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					<p>The Fallen Country (Somtow Sucharitkul, 1986)Somtow Sucharitkul (born 1952), aka S.P. Somtow, is a Thai polymath who started out as an avant garde musician in the 1970s, became a respected science fiction writer in the late 1970s, helped create the splatterpunk subgenre of horror in the early 1980s, and later returned to music. He&#8217;s currently the director of the Bangkok Opera, which he founded. He&#8217;s one of my favorite authors, one of the great, if unheralded, masters of any genre he cares to attempt. This story first appeared as a novelette in a 1982 collection called Elsewhere, Vol. II, and Somtow expanded it into a novel in 1986. He adapted the original 1982 story into an opera called The Snow Dragon, which premiered at Milwaukee&#8217;s Skylight Music Theatre in 2015. (I was there.) When Billy Binder appears one day, nearly frozen to death and clinging to the church belfry in the middle of a Florida heatwave, he&#8217;s reluctantly befriended by a teenager named Charley. Billy&#8217;s only escape from his mother&#8217;s abusive boyfriend Stark is into the Fallen Country, a snowbound world where the cold numbs the emotions of its inhabitants until they&#8217;re little more than zombies, and Billy rides a snow dragon to save beautiful princesses and vanquish monsters. Stark is here, too, as the evil Ringmaster, his lion tamer&#8217;s whip scarring the sky and cutting the flesh of Billy&#8217;s dragon guide.  Of course it&#8217;s an imaginary world, right? The kind that abused kids take refuge in, a place where they have power, where they can fight back. But Billy&#8217;s alternate reality is real, as Charley is forced to acknowledge when he&#8217;s swept into the Fallen Country to help Billy in his quest to vanquish the Ringmaster. Billy has power here—his anger—and he decides that he can put a stop to Stark&#8217;s reign of terror. I believe this was marketed as young adult fantasy, and it&#8217;s dark as hell. Billy suffers horrific abuse at Stark&#8217;s hands, physical and possibly sexual, and the system either can or will do nothing about it. It&#8217;s graphic and regular, and it&#8217;s a little hard to take. There&#8217;s also some inappropriate flirting between Charley and Dora, the hapless school counselor who tries to convince Billy that the Fallen Country isn&#8217;t real.  Someone at the Washington Post (I&#8217;ve been unable to ascertain who said it) said that &#8220;Sucharitkul can create a world with less apparent effort than some writers devote to creating a small room.&#8221; That&#8217;s true, and not true at the same time. Yes, he can create a world in a couple of paragraphs: the Fallen Country feels like a real place as soon as we enter it, perhaps because Somtow has a staggering recall of the myths and legends of several cultures, and he can employ shortcuts without them seeming like shortcuts, or perhaps because he&#8217;s a fantastic writer. Probably both. But when shortcuts appear in the mundane world of Boca Blanca, Florida, it&#8217;s more obvious: characters are sometimes distressingly wooden (Dora the counselor seems less like a person than a mouthpiece for generations of bad child psychology), and scenes that aren&#8217;t about Billy and his trauma feel rushed, like Somtow was impatient to get to what he came here to write about. It&#8217;s still a great and valuable novel despite these complaints because nobody writes better than Somtow when he&#8217;s in the zone. The complex relationship of Billy and Stark is so painfully real that I found myself weeping, having grown up not in the Fallen Country but perhaps somewhere on the outskirts. Somtow&#8217;s insight into the tools kids use to overcome abuse is clear and compelling, and he does a fantastic job balancing the requirements of a fantasy novel and the dead serious subject matter he&#8217;s addressing. In the best possible way, this is literature about escape and healing that functions as an escape and as a tool for healing.</p>
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