One of my favorite newly-discovered authors, Robin McKinley, produced a book in 2003 called Sunshine. I had savored her earlier young-reader novel The Hero and the Crown last winter and have since been searching for the sequel, The Blue Sword, at libraries. When I ran across Sunshine at my local library a couple of weeks ago, I was a little surprised to see that it was the only novel available there by McKinley. I took it out not bothering to skim anything about the plot. It was in the adult section, whereas most of her stuff is categorized for junior readers, which doesn’t faze me a bit.
I gobbled up the 400+ page novel in about a week, which is kind of unusual for me. Sometimes I skirt around a novel unsure whether I should commit myself to it. When it’s good, it’s really good, and I find that I want neither food nor sleep for the duration of time I am immersed. I tend to forget my whereabouts, my family, whether I’m wearing the same clothes for days on end. I just go somewhere else for a while. This tendency has sometimes frightened me, and it’s one reason I hesitate to read novels. I find magazine articles, like long New Yorker investigative journalism type stuff, a bit safer territory.
And here’s something else that surprised me: Sunshine is about vampires. It could be about Smurfs and I would have still taken it off the shelf and brought it home, because I really trust this author. But vampires—now that took me off guard, because I used to read a lot of vampire novels. I got hooked after reading Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot when I was maybe 12 or 13 when my older brother introduced me to the horror genre. Now that I look back on that book, I think, eh, what cheesy stuff, but it was sure fun. A little later, I got into Anne Rice’s vampire series on Lestat and Louis. I was very disappointed by the movie effort but loved the horror and vampire genre no less for it. Something Rice achieved that King had not was to make the vampire a sympathetic character at odds with himself in a truly romantic sense. Lestat and Louis have this eternal conflict, one being more glamorous and materialistic, and the other being more self-sacrificing and morally grounded. It’s a great conflict not because it describes vampire reality so well (what reality?) but because it describes the human condition.
McKinley, with her The Hero and the Crown story, which is about a dragon-slaying young woman on a solo quest to save her kingdom, similarly describes elements of the human condition, and does so with remarkable elegance and understated beauty. Her female protagonists are just awesome. The author hovers over parts of the story and dives into others with intense detail, so you feel like a bird zooming around the fictional landscape, and you go willingly, wherever she takes you. At the end of that book, the choice the heroine has to make is resolved satisfyingly, in that she doesn’t necessarily have to make the choice; she can have both realities she feels torn between. She can have it all, just not all at once.
In Sunshine the heroine gets the same reward at the end. What’s amusing, and baffling, and alluring, is that the choices boil down (at least on the surface) to a divide between lovers in the heroine’s life. And in both stories, the heroine has a sort of mortal (if a bit magical) lover, and another one who is immortal, and a bit weird and impermeable, but more scintillating and attractive in a few ways that the mere-mortal lover is not.
McKinley lovingly dedicates Sunshine to her husband, who is also a writer. She mentions that he is, for her, both of the lovers, and then jauntily adds, “Hey, am I lucky or what?”
I find that horror novels, and movies too for that matter, are really intense, passionate love stories. What do we find scariest? True, eternal love. And the best kind, I suppose, is that which is both mere-mortal and therefore fallible, and also magically eternal, sparklingly true, faithful, and therefore divine.