Moonlight and Vines (Hardcover)

Many writers currently seem determined to make faeries and other magical creatures very nice, very sweet, and altogether sappy. In these short stories we find nice creatures. We also find not quite so nice ones. We also find quite horrid ones, ones that would make our nightmares sit up and take notice. We find here the wellspring for artistic inspiration and the black void that leads to drug overdoses, the spirit of freedom and the freedom that goes too far and leads to madness. Here is hope, despair, and every other emotion, sometimes whispering, sometimes crying defiantly, but always with a sense that there is a truth here, no matter how much it may seem like a "mere fairy tale".

This is an important point -- de Lint is writing about reality, about real lives, about real feelings, about real emotions. There is a touch of magic to this, from the woman who doesn't want to admit that she sees things others do not, to the man who falls too in love with a photograph. What de Lint is writing about is what makes us ourselves, whether that is very good or very not good; he writes about fears, lusts, emotional expression, distrust, scams, and dozens of other human activities with a passion and an honesty that few can match or manage. In the end these works may be seen as parables, as internal explanations, or almost anything else, but ultimately they are beautiful works, very poignant, and full of sadnss, beauty, joy, and fear. They are raw expressions of all that happens in our world, coloured slightly by a dusting of the fey and the careful tread of a coyote in his moccasins.

Read, love, cry, and feel.

Some of the ideas were a bit far-fetched as well. Even though I didn't care as much for it as the two previous Newford Collections, it's still good. His prose is well writen in a realistic, conversational way. His charachters put me back in a time of my wild, young, living-on-the edge days and remind me of people I used to know. I've moved to a more stable(ok, I'll admit, boring and full of responsibilities) lifestyle now and it's nice to remember my young, living on ramen noodles lifestyle with a romantic and magical edge that DeLint can infuse into his stories and charachters.

Charles de Lint is wonderful at treading that line between fantasy and realism, where we wonder right along with the characters, "what is real?" That is his biggest talent; his biggest flaw is trying too hard to insert a moral into each of these stories. They all seem to be making a point. Sometimes this is annoying; sometimes the story is so good I don't mind at all. Still, I would have given the book three stars, since the moralizing tends to place an artificial distance between the reader and the story.

Then I read "Birds". My favorite story in the anthology, it deals with two young women's search for peace of mind, and the rituals they use to find it. De Lint has captured the very essence of magic and of personal ritual. I'm a pagan/witchy type, and I've read so many formulaic lists of "spell ingredients" I could puke; de Lint's description of the women's search for certain objects of personal value is right on the money. I want to copy the whole darn story into my BOS.