Shallcross
Painted Birds
A possessed snake targets members of a Florida community in the fantastical, experimental fantasy novel Shallcross: Painted Birds.
Charles Porter’s natural, fresh fantasy novel Shallcross: Painted Birds blends ancient mysticism with contemporary issues.
The ensemble cast, residents of a small community in rural Florida, includes both humans and entities known as “slippers.” The latter are spirits of the dead who inhabit humans and animals alike. And the book’s central hero, Aubrey Shallcross, is a self-described “talk-walker” who experiences auditory and visual hallucinations.
A handful of Aubrey’s friends and relatives, members of the local Native American community, are also talk-walkers with the ability to see and communicate with slippers, even those who live inside wild animals. When Aubrey and other talk-walkers learn that a man-eating snake is terrorizing the Everglades, targeting people of color in particular, they join with a group of animal slippers to kill the snake and capture the malicious slipper that lives inside its eye.
The book’s worldbuilding is quite ambitious, ranging from the fantastical slippers to a bevy of elements that lean into absurdity. For example, one of the slippers is the spirit of French novelist Jules Verne. This detail does not impact the overall story whatsoever, though; instead, it serves to baffle and delight. And despite its conceptual grandeur, the novel’s actual story is simple; its setting is grounded and its stakes are low, though they’re set in a wild, larger-than-life context.
The prose is an electric marriage of substance and style. It reflects a loose, frank authorial voice that evokes the 1960s and oral storytelling traditions. It is self-referential on occasion, too, supplementing its narrative sections with comments like “This character was in the first Shallcross story.”
Though the book is part of a series, it functions well as a standalone. However, its major characters lack meaningful arcs; intimacy is limited to the book’s setting rather than its characterizations. Environmentalism plays a key role, and Florida is depicted with a level of care and authenticity that makes an impression. Scenes from the Indian River to the dense cypress domes become emblematic of the core theme of nature being stronger than the will of humanity: “Florida is like its water—You can change it, control it, block or twist it, but eventually it will go back to its original place.”
Shallcross: Painted Birds is an unflinching, inventive novel that explores grand ideas with a fascinating blend of playfulness and sincerity.
Reviewed by
James Edward Cook
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
