[.ca] Moonlight And Vines (ISBN 0765309173)

From Amazon.com:
Imagine a city--cold, hard, concrete jungle on the surface, but, down that dark alley or disused cemetery, magic has begun to unravel the gray fabric of realism. Charles de Lint succumbs to his fascination with the outsider in all of us, and writes of lonesome goth kids, newbie lesbians, strippers, Gypsies, angels of death and mercy, and even vampires and ghosts in a style that is remarkably refreshing after so much sword-and-bodice formula fantasy. Moonlight and Vines is a medley of fairy tales for the alternative crowd, with most of his city grrrls and boys sporting combat boots and wounded souls. De Lint crafts his stories with soft edges but indelible images: I can feel a foreign vibe in my apartment, a quivering in the air from Teresa having been there.... My furniture, the posters and prints on my walls, my knickknacks, all seemed subtly changed, a little stiff from the awareness of her looking at them. It takes a while for the room to settle down into its familiar habits. The fridge muttering to itself in the kitchen. The pictures in their frames letting out their stomachs and hanging slightly askew once more. Hardcore horror/fantasy enthusiasts might find the author's habit of imbuing each protagonist with a sense of wonder and self-discovery slightly saccharine and hackneyed after the umpteenth happy ending, but longtime de Lint fans will be delighted. --Jhana Bach

The search for magic continues:
_Moonlight and Vines_ is a well-written collection of stories, set in a modern city, intended to give the reader a sense of wonder, and make us believe that there is magic afoot, even in our most run-down urban slums. 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.

Newford; A more somber collection:
I was glad to find a third collection of Newford tales, but still a bit dissapointed. The stories hit some deep emotional tones, and I even found tears streaming down my face at more than one part of this book. However, this didn't have the light-hearted flow of his previous Newford collections of short stories. It seems almost like DeLint set out to come up with a moral tone and it wasn't as enjoyable as the lighter, beat-of-the-town which I was expecting. 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.

Magic is alive, and that is not always pretty:
Charles de Lint has an amazing way of writing; I can only compare his style to Guy Gavriel Key, which makes me think that there is something truly magical in the waters up in Canada. When de Lint writes, you feel a strong tug at your deepest core; you know he is writing about a truth, even if you have yourself never seen balloon people -- they are true on a level beyond something seen on the news. 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.

I read a LOT and this is the best book I've read in years.:
The young girl in "Pain Management" by Andrew Vachss is very involved with books by Charles de Lint. Vachss is a wonderful writer in many ways - one of which is that his characters listen to REAL music and REAL books. I followed Vachss's lead and bought (and fell in love with) Judy Henske, so I continued on, and bought a few de Lint books. I don't have the words to tell you how wonderful "Moonlight and Vines" is. That would be like my telling you that a baby's first steps are "wonderful." This is a collection of short stories whose characters continue to weave a delicate connection of lace from story to story. The city is the same throughout. It's a hard city filled with gentle souls. From "I envy the music that lovers hear," the first line of the first story, I was HOOKED. When I have time, I read a book a day. Please, look at the other books I've reviewed. I've read enough books to be able to base an opinion on what is good and what is bad. This, my friends, is the best book I have read in a long time. Best. Superlative. In our current scary times, it's wonderful to be able to escape to a place where everything sure isn't perfect, but where there are good people.

I love this book:
This is the most heart touching book those odd people out there.