“kest”, as he says) to return a salamander’s tail. Noah crosses the boundary between his ailing family’s farm and the eerie woods beyond where he is suddenly swallowed up into desolate Undercity below the forest.

From here, Noah’s quest takes a different turn with greater stakes than a salamander’s tail. Likewise, Gil and Melissa each embark on quests of their own--quests for their lost son, and eventually the truth behind their farm, the forest beyond their border, and the fate of all lost children.

Pretty compelling, eh?

Michael Jasper’s A Gathering of Doorways promises a lot and eventually delivers, though it takes a few chapters to really get under way. The book was first introduced to me as a “rural fantasy” and I pondered for a moment exactly what that meant. I suppose the obvious interpretation is the most valid, i.e., if “urban fantasy” is a fantasy set in a city--like elves and fairies infesting Manhattan or LA, then a rural fantasy is elves and fairies inhabiting a contemporary rural setting such as the backwoods of North Carolina.

Fine.

I’m not a huge fan of urban fantasies, but rural setting work for me. It seems more natural for me to envision interactions between humans and demihumans as taking place in forested landscapes than in city sewers. (I mean come on, an elf wouldn’t stand a chance against a sewer-gator or a C.H.U.D.).

But Jasper’s novel doesn’t present us with elves or fairies--at least not in any of those sort of words. The denizens of the Undercity seem more creatures out of dreams than any traditional mythology--for the most part. There are a couple of dragons, but it’s suggested that their origins are from someplace other than the Undercity. And while I’m mentioning the Undercity and the whole urban/rural fantasy thing, I will hand it to the author for mixing it up a bit by hiding an urban landscape in his rural, backwoods farm setting. Mind you, it’s a desolate other-worldly sort of urban place born more out of the shifting tendency of dreams than any city planner’s office.

I’ve also heard the book described by others as reminiscent of 80s horror. I’m not so familiar with that particular slice of the genre to judge, but I’m going to assume it’s an unfair comparison. Why? I didn’t really get the feel of a horror novel. I got the feel of a dark fantasy. Visually, the Undercity is very much a dreamscape. Buildings and streets move and shift. Doors appear in odd places, opening and closing at will. There are rules, but what are they? The architecture of the Undercity is both familiar and alien. One is almost tempted to say the style defies genre-fication, but what fun would that be? We like our labels.

Overall, A Gathering of Doorways is a very good story with all the things I like to see in a fantasy-like adventure: flawed heroes, quests that have meaning, misdirection, shocking revelations, imaginative settings, and villains with dimension. Oh, and I like a bit of tragedy. Call me weird.

If I had any problems with the book, I suppose it would be two things. One would be the pacing. The story starts off a bit slow for my taste, spending an abundance of time setting the mood. Everything is gray. The farm is sick and depressed and its showing in the produce. The water is polluted, but by what we can only guess. The land is emotionally damaged as is the family that lives there. I really think Jasper could have established all of this in the first two chapters, then jumped us into the action. Likewise, the desolate landscape of the Undercity gets a lot of attention with heavy description of the grayness of everything before we feel like the characters’ quests have truly gotten under way.

So there’s that. It could have used a bit of tightening at the start. And while we’re talking about the opening chapters of the novel, my second point of contention is that it seemed an important facet to the character of Gil Anderson is his supposed past as some kind of con artist. We don’t really see this perception of him clearly until late in the novel. Unfortunately, by then it’s become an important piece in the puzzle and its late appearance seems a bit out of left field. What’s more is that he seems to be more a con artist in his own mind than in any real sense of reality. His so-called cons are pretty bush league. At the start of the novel, Gil Anderson is a former businessman who, with his wife, escapes the rat race for the idyllic life on a farm. His acquisition of the farm from its former owners may have been a little shady, but not much more than any other real estate dealing. I just feel the whole “former con artist” angle could have been built up a bit more in the beginning so it would have fit better when it was important later in the novel.

It still works, albeit a little clumsily. Once you get past the con artist hiccup, the story works--and that’s important. The pacing issue doesn’t remain a problem for very long either. Picture a pebble of snow at the top of a mountain rolling down toward the innocent village below. As the plot moves along, the pebble keeps rolling and growing in size and weight and force until by the end it’s the house-sized boulder of implacable snow ready to crush everything in its path. So it is with the novel. It starts slow, but it ends big and fast. If you get through the first sixty pages of A Gathering of Doorways, you won’t have any trouble with the rest of the novel. You’ll probably want to finish reading it in one sitting.

Recommended? Sure!

Is it for everyone?

I’m not going to be one of those reviewers who tries to apply one author’s style to another’s. I’ve heard Jasper’s handling of this novel compared to Clive Barker, Stephen King, even Neil Gaiman, but in all three cases I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. Jasper’s style is his own and it’s pretty good. (I would add China Miéville to this list--but again...it’s Jasper’s style, not Miéville’s)
If you like the works of Gaiman, Barker, King, and the like--you will probably enjoy A Gathering of Doorways.

So yeah, I’m recommending it.

Cheers!

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