In Yana, the Touch of Undying

Fantasy historically tends toward romanticism, the poetical, even when the story turns to war, heartbreak, and betrayal. Fantasy writers command a soft pathos, gentle lamentations, and frequent themes of grace and redemption.

Take Lord Dunsany, for example, in his masterpiece The King of Elfland’s Daughter where a witch casts a curse:

“She whose curses had blasted the fire till it shriveled big logs of oak crooned now a melody like a wind in summer blowing from wild wood gardens that no man tended, down valleys loved once by children, now lost to them but for dreams, a song of such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again, to go back to the shades of oblivion, and leaving on the mind those faintest traces of little shining feet which when dimly perceived by us are called regrets.”

Along with Dunsany, Shea’s In Yana, the Touch of Undying should be rightfully canonized in the curated halls of seminal works of fantasy, but this novel exists in a room where shadows play on light, where spiders drop down from the ceiling on lone spindles of gossamer. Shea’s fantasy is lawless, raw, and violent. Cruelty is everywhere. There are no apex predators in Shea’s land; all are equally available for ravaging. If you find yourself on the wrong patch of grass, there may just be a herd of vampires waiting to dismember you or a group of Karbies to sell you to the skinfarms:

“Listen closely, my friend.” The voice was gravelly, the words freighted with warm gusts of wine as they fell down on Hex. “You cried out. This you must not do. Never. Your next loud sound we will punish by crushing your feet, gagging you to mute your moans. Terribly painful, but we’ll have no choice, and your feet needn’t be intact for our purposes.”

Or perhaps you are simply dinner:

“Kroppflopp now bit Racklin’s head off, and stood a moment crunching it, as if in thought. As he took two further bites, Hex looked away, then saw him toss the red-stumped remnant into his trough.”

But Shea’s world is not only horror by means of Sadean libertines with their vivid and oddly casual means of violence; the terror is ambient:

“The water was alive with vaster tactile memories than their own. A kind of neural mutter moved through it; murder in a thousand vivid forms crackled around them, to be erased by a random counterwave, the pangs of a thousand species of disease.”

Modern fantasy readers will likely go cross-eyed while adjusting to Shea’s ornate tone. His writing has an elegiac quality, moral and sociological without being entirely didactic. Here the reader will find a lexicon of dense and florid language, as if marred from the very lore and magic texts found in Shea’s world. The writing is decadent and confident, an empire of fine brush strokes and sweeping backdrops, psychotropic creatures, the living and the dead, all clash into one like a stake through the brain. In Yana demands attention; like Peake’s Gormenghast, the story is to be found directly in the prose, and in this manner Shea skillfully pays homage to a long lineage of the fantastical.

While In Yana characteristically belongs to Shea, it owes much of its style to David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, following the same episodic pacing, C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry for its gloaming mood, and of course, Jack Vance, Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith.

What Shea accomplished in his few works confidently cements his memory as an important voice of the fantastic. I applaud Shea’s obvious adoration and knowledge of his chosen genre even alongside his varying degree of success when imparting something uniquely imaginative. It’s my personal belief that Nift the Lean is Shea’s masterpiece, as toward the end of In Yana things fall a bit flat. Shea rushes to compress his episodic journey into a moral framework within a single chapter, resulting in a wooden conclusion as he scrambles to find a “point” for Hex’s voyage, an organizational misstep in an otherwise fearless work. However, Shea has no boundaries, and unabashedly deployed his worlds for us to fall into, and the literature of fantasy is that much better for it.