A Sudden Wild Magic by Diana Wynne Jones

[lightreads]

A Sudden Wild Magic

3/5. DWJ writes adult fiction, except it's sorta Chrestomanci with banging? Basically, a group of Earth witches set out to another dimension which is secretly parasitizing off our reality. Their plan is to infiltrate an all-male outpost and defeat the men with sex?

This is . . . weird? It is doing lots of things – it's about parasitic relationships of all sorts, and the stories you have to tell about another world or another person in order to feed off them. But it's also just – maybe it's unfair of me, but I have this quietly offended sniff sniff reaction to DWJ writing about adults generally making their problems worse with sex. I just feel that the way she writes about children is more complex and interesting than this, is the thing.

Also, separately, the way she introduces a few gay guys just to kill them off to eliminate any reference to gay sex is really something.

Comments

[thefourthvine]

Yeahhhhh. It’s my least favorite of her adult books for a reason. Or a lot of them, actually.

[jadelennox]

Interestingly, she agreed with you about how she did a meh job of writing for adults with that book. "Two Kinds of Writing?" The Medusa: The Journal of the PJF 1 (1990): 1-4 The piece is oddly judgemental and has a lot of that nonsense essentialism about how kids are better readers than adults, but it fundamentally gets into how publisher assumptions about genre lead to different writing styles and she found it very difficult to write well to adult fantasy genre conventions.

(and yeah, the sexuality issues in that book are definitely a thing.)

[lokifan]

Huhhhh okay lol this is making me realise there's a DWJ I haven't read! Shame it's this one, lol. I've seen references to this but I think I thought it was one of the Chrestomanci short stories or an alt title for the Wild Robert book or something?