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5.0 out of 5 stars
"There is sometimes among children another seeingness...", 10 Nov 2008
The Anything Box is a collection of fantasy, horror and SF stories that appeared in the 1950s and early 1960s in such magazines as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy and Imagination. Zenna Henderson is best known for her stories of a community of aliens living in secret on Earth, the People, but the tales in this book are all one-offs, not in any series. There are a few SF stories, such as the comical "Food to All Flesh" in which a Mexican Padre encounters a hungry alien mother and tries to find out what to feed it -- and goes one step further than the obvious ending; also "The Last Step", which is an SF example of a theme that appears in many of the other stories in this volume: special abilities possessed by children, usually in the form of some sort of special sight. In "The Last Step", this is an odd form of precognition which expresses itself through a game with toys, but which has an effect on the future, too. Other children-with-special-abilities stories range from the magical (such as "The Anything Box") to the horrific ("Hush!"). In "Hush!", a child summons, or creates, a creature which lives on sound, sucking it out of whatever makes a noise near it; quite a bleak tale compared to the others in this volume. In "The Anything Box", a young child escapes from the harshness of reality into the world contained in her Anything Box -- which the teacher-narrator at first assumes to be imaginary until she gets a look inside it. A debate on escapism and imagination, it avoids both sentimentality and moralising -- this story is worth the price of the whole volume on its own, though "Something Bright", with its glimpse of other-dimensional beings trapped in this world's harsh reality, is another high point. In places, such as the disturbing tale of a family's initiation rite, "Walking Aunt Daid", Henderson is reminiscent of Margo Lanagan (Black Juice (Gollancz S.F.)) (though of course, that should be the other way round, as Lanagan is 50 years after Henderson).
Henderson was a teacher, which may explain why many of her stories focus on children. Her representation of them is, perhaps, coloured by the views of the times, and so may seem sentimental or at times slightly babyish in its language, but see through that and you realise she's writing about the realities of young human beings whose imaginations, hopes and innocence are brought into contact with an all too casually cynical adult world.
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