Lilith

While attempting to avoid a fire drill at my apartment building, I spent most of today in the University library reading a book I selected by intuition. That's an exercise that has served me well in the past, for instance by providing the seed for my short story He lei nalu ho`okahi in a Hawai`ian dictionary. Today the book I chose was Lilith by George MacDonald. It's from 1895, and available online through Project Gutenberg. It reminded me a lot of my own novel Cross Product and readers who like one will probably like the other.

There's a lot of similarity to some of the work of H.P. Lovecraft - and it shares some of the shortcomings of both Lovecraft's and my own work. The edition I read came with an introduction by C.S. Lewis, who apparently thinks that it's about Christianity. I think it was probably intended to be about Christianity, and there's a lot about redemption in the climactic chapters, but there's also rather more Goddess and a lot less Aslan Jesus than I generally expect from Christian works, so I kind of wonder. That's one of the ways in which it reminded me of my stuff. There are even glimpses of Ima Soko ni Iru Boku, Terry Pratchett's L-Space, and some imagery that sounds an awful lot like it could be from the Waite Tarot, which this book predates. It also predates what the 20th Century feminists did to the Lilith story, though because of all the Christianity (or whatever it is) that's been added, I don't think this book can in any way be said to be an unaltered telling of the old Lilith story. Very interesting stuff, in any case. The same author wrote a lot of other fairy-tale stuff, mostly aimed at younger readers; I at least recognized the title of The Princess and Curdie though I don't think I've read it.

Besides: vampire catgirl. Gotta love that.