David Payne

The Collector of Tales David Payne

The Collector of Tales is a novel about a man who, if he really knew it, is looking for answers. Whilst he is searching for a story about a curious people called the Fire Dancers he is also is also, unwittingly, looking to gain some understanding about the place that his fifty-two years have brought him to. He is at a crossroads and, like the poet Dante many centuries before him, he finds himself with a choice between the broader, well trodden way and the narrow path ripe with risk. He chooses the former, the one that he perceives to be easier. The Collector first hears of the Fire Dancers at a chance meeting on the road with a fellow traveller and then, a few months later he heads into the cold northern lands of his world in search of the tale. The story is set somewhere in Earth?s future but the world of the Collector is inherently medieval. In a strange village inn, run by Grendel and his Mother and frequented by a brutish collection of people, he learns a mythical tale of these Fire Dancers. After a brief stay there he travels on to Trellsheim, the northern-most city of the region. On his way and after arriving, he has a series of encounters that tap into his own innate sense of paranoia so that he becomes increasingly worried about being pursued by persons unknown. This feeling is crystalised when he is abandoned, sick and dying, outside the city walls by the owners of the inn where he had been staying. His rescue at the hands of a well proportioned woman with an earthy sense of humour and the ability to talk without pause serves to emphasise his lack of control over the events in his own life alongside the effects induced by his illness. As he recovers slowly from the temporary paralysis of his illness be becomes the unwitting participant in a festival of celebration of death and rebirth. Here, in spite of everything that seems to be set against him, he discovers the real Fire Dancers and comes to learn a little about them and how the reality of it all is both similar to (and yet a world of difference from) the myth. The Collector is on a quest of sorts and in this story, as in life, the journey is more important than the destination. Although he is looking for one tale, every encounter that he has presents itself as a story in its own right and each opens out a little further, our understanding of the nuances of the world in which he lives. This is a random cross section from a world unlike our own: dissimilar and yet very familiar.