Claude Lalumiere - The Door to Lost Pages

FIRST EDITION

Introduction 2011 by Paul Di Filippo

The Door to Lost Pages 2011 by Claude Lalumire

Cover artwork 2010 by Erik Mohr

Cover illustrations 2011 by Astrid Mohr and Estelle Mohr

Cover design 2011 by Corey Beep

All Rights Reserved.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Lalumire, Claude

The Door to Lost Page / Claude Lalumire.

eISBN 978-1-926851-39-6

I. Title.

PS8626.U7515N36 2011 C813'.6 C2010-907280-4

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

Toronto, Canada

www.chizinepub.com

info@chizinepub.com

Edited and copyedited by Helen Marshall

Proofread by Samantha Beiko

Converted to mobipocket and epub by Ryan McFadden http://ryanmcfadden.com

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

dedication

For Paul Di Filippo, friend and fellow dreamer, who let me steal the title of his collection Lost Pages.

For Elise Moser, who was there at the birth of the Lost Pages series, offering invaluable support and criticism, and stuck it out through many incarnations and revisions.

For David Pringle, publisher and editor extraordinaire of Interzone from 1982 to 2004. The fiction and authors published during David Pringles groundbreaking tenure on Interzone had a profound impact on my imagination. That body of literature was an essential landmark in my journey as a writer. In addition, David was the first editor to publish my fiction (Bestial Acts, in 2002, which would eventually become chapter 1 of The Door to Lost Pages); he also published Dregs (chapter 3 of this book) and A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens (which appears in my collection Objects of Worship). Appearing three times in my favourite run of any fiction magazine ever was a dream come true.

For Miss, Yoda, Golem, Goblin, Kirby, and Konrad; their bestial acts taught me to be a better animal.

When I read and reread the erotic, wise, comic, tragic, passionate, surprising fabulations containedbarely contained!between the covers of this book, I invariably hear a ghostly accompaniment, that lyrical, endearing croak-warble-whine famous throughout our postmodern world: Bob Dylan, a young Bob Dylan, only twenty-three years old at the time in 1964, singing My Back Pages, with its famous refrain: Ah, but I was so much older then / Im younger than that now.

The stories that comprise this novellaall con-nected, distally or centrally, to a mystical, mythical (mythical?) used-book store called Lost Pagesembody that oxymoronic, Zen nugget of self-observation by Dylan.

Pretence and pretentiousness, self-consciousness and self-importance, seriousness, and maturity, judgmentalism and dogmatismthese so-called adult qualities are not the true mark of wisdom or experience in the deep ways of the world. They are instead too often the overreaching, desperately grasping strategies of adolescents and young adults who have forgotten the clear knowledge of pure childhood, but also have not yet attained the hard-won, never-guaranteed insights of older years, which in many ways resemble that selfsame childlike cosmic certitude.

In The Door to Lost Pages, Claude Lalumire is intent on showing us that access to ones own heart and souland to the coterminous joys of the universeinvolves putting down preconceptions and prejudices inherited and inculcated as we age, and returning to the primal source of all wisdom.

The primal source of all wisdom. Symbolized by a shabby, tatty, musty retail establishment named Lost Pages? The omphalos of the multiverse hiding behind the flaking paint of an innocuous storefront? Secrets of true happiness contained in yellowing pages of pulpy or hermetical texts?

Why not? You see, thats the kind of hidebound thinking you have to discard, if you ever want admission to the elect fraternity of homo ludens.

In Bestial Acts, our introduction to this milieu, we witness a kind of lineage transmission, as the current elderly owner of Lost Pages passes on his mantle to Lucas, who has in his own autodidactic way outfitted himself for his new role. Lucas in turn takes the orphaned-by-choice girl Aydee under his wing. Together, they will serve the community of their like-minded peers, of whatever age and race and condition.

We see one of these fellow travelers next in Let Evil Beware! Only a child to the worlds eyes, Billy is in reality one of the props on which the safety of our world depends.

In Dregs, our protagonist stubbornly and fearfully resists for a long time the offered transfor-mations that will enhance his native qualities of open-mindedness and curiosity, until a purchase from Lost Pages sets him straight. Or does it? Lalumire never fails to acknowledge that resistance to enlightenment and the potential for backsliding are always possible in the less-than-perfect human realm.

Dark Tendrils is one of the few instances where such a failure happens, as missteps are taken and warnings unheeded. Its the necessary black obverse to the ultimately triumphant sense of redemption.

In Lost Girls, even the wise onesAydee in particularare shown to be utilizing less than their full potential, needing a kickstart to the next plateau in the ceaseless quest for nirvana on Earth.

And finally, The Lost and Found of Years puts a classy metatextual spin on the whole package, as author meets creation.

But to say that all these stories embody a similar worldview or set of lessons is not to proclaim them programmatic or tendentious or preachy. Far from it! This fine little book is not some New Age self-help manual: its involving fiction of the most intimate and passionate stripe!

Claude Lalumire is an adept of prose. His sentences are sprightly and always surprising. His sense of structure is admirable. He plays deftly with horror tropes, fantasy tropes, SF tropes. One minute hes channelling Lord Dunsany, the next Charles de Lint, John Crowley, or Jeff VanderMeerpeers, but possessed of different voices from Lalumires own unique tones. He braids clues and motifs into a shimmering tapestry. (Just count the sly occurrences of green, blue, and brown, the colours of a mythical deity.) His characters stalk or dance across the pages, fully alive and palpable.

Additionally, in a smallish but important way, Claude Lalumire is not only a universal author but a regional writer. His native Canada, specifically the city of Montreal, is as much a player in these stories as the people, even when not specifically named. Theres some numinous element of these tales that acts as a counterbalance to the hegemony of US fantasy trilogies. We are hearing a voice literally from beyond the lands we (we American readers) know.