The Newsletter of
The Council for the Literature of the Fantastic
Volume 1, Number 4 (1997)
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Petals and Thorns by Bret Fetzer

reviewed by Evelyn M. Perry.
Copyright © 1996, Evelyn M. Perry

Bret Fetzer's Petals and Thorns reveals an author who is not only clearly aware of the stylistic traditions of the fairy tale, but equally cognizant of the great complexity and significance that give depth to those tales too often considered simplistic or silly.

Fetzer's prose is engaging, and the reader is charmed by the contemporary spin on the 18 tales that make up Petals and Thorns.For here we may delight in a duality of vision: The tales have tongue-in-cheek observations embedded in traditional forms which at the same time allow for new readings of an established genre.

From the first to the last tale in the collection, from "A Princess in Pieces," in which our post-modern, fragmented selves (and the impossibility of wholeness or reassembly) are celebrated, to "The Elegant Fish," in which the hero who calls for reform unsuccessfully is perhaps as vital and useless to her community as those who are successful, Fetzer continues to charm us. His striking talent for, and familiarity with, the fairy tale affords Fetzer the seeming luxury of a first-rate swimmer who, in the ease of glide and stroke, in no way makes apparent the power, the mental focus, and the struggle behind the movement. Fetzer is neither too arrogant to be disrespectful of the fairy tale--

"'While I bow to your inestimable logic,' said the efreet, 'were I to follow it fully, I should never eat at all. Logic may say that an arrow must first cross half the distance to its target, and then cross half the distance that remains, and then half of what is left after that, and because the halves are infinite in number. the arrow never reaches its target at all; but in practice my arrows will split a man's head like a cantaloupe'" (p. 49)

-- nor is he too reverent to be devoid of humor:

"At last the door was thrown open and a cold wind swept into the room around the dark form of a tall, thick, and ugly troll with three dead deer beneath his arms. Was his ragged hair fetid, or was that just mud? Was his skin covered with warts, or were they just vermin, asleep? Were his teeth black and pitted, or--no, this was clear, they were black and pitted..." (p. 69).

Fetzer is, in short, an artist in command of his medium. Both a traditionalist and an innovator, Fetzer has struck upon a perfect blend and balance of the absurd and the marvelous, of insight and observation. Coming as it does after his first (and quite appropriately numbered) fairy tale collection, Thirteen Fairy Tales, Petals and Thorns promises to firmly establish Bret Fetzer as a leader in the popular new genre of folk and fairy tale contemporizing.