A review by ricksilva
Exit, Pursued by a Bear by Greer Gilman
5.0
Poet and playwright Ben Jonson finds himself in the midst of intrigues common, royal, and supernatural when he is commissioned to stage a faerie-court masque for the King James and his court.
While Jonson deals with malfunctioning stage apparatus and trying to figure out the managing of a pair of live bears to be used in the performance, the ghost of Christopher Marlowe arrives on a mission from the faerie court.
There is a lot of plot happening in a short amount of pages in this novella, and Greer Gilman juggles it all brilliantly, but it's her use of language that really shines. I wasn't familiar with all of the history, and I'm sure I only caught a fraction of the references, which the story is overflowing with (having just read Marlowe's complete plays helped), but I was still enthralled with the poetry of it all.
While Jonson deals with malfunctioning stage apparatus and trying to figure out the managing of a pair of live bears to be used in the performance, the ghost of Christopher Marlowe arrives on a mission from the faerie court.
There is a lot of plot happening in a short amount of pages in this novella, and Greer Gilman juggles it all brilliantly, but it's her use of language that really shines. I wasn't familiar with all of the history, and I'm sure I only caught a fraction of the references, which the story is overflowing with (having just read Marlowe's complete plays helped), but I was still enthralled with the poetry of it all.