Lauren RabainoMy generous editors made writing this column fairly easy when they accepted my pitch: Every week, I would write about a different book I loved and which I thought you, dear reader, would find worth your time. Ah, the luxury of being able to pick whatever literary work I was in the mood to write about and then sing its praises.
Given this freedom, I find myself slightly baffled to have chosen a book with some rather glaring flaws. “The Dreaming Jewels” was acclaimed science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s first book and, well, it often feels like a first book . and not one touched by beginner’s luck. The prose is occasionally pedestrian, several supporting characters are underdeveloped, and the narrative is sometimes more choppy than coherent. And yet . and yet . the book is rarely less than compulsively readable. Flaws and all, it remains a haunting and darkly beautiful work that locates the humanity within the seemingly (sometimes literally) inhuman and the poetry within the squalid.
The story’s central character is Horty Bluett, an 8-year-old boy who’s abused at home and ridiculed by his classmates. His only real “friend” is Junky, a jack-in-the-box doll with bejeweled eyes. After Horty’s stepfather inflicts a singularly cruel punishment on him, he runs away. With Junky, of course. He eventually finds refuge with a mysterious carnival populated by fellow outcasts and it’s here, as Horty finally has what he can legitimately call a family, where both the warmth and terror of the story emerge.
Mixing elements of coming of age, love, science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery, Sturgeon takes the reader through a shadowy yet vividly realized world of “carnival dark,” at once more menacing and more humane than evident on first impression. He also mixes in themes of identity, both natural and re-invented (including gender switching), self-acceptance and revenge. Of course, it can be a fool’s errand to mix such disparate genre elements and ideas into a fluid and fully realized narrative and, truth be told, Sturgeon doesn’t always succeed at it. But he succeeds more than most writers might have, and the result, though uneven, is consistently intriguing and engaging, and at times, magical.
A decade after the publication of “The Dreaming Jewels,” Ray Bradbury published his own tale of a carnival with supernatural elements, “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” With a more cohesive narrative and a popular screen adaptation in 1983, “Something Wicked” would become, by far, the better-known tale of carnival dark, leaving Sturgeon’s tale respected but, in comparison, neglected. Perhaps, though, there’s something poetic about an idiosyncratic tale of the marginalized remaining somewhat on the margins of its genre(s). And perhaps it was the debt “Something Wicked” owed to “Jewels” that led Bradbury to admit, “I look upon Sturgeon with a secret and growing jealousy.”
If a master such as Bradbury had reason to be jealous of Sturgeon’s singular writing ability, the rest of us simply have reason to be grateful.
Quentin Dunne is a psychology graduate student and Mustang Daily book reviewer.