Charles De Lint

This is the first in an frequent series of posts on favourite authors.

De Lint is a Canadian writer of predominantly fantasy. Fantasy usually means elves, heroes with swords, beautfiul princesses etc not for De Lint (although one or two very early novels were a little derivative).

I first encountered De Lint in the early 1990's I think. A colleague of mine, Anne Broderick, recommended to me a book called Greenmantle. Greenmantle is very much rooted in today but entwined with the myth of the Green man very much like a modern Lord Dunsany. It was very much urban fantasy.

I was hooked and went on to discover the Tamson House stories Moonheart and Spiritwalk (collection) set in modern Ottawa and The Little Country set in mundane Cornwall and a turn of the 20th cenutry fable version of England.

But De Lint is best known for his loosely related Newford Stories. Newford is an imaginary North American city. De Lint has populated it with a set of totally believeable characters. Old Newford friends may not be central to a Newford novel but they do pop up and are often heavily featured in short stories.

I've snaffled this from De Lint's website

"The books have all been written in such a way that you should be able to pick up any one and get a full and complete story. However, characters do reoccur, off center stage as it were, and their stories do follow a sequence. The best place to start is the collection Dreams Underfoot. From there they go pretty much in this order:

The Dreaming Place
A Whisper To A Scream (originally credited to "Samuel M. Key")
I'll Be Watching You (originally credited to "Samuel M. Key")
Memory And Dream
The Ivory And The Horn (coll)
Trader
Someplace To Be Flying
Moonlight And Vines (coll)
Forests Of The Heart
The Onion Girl
Seven Wild Sisters (also available in Tapping the Dream Tree)
Tapping the Dream Tree (coll)
Spirits in the Wires
Medicine Road
The Blue Girl"

The Dreaming Place and The Blue Girl are YA novels. A Whisper To A Scream and I'll Be Watching You are, respectively, a horror novel and a thriller; they're darker fare than the other Newford books and aren't really that integral to the underlying, ongoing backstory that takes off center stage in so many of the books and stories."

I haven't read all of those. I'm not bothered about the Kay books but I was suprised I had missed the Dreaming Place even if it is YA. I've read all the rest down to The Onion Girl and all are **** to ***** stuff.

I have Tapping the Dream Tree on order from Amazon. Spirits in the Wires is yet to be out in paperback. The one I want to get my hands on is the new one Widdershins its all about Jilly Coppercorn (a frequently occuring character) and the chap who is her soul mate Geordie Riddell (they just don't know it yet).

I'd agree that a good starting place is Dreams Underfoot but the novels Memory and Dream (possibly my favourite), Trader, Someplace To Be Flying, Forests Of The Heart can be read in any order. I suppose the same can be said of The Onion Girl but this is about Jilly and you need to have read more of the others and perhaps the collections to appreciate her importance. Its a super book.

Excuse me I need to see if Amazon has the Dreaming Place. Get reading.