Diana Comet And Other Improbable Stories
Every so often, a book gets published that pushes the limits of the ordinary; or in the case of Sandra McDonald’s Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories, transcends it with a wise and playful intelligence. This collection of 15 new and previously published short fiction delights with tales from a world where the mundane and fantastic intertwine in strange and marvelous ways.
Set in and around the imaginary lands of New Dalli and Massasoit, the stories juxtapose lovely drag queens, buccaneer nuns, gay lovesick cowboys, and salty women warriors with tenderly sadistic aliens, bitchy witches and goddesses, talking animals, and a tiny fireman’s fairy named Bob. The realm of Diana Comet is the realm of the magically real. Chronology is fluid and unfixed here; and history gets cheerfully rewritten to suit the sly whims of the writer and the exigencies of the worlds she creates.
McDonald’s stories deal with a variety of universal themes, most notable among them love, desire, longing, friendship, keeping secrets and betrayal. Yet what unites them is the compassionate concern with understanding difference. Three of the stories--which also happen to be among the longest in the book--center around the character of Diana Comet, an intoxicatingly beautiful transvestite. If not on a quest for her own true love, she is always around other people, like the closeted cowboy Captain Landan, who are on a quest for theirs; or, who, like Theodor Moncrief and his sister Meridel, desire to express a love for each other that is both forbidden and misunderstood.
Diana accepts--and gloriously revels in--her own difference, while never judging the differences she sees around her. Or if she does, it is never from the perspective of what that difference implies about the sexuality of the people involved. Theodor and Meridel are not wrong for loving incestuously, but they are wrong for doing so when each has other pre-existing commitments they must honor, to others and to the society of which they are part.
In the fabulous Miss Comet, readers catch a glimpse not only of the serious underside of an otherwise whimsical-seeming book but of McDonald herself. She states in her dedication that the book is for "people whose sexuality should be held as sacred as anyone else’s," people like Matthew Shepard, the gay college student beaten to death in 1998 for his homosexuality. Like the runaway boy Diana seeks to educate in the free thought, free will and the eschewing of "harmful gender and racial stereotypes," so too, does McDonald seek to open the minds of her readers to what is possible beyond the improbable.
by Sandra McDonald
Publisher: Lethe Press. Publication date: June, 2010. Pages: 284. Price: $15.00. Format: Paperback. ISBN: 978-1-59021-094-9
