There’s a lovely scene in “Errantry,” the title story of Elizabeth Hand’s newest collection of short fiction, in which a character finds a print of a painting she loved as a child and describes what she used to imagine about the world it depicts: “A sense of immanence and urgency, of simple things [...] charged with an expectant, slightly sinister meaning I couldn’t grasp but still felt, even as a kid.”
It’s probably not a coincidence that the same painting graces the cover of the book, because that quote is a perfect way to encapsulate the atmosphere of many of the “Strange Stories” in Errantry. The magic in Elizabeth Hand’s short fiction can usually be found at its edges, just slightly out of reach. It’s there for a moment, but it’s hard to see without squinting. If you blink, it might be gone—but you’d never lose the sense that it’s still there, pushing in on reality from the outside.
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