The Wizard of Oz
I started reading the Oz books in sixth grade, when I was ten years old. I had been reading rocketship style science-fiction for a while, along with the Alfred Hitchcock collections (Ghostly Gallery, Haunted Houseful, Monster Museum, etc.), so this detour into fairy tales was a bit of a shock to my system. In my mind fiction was either scary supernatural stuff, or what-if extrapolations, all stainless steel and glittering stars. So what the hell was this?
I was of course familiar with the basic story from watching the film each Easter, and that was the source of a lot of confusion. If you haven't read it, the book is quite different from the film, making much stronger points about the alien nature of the fairy land of Oz. For one, the Tin Woodsman is practically an action hero, using his trusty axe at the drop of a hat to behead adversaries right and left. The Cowardly Lion is a real animal, and at once point it is mentioned that he goes off at night to feed, and they don't question him about the nature of his meals. And the "wonderful" Wizard isn't just a humbug, but a scheming old man. He sent them to kill the Wicked Witch of the West in hopes that the adventurers would die or be enslaved by her, so that he wouldn't be revealed as a fraud. Clearly Oz was a magical place, but one fraught with danger, as well.
The nature of the magic was also odd. I was used to simple science fiction stories, where you make one divergence from the "real world" (say, space travel), and the rest of the story proceeds logically from there. Or horror stories, where there wasn't any logic, but there was a thematic unity around the sense of the world being inherently unknowable, and filled with unseen evil.* But this business—nothing is ever explained, and just one wonderful thing after another keeps getting piled on. A sack of clothes wakes up while being stuffed with straw? A woman dissolves when she gets wet? A race of tiny people made of china, who can only move if they stay in the area where they are born? So much strangeness, and yet it has a kind of realism of its own. My head just nearly exploded trying to absorb all these new images.
And ultimately that's what has stayed with me: the infinite variety of creation in the world, and the lack of reason behind it. In science fiction everything serves the purpose of advancing the plot; in horror the invention illuminates the world as a malevolent and frightening place; in European fairy tales the stories serve a moral purpose. In the Land of Oz things just exist, without purpose, without explanation, driven only by a sense of wonder and the raw force of imagination.
That's why I keep returning to Oz.
*Just for the record, I would not have expressed myself in quite those terms. I was pretty precocious, but I didn't become a pseudointellectual lit-crit ass until much later. However, I did have a conversation with my Grandma Palmer about what separated sci-fi and horror, and told her the words they used were very different, and made me feel differently. I guess it's always been in me.
