Voices From a Forest

There is a place in everyone’s head where fairies fly, future worlds flourish and unspeakable horrors abound. It’s called imagination.

We seek refuge there from the calamities of reality. And if vampires occasionally haunt the dark side of make-believe, they can at least be dispatched with crosses and wooden stakes.

The evils of a harsh daytime world obey no such rules.

You can’t bring a missile down with a crucifix, and 10,000 wooden stakes driven through 10,000 hearts won’t end the madness on the streets of our cities.

To dwell in fantasy, Sherry Gottlieb has said, is to vacation on another planet, where all things are possible. Cowardly lions find courage on those planets and little boys never grow old.

Gottlieb ought to know. For the past 19 years she has owned a bookstore celebrated across the country for its collection of fantasy, science fiction and horror.

It’s called A Change of Hobbit.

Twenty-five-thousand books once lined its shelves and another 25,000 were stacked in a back room to take their places.

Ray Bradbury autographed books there. So did Stephen King, Arthur Clarke, Frank Herbert and so many other masters of “alternative fiction” that Gottlieb can’t remember them all.

“Sometimes,” she says, “we had hundreds of people waiting to have their books signed. They’d line up outside for hours. But that’s all over. Now they come here to cry with me.”

The shelves of the bookstore are almost empty, their emptiness magnified by mirrors that line a wall.

There’s a kind of surreality to that, too, creating spaces that don’t exist, like the world beyond Alice’s looking glass, or the land at the end of Gulliver’s travels.

But unlike the fairy tales that have endowed this store with a special ambience, there is no happy ending here.

Change of Hobbit, a fixture in Santa Monica, will close at the end of the month.

A fan calls it the death of Oz. Gottlieb blames the recession.

“We might have survived the recession alone,” she says, “but we moved 18 months ago and it cost twice what I had expected. We just couldn’t survive both the move and the recession.

“The end.”

Endings are often sad. I have endured bleak days in my own life by wandering the forests of imaginary places that books offer.

If not all of those places were as sunny as the Emerald Kingdom, if some echoed with the eerie pounding of a tell-tale heart, they were still far better than what I faced at the time.

I hate to see a bookstore close, especially this kind.

Fantasy gives flight to our dreams, science fiction offers hope for the future and horror alerts us to dangers that lurk beyond the pages of Poe and Lovecraft.

These books become, in effect, voices from the forest that draw us in, like the tendrils of a siren’s song, to ponder the once upon a time. . . .

As I walked through Gottlieb’s dying store, I wondered if its demise somehow reflected a triumph of reality over fantasy, of war over the beguilement of imagination.

Ray Bradbury laughed at the notion.

“Just the opposite,” he said. “Science fiction is about the dreams of our time, stories that move the heart. We’ll always need that. Fantasy makes you want to live forever.”

Only a bookstore dies here, he says, not that genre of writing that has come to be called the literature of what-if.

I caught up with Bradbury during a pause in his dizzying schedule of lectures and writing. At 71, he makes all the rest of us seem somehow indolent.

The man has mastered all areas of imagination and elevated them to higher planes of social fantasy.

“The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” have, in their special ways, established standards for others to attain.

He calls today’s efforts science fantasies, overlapping two specialties.

“It’s Prince Valiant in outer space,” he says. “Medieval knights dancing with astronauts.”

Hobbit’s closing, Bradbury adds, will only mean you’ll have to go somewhere else to buy the kinds of books Gottlieb specialized in.

“Fantasy denies the end,” he says. “It is composed of dreams, and dreams endure. Man dreamed of fire before discovering it. The dream always comes first.”

I’m sorry there isn’t a better ending to Gottlieb’s tale. But at least, once upon a time, her store was a place where imagination lived and dreams came true.

That’s not a bad epitaph.