MDMD Gore Vidal's "The OZ Books"

[David Morris]

An author named Geof Ryman wrote a very good book called "Was" (1992) which 
contains two parallel stories which revolve around the "historical" Dorothy. 
  I won't review it 'cept to say I enjoyed it, but the following is from the 
review on Amazon.com (I also highly recommend his "The Child Garden"):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140178724/qid=1001610826/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3_3/103-8027290-8356661

"The Scarecrow of Oz dying of AIDS in Santa Monica? Uncle Henry a child 
abuser? Dorothy, grown old and crazy, wearing out her last days in a Kansas 
nursing home? It's all here, in this magically revisionist fantasy on the 
themes from The Wizard of Oz. For Dorothy Gael, life with Uncle Henry and 
Aunty Em is no bed of roses: Bible-thumping Emma Gulch is as austere (though 
not as nasty) as Margaret Hamilton, and her foul- smelling husband's sexual 
assaults send his unhappy niece over the line into helpless rage at her own 
wickedness and sullen bullying of the other pupils in nearby Manhattan, 
Kansas. Despite a brush with salvation (represented by substitute teacher L. 
Frank Baum), she spirals down to madness courtesy of a climactic twister, 
only to emerge 70 years later as Dynamite Dottie, terror of her nursing 
home, where youthful orderly Bill Davison, pierced by her zest for making 
snow angels and her visions of a happiness she never lived, throws over his 
joyless fianc‚e and becomes a psychological therapist. Meanwhile, in 
intervening episodes in 1927 and 1939, Frances Gumm loses her family and her 
sense of self as she's transformed into The Kid, Judy Garland; and between 
1956 and 1989, a little boy named Jonathan, whose imaginary childhood 
friends were the Oz people, grows up to have his chance to play the 
Scarecrow dashed by the AIDS that will draw him to Kansas--with counselor 
Davison in pursuit--in the hope of finding Dorothy's 1880's home and making 
it, however briefly, his own.

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