Jack Shade is a Traveler, a man who travels between our world and various eerie afterlife/supernatural worlds to bring messages from the living to the departed, and to perform other magical tasks, such as the finding of souls that have been lost. The story that follows is one of a series of vivid and highly imaginative stories that Rachel Pollack has been writing about Jack’s adventures. The magical system used in the Jack Shade stories is one of the most intricate and unusual ones employed in modern fantasy today, and the mystical world that Pollack creates in them, one inextricably wrapped around and interacting in many different ways with our modern everyday world—the double vision of the things around him that Jack possesses enable him to see a taxicab on the Manhattan street as a taxicab but also at the same time as the Piss-Lion that it actually is—form a mystic ecosystem of supernatural checks and balances, layered hierarchies, and rival Powers that is rich and complex and strange. (The Jack Shade stories also contain a shout-out to old farts like me who have been around long enough to remember another morally ambiguous traveler-for-hire whose business card consisted only of his name and the silhouette of a chess piece knight.)
Here Jack must find a way to defeat a seemingly unbeatable enemy bent on destroying the whole world of magic…
Rachel Pollack is the author of forty books, including Godmother Night, winner of the World Fantasy Award, Unquenchable Fire, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Temporary Agency, short-listed for the Nebula Award. She is also a poet, a translator, a comics writer, and the author of a series of bestselling books about tarot cards, including Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, in print continuously since 1980. She is also a visual artist, having designed and drawn The Shining Tribe Tarot. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages and sold around the world. She has lectured and taught on five continents. Her most recent work is The Fissure King—A Novel in Five Stories, featuring Jack Shade and the other characters seen here in “Song of Fire,” though “Song of Fire” is an independent story.
