Tales of the Quintana Roo
Author: James Tiptree, Jr.
Published: 1986 by Arkham House
Cover Artist: Glennray Tutor; interior art also by Glennray Tutor
Publisher Blurb: "The Quintana Roo is a real and very strange place," writes James Tiptree, Jr., in the preface to this new collection of three talismanic tales of the supernatural. "It is the long, wild easternmost shore of the Yucatan Peninsula, officially but not psychologically part of Mexico. A diary of daily life on its jungly beaches could sometimes be taken for a log of life on an alien planet."
During the late 1970s Tiptree-- one of the greatest American authors of short imaginative fiction-- lived for months on the eerie windswept shore of the Yucatan, and the true protagonist of his book is neither the Tiptree narrator nor the manifestations of ancient Maya civilization, but rather the Quintana Roo itself as a living, pulsating entity that envelops the reader within a uniquely alien ambience.
In these pages Tiptree presents a mysterious numinous milieu in which an emissary from the sea beckons an unwary wayfarer into the realm of dead souls, a warp in time provides a vision of vanished Maya splendour, and a race of insidious subaqueous creatures lures men to their destruction. Visions of wonder, intimations of doom...Tales of the Quintana Roo is an incantatory collection from a master literary sorcerer.
Notes: This book contains three 'ghost story' short stories. They're formatted the same way, with different unnamed narrators telling the reader of stories they have heard from others. These stories are brief, and are largely devoted to establishing atmosphere and bringing our narrator and his narrator together.
Summaries:
"What Came Ashore at Lirios" (1981) - Recounts a young gringo man's attempt to rescue a shipwreck victim, finding himself pulling ashore someone of indeterminate gender. The stranger proves to be haughty, beautiful, and pushy. The young man leaves to get them water, returning the attempted gift of a strange gem, and when he wakes in the morning the stranger and the shipwreck are gone.
"The Boy Who Waterskied to Forever" (1982) - Recounts the fate of a young Mayan man who, making use of his uncanny talents in the water as a diver, swimmer, and waterskier, transcends his modern-day bonds to escape into a magnificent past where he-- maybe-- becomes a god.
"Beyond the Dead Reef" (1982) - Recounts a Belizean man's misadventure in a dying reef, which, responding to humankind's polluting trespass, is being reborn into a new and threatening kind of life.