Cold Skies and other Tales of Fear

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There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. She controls her home and manages her family, as well as the stray waifs who come to her; but they don't impinge upon her creative space and energy - unlike JM Barrie's Wendy who told stories to the boys, Josephine retains maternal power by secretly learning and reusing their stories in her work.

Until, that is, the arrival of the unfathomable Henry Smee who represents the threat of one half of her world to the other. Indeed, he undertakes an intellectual battle to the death with his hostess. Byatt uses the metaphor of enclosure to depict Josephine's separation of her diverse selves. Being enclosed may be claustrophobic but it is an escape into a space that she can re-create as 'home', making it Heimlich , furnished with her own ideas.

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This space can then enable her to reach out into the world, which is how Josephine's writing emerges. But her problem is finding a balance between being out in the world while remaining shut off from it. How can she engage with readers via her books while maintaining a self that is somehow separate and unreadable? Josephine sees the opportunity for controlling, rather than being consumed by, the situation; she sees the benefits of using enclosure for her own gain, for widening the space into a place for expression and later re-lives the pleasures of the freedom of being able to hide.

Why is separation from others, or into two separate selves, so essential for her successful literary expression? Josephine and Henry Smee are brought together to play out a competition on the mental plane, where the threat of Henry lies in his fusion with Josephine. The rupture of Josephine's carefully structured dual worlds begins when Henry is described as resembling the fictional Simon.

Josephine's 'The Boiler-Room' is a surreal story of a boy in a boarding school who builds himself "a Crusoe-like burrow or retreat in the dust behind the coiling pipe-system of the coke-boiler in the school basement and finally moved in there completely, making forays for food and drink at night. Most worrying for Josephine is that she starts to lose control of Simon's image and she is irritated by the intrusion into her creation. Henry is thus depicted as a fraud, a real person who is trying to be a constructed character - a stealthy, changeling boy.

For whom is he a substitute? All of Josephine's fictional boys? The nexus of her creativity? Or does Henry represent dissolution of the 'real' Josephine, an identity that she keeps in a discrete box that functions alongside, but in opposition to, the Josephine who exists in the domestic sphere? The language used to describe Henry paints him as an almost intangible figure, as his presence is refracted through Josephine's interpretation of his image.

Once Henry has embodied fact and fiction, these become increasingly blurred for Josephine. Has she drawn Simon from the archetypal outsider, or is Simon the palette used for painting the Henry canvas? This is the climax of the merger. Henry has 'a habit of stasis', but he also moves about like a permeating fluid. This paradox of stillness and fragile movement creates a quandary for Josephine. On the one hand, he is a real boy who seems to have no will of his own and is malleable; she uses her mood to gauge his, she actively reads him as a passive text - she is the writer and he is the object.

But on the other hand, he is slippery and moves into the realms of being an unreadable text beyond Josephine's interpretative domain, which produces fear in her. This terror of losing control leads to an anguishing search for an inviolate space, combined with a feeling that this place cannot be found 'out in the world'. If one is 'not at home in the world' where else is there to go? Josephine disappears into the pleasure-giving activity of writing.

Here, she deals with her fear by writing of the terror as being outside. Writing is the door that shuts her in and shuts the world out. This connection between fear, enclosed spaces and the creative imagination allows these elements to feed off each other. Being one of the "lost, voiceless sufferers locked in cupboards" is a torment when inflicted by others, but a self-imposed exile into the boiler-room is a delight.

The sanctuary that enables expression is a form of seclusion, a framework into which Josephine thinks she has incorporated freedom, but a freedom where one keeps one's self to one's self. It's not just a fear of going into the world, but rather a fear of infiltration by the world. Imagine the terror of someone trying to penetrate that world. For Josephine, her creativity is violated. She can't bear to be told about Henry by Henry - she has already written him in her own words and doesn't want a re-edit. The battle is for authorial ownership. If the creation of Simon is an exorcism, then Henry is the ghost come back to haunt her.

She is losing control of fear - and that is the crux of the problem. What she has written to contain her fear has materialized - it has leapt off the page and into the world.

Byatt has said that Possession contains "a sort of passionate plea for readers to be allowed to identify with characters," but here Henry's identification with Simon is a form of theft, which violates the mode through which Josephine channels her excess - that's why she gets writer's block. New Critic Cleanth Brooks says of IA Richards that he "has endeavoured to maintain a careful distinction between the emotional state produced in the reader On a superficial level, Josephine cannot engage with Henry and learn his 'inside', but on a deeper level they are utterly locked together.

She sacrifices time and effort for the other boys, as women have historically looked after others, but Henry involves the sacrifice of something more crucial, and so one of them has to go.

Henry leaves Josephine's house and literally withers away without her. Josephine begins to imagine him once he's dead. His identity becomes less specific, more blurred, more malleable. Her writer's block lifts. She can steal him back now and write him, sketch certain aspects, design chosen characteristics: She regains control over herself, her identities and her art. She imbibes Henry as if she has artistically consumed him by osmosis.

Cecilia Ekbäck’s debut Wolf Winter is an absorbing tale about fear, death and a cursed land

In her new story, "the ghost of those limp yet skilful hands, just that, attached itself to the form of the present Simon whose name was in fact James but not so that anyone would have noticed. AS Byatt says of 'Cold' in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice that it is a "metaphor for the writer in myself", a story of an Ice Princess "whose existence is predicated on not making contact. Princess Fiammarosa is surrounded by the warm protection of her family, which makes it difficult for her to act upon her true icy desires. After secret frolicking in the snow, her body becomes encased in an extra skin of ice, which does not cloak her identity - because it is her identity.

Her new mantle defines her difference from others, but how can this crackable outer boundary survive their attentions? When her preference for coldness is discovered by her tutor, "her whiteness became whiter, the ice-skin thicker" - he understands her separateness and thus her self-enclosure becomes liberating.

This is unsurprising when in contrast with her claustrophobic childhood: She finds a breath of life in her newly-realized loneness and experiences sensation in her new skin: Inside a crackling skin of protective ice that was also a sensuous delight". Fiammarosa becomes further separated from the rest of the kingdom when not only is she given her own icy section of the palace but she becomes less understood and loved.

Yet, it is now that her creativity is unleashed, in the form of original striking tapestries expressed in "ice-blue threads". The preciousness of her artistry is paramount, born of a thriving existence predicated on not making contact. Her father is her enemy in this respect, as he wishes her "to be softened and opened to the world In this metaphorical tale, metaphor proves to begin the undoing of the Ice Princess because she is a very single-minded interpreter.

Her suitor Prince Sasan's gifts are crafted from glass, shimmering metaphors that reflect his desire to capture her: The Princess's senses tingle only to the crystal clarity of the form and the texture of the cool glass; she is blind to the crafted rosy flames, the warm, gold quality of the honey, and the rich summer season. Her interpretation of glass as resembling frozen water leads her to marry Prince Sasan, even though she learns that glass has been created from desert sand in "a furnace of flames".

After the heat of lovemaking with the warm Sasan, Fiammarosa begins to melt inside and her icy centre and boundaries start to dissolve.

• Writing a tale.
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• Captain America: Two Americas (Captain America (2004-2011)).

Once in Sasan's desert kingdom, she recognizes the passion of her sexuality in the heat of the glass-making process, so what represents danger in the external world is also inside her soul. Her surroundings weaken her bodily and mental power but she is revived by entering the manifest metaphor for the Prince's heart - a life-size palace he has constructed for her from glass on a snowy mountain, where her protective ice layer reappears and re-forms her fading identity.

Fiammarosa makes a compromise with Sasan's creative imagination, and is enabled to recommence study and writing. Thus, I think 'Cold' presents "making contact" as a positive creative process. So, finding space for expression is paramount, whether devising a new strategy for survival, defeating encroachments upon one's creative drive or traveling to an ice kingdom.

Reversal of expectation is a common trait in these Byatt stories; the rebellious princesses and the self-serving mother all find some sort of artistic liberation. Here, a woman who works as an etymologist faces decay and death but finds surprising revitalization. There is a similarity with 'Cold', in that rather hazardous bodily change encourages creativity.

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Ines is confronted with disintegration wherever she turns. Her mother dies and is cremated, leaving Ines numb with grief; there is no more love. There is also a distinct lack of colour; everything's pale and bland, right down to the food.