Ghost Drum: A dark and haunting Slavic fairy tale

Ghost Drum by Susan Price

Susan Price is a gifted author, though like Anne Pilling, I suspect her work is just a tad too dark and uncanny to draw in a devoted child fanbase. Truly, she pulls no punches with what she writes for her young audience – here for example, the protagonist is killed when she’s deliberately impaled with a large stake. Though she finds a way to reanimate her body, it’s not before hungry wolves chew off one of her arms. You know, for kids!

Ghost Drum (1987) is presented as an oral tale, in such a way that it almost demands to be read aloud. The framing device is of a learned cat chained to an oak tree (a stock fairy tale character popularized by Alexander Pushkin, who is also referenced in Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale) that sings songs if he goes in one direction, and tells tales if he goes the other.

Unfolding over the course of several generations, this story is about the witch Chingis, who is taken from her home as an infant and fostered by the witch who lives in the house with chicken legs. Meanwhile, the Czar’s unwanted son Safa is raised in a tower room, with no inkling of the outside world beyond what his nursemaid can tell him. (Yeah, it’s Room, twenty-six years before that book was published).

One day these two individuals will meet, but the path to each other is a long and strange one…

Though Price doesn’t go deep into characterization, for that’s never the purview of fairy tales, she does create dense and evocative imagery, from the dark opulence of the Czar’s palace to the stark coldness of the Iron Wood that ghosts traverse after death. It’s a slim book, and yet I’m not surprised that it goes down like a very rich plum pudding, for every sentence is leaden with meaning and weight, and not a single word is wasted.

Another thing that intrigued me is that even though I’ve only read a few of Price’s books, I love how you can often pick up on a writer’s specific interests; the subjects and themes they keep returning to. In this case, I know that Price is deeply into fey lore and shamanism, which are also heavily present in The Sterkarm Handshake and The Bearwood Witch, even though if I provided a synopsis of all three books, they would sound like they had nothing in common. And yet, you can definitely tell they were written by the same hand.

She also likes to go hard not only on monarchies and the right of kings, but those that allow these institutions to flourish (“if the world were well-rid of every Czar, then the most greedy, the most cruel, and the least truthful of those left would called themselves Czars – and the rest would let them do it”) as well as the power of words and how they can shape people’s minds:

Suppose that a Czar or Czaritsa ordered their people to fight a war, a stupid war, a war that should never have been fought. Thousands of people are killed for no good reason, and their families left to mourn them. Much, much money is spent on canons and swords, so there is no money to spend on other, better things, such as seed to grow wheat to feed the people – and thousands of people are cold and hungry because of this war.

The Czar is afraid that if the people find out how foolish and wasteful the war was, they will be furious and do him harm. So the Czar uses word-magic. He says to the people, “The war was not foolish – no! It proved that our people are the bravest and best in the world because they died for us, and killed so many of the enemy. I know you are starving, my children,” he says to them, “but that shows how noble you are and how willing to make sacrifices for the Mother-land. I, your Czar, am proud of you!”

He says this and repeats it over and over again, and he makes his servants repeat it over and over to everyone they meet – and the magic works. The people forget to be angry. They grow glad that their sons and brothers were killed, and proud that they themselves are cold and hungry. This is the very simplest kind of word-magic, but it is very powerful, my daughter, very powerful indeed.

It really is an evocative and thought-provoking piece of work. It also reminded me a lot of Margaret Mahy’s YA novels, though don’t ask me how or why – I can only tell you I kept thinking of The Changeover and The Tricksters while reading this. Apparently this book has several sequels, so hopefully they’ll get the reprint treatment that Ghost Drum just has.