Rachel Ruth Cosgrove Payes (1922–1998)

Like many Oz fans, I suppose, my kid likes how the books lend themselves to indexing and organizing. Four quadrants of Oz, each with its own color, and each with its own ruler. Each also has its own wicked witch... well, almost. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the Wizard stated that when he arrived in Oz, each quadrant was ruled by its own witch, good ones in the north and south, and wicked ones in the east and west, but Ozma told him that before that, the north and south had been ruled by wicked witches as well. The Wicked Witches of the East and West we of course met (and disposed of) back in the very first book, and the Wicked Witch of the North, Mombi, appeared in Marvelous Land. But who was the Wicked Witch of the South, and what was her story? My kid has long asked me this question—and from our looking at covers of future Oz books, has long known we would someday find the answer to that question in The Wicked Witch of Oz.

The story goes that after writing Hidden Valley, Rachel Cosgrove offered Reilly & Lee a second Oz book, called Percy in Oz. But Reilly & Lee passed on the book, and the manuscript sat in Cosgrove's trunk for forty years (by which point she had married and was known as Rachel Cosgrove Payes*) until it was published by the International Wizard of Oz Club with illustrations by Eric Shanower under the title The Wicked Witch of Oz. As is my usual method on my journey through Oz with my kid, we read it where it would have been published, not where it was, my reasoning being they were far more likely to remember and care about relevant characters in this sequence. (This does create a minor discontinuity, in that a character from Merry Go Round in Oz, which we haven't read yet, appears in a crowd scene.)

The story, like many of Baum's own, is tantalizing but light on backstory. It begins with Singra, the Wicked Witch of the South, awaking from a hundred-year sleep in her hut in the Red Forest of the Quadling Country. We are told Glinda put her to sleep (consistent with the statement in Dorothy and the Wizard that "Glinda the Good had conquered the evil Witch in the South") but given little beyond this. How did Glinda do this? Why put her to sleep (and then, apparently, forget about her)? What kind of terror did Singra get up to? We are not told, because the story much more focuses on the present-day machinations of Singra, though it does give us the tantalizing bit of information that Singra is cousin to the Wicked Witches of the East and West—our first indication in the Oz novels, in fact, that they were related to each other. (The 1939 film made them sisters.) The book does seem to indicate Singra did not rule the Quadling country previously, when she thinks about how nice it would be to rule it.

Singra is a protagonist here; many of the book's chapters follow her decisions and actions. On waking up, she learns that while she was a sleep a girl named Dorothy killed her cousins, so she plots her revenge: turning Dorothy into a piece of cheese! This requires stealing some ingredients from Glinda's palace and even capturing the Scarecrow, but things go wrong for her when she accidentally transforms Trot, thinking her Dorothy. Dorothy and Percy the White Rat (from Hidden Valley) immediately set out in pursuit of Singra, and have various adventures, meeting a "rubber band" (i.e., a band whose members are made of rubber), making friends with a living neon light named Leon, getting captured by giant bees, and being partially transformed into hummingbirds before finally catching up with Singra... who then turns Dorothy into a statue!

My kid repeatedly indicated they found the book scary and that they didn't like it. They have never like reading about "bad things" happening, and Wicked Witch has more of those than most Oz books: Singra stealing things, Singra tying up the Scarecrow and taking some of his straw, Singra transforming Trot, Singra transforming Dorothy. I think to an adult reader, it doesn't come across as terribly perilous, but it totally works for a five-year-old. (Even though at one point they told me they were pretty sure Dorothy would not be a piece of cheese in later Oz books.) It did, I suspect, keep them involved in the book—for the past year or so, we've averaged one Oz book per month (compared to our earlier rate of twenty-three in one year), but we flew through this one in just a couple weeks because they kept on asking for chapters (whereas normally we just read a chapter on the alternate days that I do bedtime). How would Dorothy be saved?

Though it has the problems in the ending of many Oz books (once Ozma knows what's going on, the book wraps up pretty quickly, because there's little Ozma can't do with the Magic Belt, the Magic Picture, and the Wizard to call upon), I too enjoyed it a lot. I do like it when "wicked" characters are co-protagonists in Oz books (e.g., Lost King, Pirates) because they are often sly and clever, and it's interesting to kind of root both for and against them. The book is much more focused than Cosgrove's Hidden Valley, with a smaller cast of characters: just Percy, Dorothy, and later Leon in the adventuring party. This means the characters all get to contribute (unlike the extraneous Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger in Hidden Valley), and Dorothy comes across as the forthright protagonist we're used to from previous books. The communities they bump into on their journey are interesting without being distracting, and like in Hidden Valley, Cosgrove is good about the characters using their cleverness to get out of situations. The incidents feel Baumian without feeling derivative; the partial forced transformation into hummingbirds, for example, recalls Road to Oz, and Leon the Neon is a great idea.

I think it's probably also impossible to understate what a difference good illustrations make to an Oz book, and Wicked Witch is blessed with ones by Eric Shanower, surely the best Oz illustrator other than Denslow and Neill. His illustrations are detailed but also whimsical, capturing the imagery of the text in an evocative way: I loved his pictures of Leon the Neon, for example, and Percy and Dorothy with hummingbird wings is an amazing visual. (Sure this is the only official Oz novel to show us Dorothy's belly button!) There's a good sense of humor to the images too; my kid and I both loved his pictures of the cheese-obsessed Percy. And the pictures aren't just there in quality, but also quantity: each chapter has a title page with a small picture, whereas the first page of each chapter has a big image that wraps around the text, spanning two pages. (J. L. Bell has a great discussion of the book's visual design here.) Indeed, there's no two-page spread of the book that is image-less; again, compare with Hidden Valley, where my three-year-old (who will read Oz with us a bedtime) would look at a two-page spread of pure text and complain, "I want to see a picture!" Crazy to think that Shanower offered to reillustrate Hidden Valley when the Oz Club republished it, and they turned him down!

Other Thoughts:

• For the first time, I think, my kid actually got a punny creation in an Oz book: they understood both meanings of "rubber band" here, being familiar both with actual rubber bands and getting what it meant to have a band made out of rubber. They boggled a bit.
  
• There is a very rare post-Neill reference to Ruth Plumly Thompson's books here, with the Wizard's searchlight (from Yellow Knight and Ojo) being mentioned, though not used, as a way to find the missing Trot.

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The Hidden Valley of Oz is a landmark book for me: though not the last book in the "Famous Forty" (there is one more to go), it is the last that I had not read before, as I owned the fortieth and final one, Merry Go Round in Oz, when I was a kid. So my reading it aloud to my five-year-old kid was the first time I had ever read it, and the last time I will ever discover a new "canonical" Oz novel.

Like rel="nofollow" _target="_top">Jack Snow, it seems like Rachel Cosgrove was very consciously aping L. Frank Baum in her contribution to the Famous Forty; more specifically, she was definitely aping The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In Wonderful Wizard, an American child is whisked through the air to Oz where grateful locals think they are a witch or wizard and send them on a quest for a distant ruler with animal companions in tow. In Hidden Valley, an American child is whisked through the air to Oz where grateful locals think they are a witch or wizard and send them on a quest for a distant ruler with animal companions in tow. While the Munchkins were grateful to Dorothy for killing the Wicked Witch of the East and send her off to see the Wizard of Oz, Jonathan "Jam" Manley lands in the Gillikin country. He doesn't kill anyone for the Gillikins, but they send Jam off to find the Emperor of the Winkies, because they believe his axe is the key to liberating them from the tyranny of a giant named Terp the Terrible.

This "back to basics" approach also manifests in who Jam meets, and how the story is told. When Jam meets the Emperor of the Winkies, he is of course the Tin Woodman, and they are joined on their journey by Dorothy and the Scarecrow (plus also the Hungry Tiger). So we get a classic formula for an Oz story, told with a set of classic characters. The way it is told is also very Baum: unlike in a Ruth Plumly Thompson or John R. Neill novel, where the characters plunge from encounter to encounter, for the first time in a long while, we have an Oz story where they amble from encounter to encounter, slowly walking from point A to point B and back again, encountering various obstacles on the way. And like in one of Baum's better novels (e.g., Dorothy and the Wizard, Patchwork Girl), those encounters are ones that require clever thinking on the part of our protagonists to escape danger. That said, the dangers are very Thompsonian: two of the three irrelevant enclaves that Jam and company meet are ones that want to convert the protagonists into their own weird way of living (as books and snowmen). The original animal characters here, Percy the White Rat and the Leopard with Changing Spots especially, are fun additions.

So far so good. But I found the book weak in a couple key areas. One is that there are simply too many characters in the adventuring party: across the course of the book we have Jam, Percy, Pinny and Gig (two guinea pigs), Jam's sentient kite, Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Spots, and the Rhyming Dictionary. Though there's no point where all eleven characters are in the party at once, Cosgrove clearly struggles to give them all something to do, and twice resorts to characters just leaving the group for sort of flimsy reasons. And among the ones who don't leave, it's really only Percy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman who consistently contribute; Jam feels like an also-ran in his own book, Dorothy might as well not be there, and the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger are wasted. I like the emphasis on clever problem solving, something sorely missing from many of the recent Oz novels, but it would have been nice for Jam to do something in the book. The climactic fight against Terp seems like the place for that, but it's actually the previously hapless Gillikins who do most of the heavy lifting for some reason! The party comes up with a clever plan, but I wish the party had been the ones to put it into action.

The book is also let down by the illustrations, probably the worst to ever appear in an canonical Oz novel. Sketchy and utterly lacking in whimsy or charm or imagination. And so few of them too! ("The food at this place is really terrible." "Yeah, I know; and such small portions!")

My kid seemed to enjoy it; they were particularly fascinated by the fact that the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman used hypnotism to defeat the monster guarding the magic muffin tree that made Terp the Terrible into a giant. I think they particularly liked the new animal characters. But I don't think it's one they loved either. Which, I think, is a fair assessment. I am hoping Cosgrove's other Oz novel is more involving.… (more)

I'm not saying it's a bad story, just that it could have been better, it had potential it didn't live up to. Teenage Mellie Wilton, part of the the French Court scene in the 18thc, ends up forced to leave her home, excepts the "kindness" of the wrong person and winds up working in a brothel, is bought by Lord Henning as a bride for his homosexual son, Jaimie, in the hopes that she'll have the sex skills to make a proper man out of him and produce an heir, but Jaimie's too enamored with his current boyfriend to want to make the attempt. (A few tries prove ineffective.) To make matters worse, Mellie's fallen for Lord Henning, despite the age difference and wants to be his wife, not his daughter-in-law.

Lord Henning (his first name escapes me at the moment) is a real dull dud of a H, as when he's not nagging Mellie to keep trying with Jaimie, he's forever lamenting that his first wife hated sleeping with him, left him, took their son, and turned Jaimie into what he is. (This was either a reflection on what was thought at the time or else the author didn't know her facts, because being raised by a domineering mother, especially a man hating one, doesn't make a son gay. It may make him a beta male, but not a gay one.) He even cries about this and later, when he discovers Jaimie's not his son, he cries again! Then he gets drunk, sleeps with Mellie, and doesn't remember, so when she discovers she's pregnant, he thinks it's either Jaimie's or some other guy's.

From there it's a lot of repetition: "It's not my baby", "It is your baby", "It is not", "It is too", on an on, and ENOUGH! He's finally convinced, but by then who cares anymore?

The same with a plot to kill him, in which Jaimie and his birth father are involved, Mellie discovers this and pretends to go along in order to get evidence against them. When it's over and his un-son and bio dad are both dead, dumb dumb Lord Henning thinks Mellie was in on the plot and again it starts: "You wanted me dead," "I didn't", "You did".....

The best part of this book was when Mellie gets revenge on the man who raped her in the brothel (her first customer) and later tries to threaten her into becoming his mistress. She sends one of her brothel friends to meet him in disguise and he has sex with her, thinking it's Mellie, and discovers not only the truth, but also that the girl has an STD, commonly known back then as the pox! The guy sure deserved it, though today she'd be in real trouble, as he could also charge both women with rape! Times sure have changed!

Yes, there's a HEA, but for this H and h, who gives a....… (more)

Fun Short novel by E. L. Arch.
The authors real name is Rachel Cosgrove Payes. She wrote in many genres under various names. In the 1960s she wrote several SF novels under the name E. L. Arch. These books were only published once and in hardback. If you find one now it will likely be from a library. This one was included in a collection of, classic, short SF novels, as an audio book by BLackstone Audio.

I found the story quite fun and interesting. It is mystery based on "who is the strange one among us and why are some of us being killed". It will not win awards but I enjoyed it. I'll be looking for more of her, hard to find, books.… (more)