Karen Graham University of Aberdeen karen.graham@abdn.ac.

uk No One Mourns the Wicked: On the Nature of Evil and Monstrosity in Gregory Maguires The Wicked Years Series

Evils an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. Its an other. Its not us. (Maguire, Wicked: the Life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West, 1995, p. 450)

By re-writing and expanding upon the Oz narratives from the early twentieth century tales by L. Frank Baum, Gregory Maguires The Wicked Years series of dystopian fantasy novels explore the characters and spaces the occupy the margins of the original tales. This shift in focus from the familiar child protagonist of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz incorporates much of the striking imagery of the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz as well as the tales by Baum. The expanded role of the Wicked Witch of the West character leads to discourse on the nature of evil both within the novel and in critical analysis. Oz offers an alternative America in all three incarnations of the world depicted in literature and on screen. Maguire utilises the various inconsistences in Baums tales and the alterations made for the 1939 film to build the landscape and inhabitants of Oz into a complex world populated by beasts and creatures that would more usually be considered monstrous. This paper proposes to examine the way that the appropriation of wicked characters, such as the Witch, develops the discourse on the construction of the monstrous within a society where the line between the real and the uncanny is undefined.