Subject: (urth) Coldhouse Banshee

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 16:27:00 +0000

Good heavens ... Stone Ox has brought up a marvellous correspondence, 
and then missed something that ... well, I guess it isn't obvious 
because I never saw it before either, but somehow it jumped out of 
his posting at me:

> Jack stays in the barn haunted by the banshee three nights.  

...as does the coldhouse prank victim (Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights).

Okay, then: making the banshee story as abstract as possible... J 
wants very badly a treasure in F's possession. F dislikes / looks down 
on J / regards J as a poor recipient for the treasure, but for some 
reason does not give an outright "No." Instead, he sets J to spend three 
nights in a place which should kill him.

Now, one of the things the embedded stories in PEACE seem to do is to 
provide better or happier endings to some of the situations in Weer's 
life. So I am moved to speculate that the Coldhouse Prank was not a 
prank at all, but a deliberat attempt to keep a "real world" (Weer's 
reality) J from acquiring something that a "real world" F did not want
him to have but could not deny him. 

To those for whom the book is fresher in their minds than it is in 
mine, then: Do any possible real-world F's and J's come to mind? The
most obvious candidate for F would be Julius, who owns the barn /
coldhouse... is this even plausible? And if so, who would be J?

(Is this another candidate for when Den "really" died?)

--

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From: StoneOx17 <stoneox17 at aol.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 15:44:13 +0000

> Good heavens ... Stone Ox has brought up a marvellous correspondence, 

Thank you.

> because I never saw it before either, but somehow it jumped out of 

It wasn't obvious to me.  I came across these correspondences by assuming that Julius was the devil (as suggested by Robert Borski's essay, "The Devil his Due.") and once I made this connection, the i

> ...as does the coldhouse prank victim (Friday, Saturday, 

That's wonderful.  It's either a remarkable coincidence, or something very clever on the part of Wolfe.

On another topic, I just saw that an interview with Gaiman and Wolfe is coming out in the September issue of Locus, and that an excerpt from it has already been posted at   
http://www.locusmag.com/2002/Issue09/GaimanWolfe.html -- even the brief excerpt is very interesting.  

--Stone Ox 

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