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Mulengro
Charles de Lint
Pan, paperback, 488 pages, £6.99
Published November 1997
ISBN 0330321137
Review by Mike Don (1998)

How to describe Mulengro? Contemporary fantasy, based on Romany (gypsy) folklore, perhaps . . . But that doesn’t really cover this blend of police procedural, supernatural Grand Guignol horror and edge of seat suspense first published in 1985. Gypsies have been persecuted for millennia, so it’s hardly surprising that there’s a darkness about their legends, legends mined — not unsympathetically — by de Lint. His defensive apologia in the afterword is hardly necessary, I feel; the gypsy community can rarely have had such a positive portrayal in recent fiction.

De Lint retains a gentle, late sixties feel to the story without compromising the tension. It’s surely no accident that one of the non-gypsy heroes, Zach, is the archetypal hippie dropout, like the hero of de Lint’s 1997 novel, Trader. As with Trader, too, there’s a persistent musical background, though here it’s the haunting folk of Ewan MacColl and Robin Williamson rather than Trader’s cool jazz. Beautifully crafted. A winner.

First British publication, with an Afterword by de Lint, which wasn’t in previous US editions.