Before her death in 2022, Patricia McKillip garnered many awards, including two World Fantasy Awards, three Mythopoeic Awards, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement…but somehow it’s hard not to feel that her work didn’t receive the attention, acclaim, or readership it truly deserved during her lifetime. Tachyon Books recently published The Essential Patricia A. McKillip, a collection of sixteen stories and two essays that serve as an excellent introduction to new readers and a reminder of what made her such a singular writer.

One of the joys of reading McKillip is the sheer, wondrous unpredictability of her writing. She wrote series, including The Riddle Master trilogy, as well as multiple duologies, but much of her work was standalone novels and stories. Between 1996 and 2016 she published the Winter Rose duology, three story collections, and nine standalone novels. Each novel was set in its own world, written with a slightly different style and approach. As if being so prolific and virtuosic wasn’t enough, she accomplished all this after she’d been writing professionally for more than two decades. That was the kind of writer she was—driven by a restless imagination and quiet ambition—and perhaps that’s why a selected volume of stories like this new collection offers such a compelling introduction to her work.

In her essay “Writing High Fantasy” which is included in this new collection, McKillip poses the question, “when I begin a new fantasy: How can it follow the rules of high fantasy and break them at the same time?”

This is key to why so many of us love her work and return to it again and again. Reading—and rereading—McKillip, one gets the sense of an author who has read widely and deeply, who knows the genre inside and out. More than that, we’re encountering a writer who knows history and art and other genres at length and so when she embraces archetypes or expectations, she does so out of genuine joy and pleasure. She embraces them and loves them and in writing each story, there is a way that she is trying to puzzle out what they mean, and what they mean to her, and why they continue to be meaningful and interesting. She is trying to understand the genre from the inside out, but it’s not just an exercise for her—she wants to tell a good story even while she’s interrogating what the story means.

She loves fantasy, as McKillip detailed in both of the essays that are included in this volume, which together provide an understanding and context for her work. Ellen Kushner’s introduction is mostly about McKillip as a person, and so the stories are presented without any further critical commentary or framing. The essay and the transcript of a speech she gave offer readers insight into how McKillip thought and worked, using her own words to illuminate the text rather than relying on an academic or scholarly expert to analyze her stories.

In her lifetime, McKillip wrote three volumes of short stories, two of which were published by Tachyon Press, and much of this *Essential *collection is drawn from those two books. McKillip was arguably more focused on novels than on short fiction throughout most of her career, mainly writing shorter pieces when she was invited to by an editor. In her introduction, Kusher points to Terri Windling as commissioning McKillip’s story for the anthology series Elsewhere. That story, “The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath,” which is included in this collection and first published in 1982, is clearly the work of a skilled and seasoned writer. With a few exceptions—a couple stories were first published in her collections—the majority of her short stories were commissioned by editors for anthologies, and this collection makes clear that McKillip was just as skilled a short story writer as she was a novelist. Drawing from many of the same sources and inspirations as her novels, she is able to convey a remarkable depth and sense of wonder in just a few pages.

Could someone who didn’t know the genre inside and out, and love it profoundly, ever write a story like “Wonders of the Invisible World” or “The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath”? Could any of these stories have been penned by an author less capable of conveying so much with just a few words? McKillip’s approach to the genre meant that she was writing something that was simultaneously very old and very new, contributing to the distinctly timeless feeling that so many of her stories possess.

The best fantasy traffics in timelessness, existing once upon a time, a long time ago, a place of now and then and never was, whether in a land much like our own or in a galaxy far, far away. Inspired by the past but not anchored to a particular moment. A good fantasy writer has to craft a setting that is real but never was. The ability to craft a fully-fleshed out setting in just a few pages is a unique skill.

When I think about the timeless quality of McKillip’s writing, I’m reminded of a story like “The Witches of Junket,” where we’re told, a few paragraphs in: “She didn’t know if she was in the past or future. In the future, the sea might eat its way through the wrinkled old coast mountains, across the pastures where the sheep grazed, to her doorstep. In the past, those dinosaur birds might have flown over Junket, or whatever was there before the town was.” The reader has no idea when “the present” is in this story, or whether it matters, but on the second page Granny Heather “drove her twenty-year-old red VW Beetle over to Poppy and Cass’ house, adding another 3.8 miles to the 32,528.9 she had turned over in twenty years.” That’s how McKillip could be—sometimes poetic and fantastical, sometimes grounded in perfect detail—and this collection manages to showcase that spectrum, touching on many different settings and approaches and styles.

“The Witches of Junket” is not a long story, but it contains so much. Besides a vision of the past and future of this place, details about the old VW beetle the main character drives, the introduction of many other characters, to say nothing of the problem that these witches face, there’s also the meeting of the witches, the brief accounting of each character, how they’re dressed, the oatmeal cookies that the main character defrosted for the meeting… and how another character openly judges those cookies in the midst of an important meeting about something unprecedented. It’s a story that gets into details about fishing and the design of chairs while also presenting a complex web of relationships, of magic, dating back years and millennia.

I am reminded what was said of Alice Munro when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, that she “is often able to say more in 30 pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in 300.” McKillip possessed this same skill, and that ability led her to be known not for a single series, but for a long and vibrant career in which she constantly seemed to reinvent herself, to write one book after another that presented unique stories in their own distinct worlds.

If you boiled down the plots of many of her books and stories, they sound like stories you’ve read before, from treasure-seeking knights arriving at a remote tower only to find a woman trapped there, to a lost mermaid in a seaside town, to a wizard in search of Faerie. Of course, the reasons these stories take place and how they are resolved may be unfamiliar or unexpected, as McKillip plays with convention and our own expectations. Then there are stories—such as “Wonders of the Invisible World”—which are harder to explain or encapsulate…where it’s better to simply encourage readers to read and experience it for themselves.

These draw on familiar stories, ones the reader knows deeply. Genre, and the tropes that help define different genres, are conduits through which culture passes on its values and ideas. If you read McKillip’s stories, however, they do not feel like anything you’ve read before—she tells these stories in unusual ways, from different perspectives, and often ending in unusual places. In this way, she manages to explore and inhabit the deepest recesses of the genre, but she’s also subverted and transformed the familiar into something new and fantastic so that some readers may not immediately recognize the elements of a narrative that they already knew so intimately.

There’s a reason that so many of her books have become classics, and still remain in print. She was a formidable storyteller, but sitting with this collection, it’s hard not to conclude that McKillip was also one of contemporary fantasy’s great prose writers, crafting musical sentences that readers can get lost in—long, elegant sentences that playfully stretch out to the length of a thought. McKillip’s work can be hard to summarize in a pithy way because she was interested in so many things. She shifted between subgenres, archetypes, and mythologies as often as she changed styles and approaches. But whenever I read her work, I am reminded why I read fantasy. And why—while I may take breaks, even stop reading fantasy for long periods—I always return to it, and always will.

“That young man I was will always love her,” Reck admits, somewhat ruefully, in “Byndley”—a story that ends with “the promise, in the faint, distant flush at the edge of the world, of an enchanted dawn.”

It’s that longing, regardless of age and the understanding that things have changed, that so often brings us back to fantasy stories again and again, enchanting us differently than they did when we were young, when we understood the world in a different way. It’s the hope that, even if we have come to see the world as less magical than we once did, we can still find magic

McKillip said it best, in the final words of her essay that concludes the book:

“At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries. Fantasy changes with the changing times, and yet it is still the oldest kind of tale in the world, for it began once upon a time, and we haven’t heard the end of it yet.”

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