Mulengro
Charles de Lint
Pan pbk, 488 pgs, £6.99
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 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.
Someplace to be Flying
Charles de Lint
Macmillan 465 pgs, £16.99
since reissued as a Pan paperback
Review by Dave Clark (1998)
The new urban (mostly) fantasy novel from the accomplished author of the recent Mulengro and other fantasies. Like the others I’ve read, this is ‘real world’ and rather good. A drama about the imagination in the form of 8 stories set in (mostly) the fictional city of Newford. When the world began there were only the animal people; Cody the trickster, Raven, the owner of the pot containing life and its unpredictable forces, and others. The corbae, related to crows and others of the corvid family of birds, and the canid (foxes) figure prominently.
One dark Newford night Hank Walker sees Lily Carson attacked. Hank’s shot, but his assailant is dealt with by two teenage girls who appear from nowhere and vanish in a flutter of black wings. It moves on, with the odd trip back in time, through a succession of recurring human and human-like characters and some pleasantly creepy surprises, and it’ll make you think. The best of his I’ve read (ie out of about three); warm, human, intelligent and haunting, superbly told. Neil Gaiman fans will love it.