How Does It Feel?

Callie’s fascination with mycology and luna moths serves as a motif throughout the novel. Obviously, the mushrooms and moths are natural links to the supernatural world: The mushrooms form a fairy ring that creates a portal between the realm of human and the realm of Fae; the moths are drawn to the mushrooms for sustenance. This sustenance is both literal, as the moths find food and drink in these areas, and supernatural: The eerie, endangered, nocturnal moths serve as representatives of the Unseelie Fae, according to Prince Mendax. They live (and hunt) in the darkness, as do the Unseelie Fae; their powers of attraction derive from both their beauty and their uncanniness. As such, they quite appropriately represent the Unseelie faction of fairies.

The mushrooms, too, are magical in their own way. Callie does not find it difficult to believe that “Crazy Earl” might know where to find a patch of toxic mushrooms, for example: “They were poisonous mushrooms that, if eaten in small enough quantities, might not kill you but made you act out of sorts […] like Crazy Earl” (5). The mushrooms link the natural world to the supernatural world, acting as mind-expanding agents of possibility, linking Science and the Supernatural. Callie’s sighting of the golden fairy as a child is chalked up to her gathering of mushrooms; her vision must have been a hallucination. When discussing the destroying angel mushroom, Earl admits, that “[i]t’s the fungus that has ruined my life” (41). This could indicate either a real-world ingestion of mushrooms that have altered his mind (he lost his job because he was deemed cognitively impaired) or a supernatural encounter that has compromised his existence in some way. That the author chooses two actual species speaks to the aspiration to link directly the human world with the fairy realm.

This use of real-world species indicates that magic can be found in the mundane. When Callie witnesses, for the first time, a multitude of luna moths gathered together, she is enchanted: It was “a mystical display,” she thinks, “so magical looking,” not just “beautiful” but “ethereal” (61). One can be as awed by the natural world as by the supernatural. Fairy tales are derived not merely from the fantastical, but also by the actual. Later, when it is again suggested that Callie’s experiences with the Fae are the result of hallucinations caused by mushrooms with “the highest toxicity that has ever been recorded in fungi” (305), she almost immediately resists, insisting that her memories are real, that her experiences are authentic. She refuses to allow the expectations of others to destroy her entanglement with magic—and, indeed, Earl turns out to be Prince Aurelius of the Seelie Fae in disguise. As Callie notes near the beginning of the novel, “nature had no rules” (47); thus, it is entirely possible that the properties contained within mushrooms and moths, ordinary creatures of the everyday world, are magical.