“Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name,” as the Cheers theme song tells us. And really, who doesn’t love the idea of some pleasant gathering place, where you can go to “forget about life for a while“?

So I’m mixing up my references a bit there, but it’s fitting, because the narrator of C. Litka’s latest novel is in fact the piano man at a bar—The Bleu Moon, which calls the Sinatra song to my mind. All these cozy references should help suggest the mood of Some Small Dive, which is a supremely pleasant literary-fantasy novel set in Litka’s Lorrian universe.

You’ll note I say it’s fantasy, even though the book description itself denies this: “Only the fact that it is set on a world other than Earth makes it slightly different from a light literary fiction novel. Readers who have found my work via science fiction and fantasy, may perhaps find this story boring.”

But it is still set in a fantasy world, so I call it fantasy. And there’s another reason too, but we will get to that later…

Part of what makes it so cozy, of course, is that we get to meet some of the familiar faces from Litka’s earlier books. My personal favorite is the dramatist, Forthwith Om, or “Omi”, as he is called by his friends.

Actually, Omi’s whole subplot was my favorite part of the story, because it is about the behind-the-scenes logistics of crafting a musical. Omi has recruited an up-and-coming composer to write the songs for his first venture at musical theater, but wants our hero, an editor by day, to look over her work to make sure it won’t embarrass him before the critics. Which, naturally, wounds her, as she feels her competence is being questioned, even though Omi tries his best to smooth things over.

I’m always fascinated by these kinds of tensions in songwriting partnerships. Look at Gilbert and Sullivan’s infamous “carpet quarrel” to see what kind of drama can happen off the stage of a big production. And Wodehouse had more than one story about the turmoil that goes into crafting a show, and it’s fair to say that in this, as in other respects, Litka follows in the footsteps of the great PGW.

The main thread of the story is a romance, but it’s a quaint, mild sort of romance, with no big dramatic moments or anything like that. Like everything in Litka’s world, it is peaceful and old-fashioned.

Which brings me to the point about fantasy. The fact is, this world of people gathering nightly for drinks, or attending laid back parties to mingle with friends and colleagues, is increasingly itself a fantasy. I reference Cheers and “Piano Man” above because they, too, are artifacts of a vanished world. Now, everyone’s just on their phones.

It would be nice if we could rebuild that world. But for now, at least, we can experience it via Litka’s cozy tales.

Last week, I referenced the “Torment Nexus effect”, whereby authors attempting to write cautionary tales inadvertently set in motion the creation of the very dystopia they mean to prevent. Litka has done the opposite. He has crafted pleasant, enjoyable futures. Let us hope that his books become widely read, and that life will imitate art.