Excerpt

Introduction

Sometimes I think I mix genres and subgenres and fairytales and other stories because I can't walk in a straight line. I certainly don't think in a straight line. Everything gets jumbled in my brain and if I don't check on the details, I pull different rules from different mythoi and think I have it right.

Maybe I do have it right, for Kris, anyway.

My sister taught me to read when I was three. She was in college at the time, studying to be a teacher. She loves reading and she loves to share the art of reading with anyone and everyone. I have the honor of being the first child she taught to read, but not the last. I know she taught her children and her grandchildren. She ended up teaching college, so I suspect she taught young adults about the joy of reading, but not the how-to.

The thing is, when you learn to read at three, you don't learn details. You learn to appreciate story, yes, but the difference between Greek mythology and Norse mythology? What's a Greek? What's a Norse? At three, I barely knew what existed outside of my family, let alone anything about the big wide world.

I still have a lot of the fairytale books I received as a child. I have a battered copy of a "World Mythology" book that I stole from someone's shelf. All of this went in as fodder. The differences between wood nymphs and freshwater nymphs were beyond me.

I'm afraid that goes for fairies, elves, pixies, and sprites as well. I even confessed to my issues in the story "Renn and the Little Men":

I had no idea where he was that morning that the wee folk showed up.

That's all I could figure they were. Because in my reading, I'd seen stories about fairies, but not stories about subsets of fairies, like brownies or pixies, and I certainly didn't know how they all worked together, like some little community, which they were. I also expected those communities to be very Old Country, which they aren't, and thought that the stuff in the folklore was true, which it mostly isn't.

I am clear about holiday elves. Kinda. Sorta. You see, Santa is a Jolly Old Elf. I just thought he was Santa. Y'know. Some magic guy who distributes presents to "worthy" people but (and this pisses me off for all the little kids in the world) not to really poor kids, who have to get presents off some giving tree, only if they're lucky.

Yeah, that anger shows up in my fiction too.

So, when Anthea Sharp asked me for some elf stories for a StoryBundle she was putting together, I thought I had a lot of elf stories. Turns out I have a lot of magical creature stories. I have only one pure elf story (are there pure elves?), and that's a story called "By the Chimney with Care," which deals with an elfy marketing phenomenon that I find particularly creepy. (You'll see.)

I have a lot of Jolly Old Elf stories under my Kristine Grayson pen name. I've included one here, with an actual elf-elf, who is not doing as well as he could. The Grayson stories and novels really mix up fairytales, mythology, and Santa stories, combining them with some "real world" stuff, and for some strange reason, adding romance and my totally off-the-wall sense of humor.

Those Jolly Old Elf stories are in my Grayson Santa Series, and I figured that most folks would want to read those stories during the holiday season, not in June, which was when that StoryBundle went live.

So I explored other fiction of mine. Some of my stories about the fae folk are very dark. I also have a Faerie Justice series set in World War II, which is also very dark. Not to mention the books of the Fey, which are—again—dark.

They don't fit with the Kristine Grayson novella or the true elf story. So I decided to use those two holiday stories as my building blocks and go with my elfish-fairy-pixie-sprite confusion.

This collection starts with a story from another series of mine, The Wyrd Sisters. The Wyrd Sisters are descendants of the three witches in Shakespeare's Scottish Play (geez, I'm such a theater nerd I can't type the name of that play), and in one of their adventures, they come across some puckish behavior.

As in Puck, from A Midsummer Night's Dream. If you Google Puck, and I just did, you find a Kris-level of confusion. Is he a fairy? A sprite? Or an elf? He gets called all of those by the "experts" in my Google search. He is not unique to Shakespeare which is why he has so many identities. He's part of English folklore—good old Robin Goodfellow, who might be a fairy, goblin, devil, or imp. He might be a pooka or some other such creature, and so, for the sake of this collection, he's an elf.

So there.

After that, if you read in order, you'll encounter the story I mentioned above, "Renn and the Little Men." I (and Renn) steadfastly refuse to identify what kind of creatures the little men are, except that they are wee folk. Which is why they're in this collection. (Besides, I love that passage of justification.)

Next, one of my personal favorite stories, "Flower Fairies." Yes, the creatures in this story are fairies, not elves. Deal with it. Once you've read it, you'll understand why I included it.

The only story I haven't mentioned yet, is "Dispatches from the Front: Number Sixty-One." This story features pixies, but elves are mentioned, and you'll see why.

Finally, the true elf stories—if you think of holiday elves as elves. The stories that inspired this entire collection. Only one of those stories walks the straight and narrow, though. I must confess that the Grayson is a typical jumble of lore, because that's just how my brain works.

So if you're expecting traditional elves, you might have to find another collection. If you want to read about wee folk in many incarnations, then go ahead, turn the page.

I suspect you'll enjoy it if you do.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Las Vegas, Nevada
May 29, 2023