Book Review: Unicorn Mountain

Unicorn Mountain by Michael Bishop


This is a fantasy book that doesn’t fit neatly into categorizations. It feels less like a fantasy book than a character-driven literary novel that happens to have unicorns and spirits in it. We have Bo, who’s dying of AIDS and has been ostracized by his family for being gay. Libby, who is working to keep a ranch afloat in rural Colorado. Sam, her ranch hand who misses the daughter he abandoned, and Paisley, Sam’s daughter who is trying to balance her need to become a spiritual leader in her tribe with her desire to reunite with her father.

Oh, and there’s unicorns too, real ones, and they’re dying of some strange disease. For some reason, in this book the unicorns are referred to as kar’tajan. By and large, they act very much like wild horses or somewhat tameable antelope.

The book was written in the 80s, and it has both the slang of its time and the prejudices of the time. For example, the fact that Libby is willing to take care of Bo is presented as unusually noble since most people don’t even want to touch him. It’s not just AIDS they’re afraid of, they all seem to think that gay is contagious. Bo’s brother Ned has to take great steps to make sure no one finds out that he has a gay brother, lest he suffer career repercussions from the stigma. And of course there’s plenty of sexism and racism thrown in, like when a guy in town is talking to a journalist and he calls her a vulgar slur to her face just because, I guess that’s what you did when talking to a woman back then.

Condoms, as a leitmotif, appear on numerous occasions. Early in the book, Bo visits another gay man who is dying of AIDS, and the man has balloons made of condoms, sort or ruefully admitting that horse had left the barn long before. There’s a literary connection between condoms and unicorns, of how condoms protect against AIDS and how they’re trying to protect the unicorns from whatever’s killing them. Condoms have such a recurring role in the book that it seems they were deliberate metaphors, like the author was trying to spiritually connect condoms to saving the unicorns. If there was, it was too subtle for me.

There’s a lot of magic in this book, but it’s not really wielded by the people. There’s the supernatural appearance of the unicorns, and a message from another reality, and a restless ghost, and some visions, but even the most spiritually enlightened ones are just deeply flawed people trying to muddle through. They’re all just doing the best they can with what they have, and they make a lot of mistakes. Both Libby and Sam do crazy impulsive things that don’t really benefit them, and Bo admits that he abandoned his partner when his partner started getting sick from AIDS.

This is a unique book. I think it’s more appealing to literary fans than fantasy fans. Fantasy fans might feel frustrated that the magic doesn’t have a system and the plot isn’t very direct. There’s no good-versus-evil conflict. The good guys are pretty flawed and the evil people are understandable, if not sympathetic. Literary fans will probably appreciate the nuance and metaphor and be willing to write off the magic as magic realism.



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