Monday, April 03, 2017

This Week's Oz Short Story

My readings of Oziana continue with the 1977 issue, and boy, was this one a nostalgia trip, as it's the first issue I ever owned or read. I was still very new to the whole Oz scene (I had only joined the International Wizard of Oz Club earlier that year) and didn't even realize there was much Oz outside of the Famous Forty (not that there was a whole lot anyway, as the explosion of extracanonical Oz works was still to come). I had, however, bought and read my first Ruth Plumly Thompson story at that point, the Club's own Yankee in Oz. Good thing, too, because Jinnicky is in that one, which really helped me better understand the first story, "Glinda and the Red Jinn" by the late Robert R. Pattrick. Pattrick was one of the original members of the Club, and an early researcher on all kinds of Oz topics. Sadly, he died in 1961, so he didn't get to see the Club grow. But this little tale, which he claimed to have found as a manuscript in one of his books while organizing his collection, is an origin story for Jinnicky, and how a humble maker of jars and jugs got to learn red magic from Glinda and transform himself into the Red Jinn. Sadly, that's where it ends, although Pattrick (writing in 1955) hints that there was more to come, including how Jinnicky foiled the Nome King's invasion of Ev. Sadly, we will probably never get to see that story.

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