A fantastical lens on modern society
Vancouver author Kristi Charish’s novel is escapism with a message
Fantasy is often seen as largely escapist, somehow superficial. It’s difficult to dispute this if your understanding of the genre consists of burly men on horseback, flashing swords, perhaps an elf or a dwarf, with the shadow of a dragon on the horizon. This is not a criticism: escapism is a valuable commodity in a world of twenty-four-hour news cycles and relentless social media. Escaping into worlds of honour and betrayal, richly imagined landscapes and complex systems of politics and magic is sometimes the best cure for the early twentyfirst century.
But not all fantasy is created equal. Sometimes, instead of an imagined world, you get a gritty, rain-soaked version of contemporary Seattle. Sometimes, instead of a burly man on horseback, you get a slight young woman in a leather jacket on a motorcycle, which often doesn’t start when she needs it to. And sometimes, instead of escapism, you get a thrilling read that holds a lens up to contemporary society, its issues, questions and concerns. Sometimes, you get Kincaid Strange. Strange is the creation of Vancouver writer Kristi Charish; the third volume of her Kincaid Strange series, this one titled “Voodoo Shanghai,” has just been released.
Kincaid lives in Seattle, in a rundown building populated by a transient community of artists and musicians. And ghosts. In Charish’s world, ghosts and zombies are real, populations acknowledged but barely tolerated by the living. Kincaid manages to eke out a living working as a voodoo practitioner, occasionally for the Seattle Police Department, usually as a freelancer. It’s not glamorous work — summoning ghosts to settle inheritance claims, for example, or holding seances so hipsters can hang out with Nate, her roommate, who happens to be the ghost of a nineties grunge musician — but she gets by.
Over the course of the series, things get trickier for Kincaid, and her life becomes a lot more dangerous. This comes to a peak in “Voodoo Shanghai,” when she is asked (read: forced) to head to Portland to investigate a murder which seems to be the work of Martin Dane, the White Picket Fence serial killer. The only trouble is, Dane has been dead for nearly a month.
On the ground in Portland, things get even more tricky: near the crime scene there’s a mysterious swamp, bubbling over with Otherside energy. There are already other practitioners at work. And all the ghosts in Portland seem to be disappearing, unnoticed and unmourned.
“Voodoo Shanghai” is a lot of fun. It’s a terrific, fast-paced read, with a number of surprising twists, a welcome blast of pure reading pleasure. One could read it for sheer escapist joy, and wonder how long they have to wait for the next instalment.
But it’s also much more than that. Through Kincaid Strange, Charish chronicles realistic social and personal concerns in a vivid and often disarming manner. Not only does Kincaid have to navigate workplace politics, and the fallout of a relationship with a co-worker, she is subject to the same sexist world that is so familiar (how she handles a grabby dude-bro poltergeist at Sea-Tac will have readers cheering). But it goes deeper than that. At the heart of the novels is the relationship between the ghosts and humans, a stark examination of societal exclusion and segregation. Police Captain Banks, Kincaid’s nemesis, for example, views all ghosts as criminals, a problem to be dealt with, by force, preferably. How many immigrant and minority populations suffer under that perspective in the real world? And how could an entire community, like the ghosts of Portland, disappear, without their absence being noted?
We see it all too often.
And that is the power of writers such as Kristi Charish, and the strength of characters such as Kincaid Strange: through the lens of fantasy, readers are able to connect — at a fantastic remove — with the real world, to navigate complex contemporary questions while simultaneously escaping from the hot-button, instant response nature of the real world. It’s a thrilling balancing act, and one which Charish pulls off with aplomb.