Grabien, Deborah
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1954- ) US author. Her first novel, Woman of Fire (1988; vt Eyes in the Fire 1989), is fantasy. Her second novel is an historical romance with fantasy elements, the first of several (not listed below) that she has concentrated upon since the 1990s; they take their inspiration from folk ballads. Her third novel, the Post-Holocaust Plainsong (1990), is an unsentimental Pastoral tale about the arrival of a new Messiah in a plague-devastated land irradiated by typological insertions evocative of Old Testament prolepses, if "properly" read, of the coming of Christ. The cover bears an apparent subtitle, A Fable for the Millennium, which does not appear on the title page, perhaps reflecting an insecurity about the generic location of the tale (for a later critical term not then in use, but which might retroactively describe this text, see Fantastika). Grabien's fourth novel, And Then Put Out the Light (1993), is a ghost story. [JC]
Deborah Grabien
born 28 June 1954
works (selected)
- Woman of Fire (London: Judy Piatkus, 1988) [hb/]
- Eyes in the Fire (New York: St Martin's Press, 1989) [vt of the above: hb/]
- Fire Queen (New York: Bantam Books, 1989) [pb/]
- Plainsong (New York: St Martin's Press, 1990) [jacket subtitle A Fable for the Millennium not on title or copyright page: hb/Honi Werner]
- And Then Put Out the Light (New York: Tor, 1993) [pb/Peter Mennim]
- Still Life with Devils (South Euclid, Ohio: Drollerie Press, 2007) [pb/]
links
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