“Night Circus,” by Regina Clarke

“What even was that de tabernak?”

Those were the first words out of my mouth when I finished this story.

…that’s a good thing.

I still haven’t figured out if Regina Clarke‘s “Night Circus” is magical fantasy, wondertech sci-fi, or something like Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, where the distinction long ago grew moot. It starts with the short paragraph:

It was said the girl-child dreamed worlds into being. Arain ran to me with news of her arrival from Rengal.

And the entire story is very dreamlike. The narrator, Silla, wanders past flamevines and figs, under the psychic eye of the never-sleeping Preceptor, meets his weirding red-and-green eyes, follows in her father’s otherworldly footsteps, and encounters the golden couple of a disappearing mound beyond dreams out in the wastes of desert quadrant Forty-Two.

That’s not even a third of the way through the story.

Silla must confront the Night Circus, the realm that binds her father, Arain’s mother, and the Preceptor, be offered a choice, and make it freely. That is the way of things, and only her and Arain’s choices will make things different again (possibly by dreaming a new universe into being).

And what of the girl-child?

This Night Circus is second cousin to Bradbury’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, the way his Mechanical Hound is to the Hound of the Baskervilles. There are nightshades of Jim and of Will Halloway in Arain and Silla, though who is Halloween’s child is rather less clear here. There’s a lot that’s unclear here, lost in shadows of poetry, give or take a simile, gain or lose a metaphor, disappearing in the smooth sands of Forty-Two like Rea and Tamis’ mound and its Builders. And the thing is – it works. It helps make the story what it is, to create a peculiar taste on the tongue that lingers but never quite settles. Whether I liked them or not, the other stories I’d read had a certain no-nonsense air to them. “The Night Circus” very much does not, and it still had me thinking on it days later.

“Night Circus” is available in The Future’s So Bright, and Regina Clarke’s page can be found here. When I finish the anthology, I’m thinking of picking up “Out of Time,” and see what dreams may come…

Next week, “The Comforting.”

The Future So Bright

“Emergence,” by A. M. Weald

“Night Circus,” by Regina Clarke

“The Comforting,” by Kevin David Anderson

“Lady Jade,” by Maureen Bowden

The Future So Bright four-star review