The grimness is relentless. Although happy endings are the rule rather than the exception – or at least optimistic ones – almost every single character either is going through hell or has gone through hell. It’s nothing new with this book that the number of happy childhoods among his characters can be counted on one hand. (One character did have a happy childhood – but then her entire family was murdered when she was twelve. Another who enjoyed her childhood was made to feel guilty about it because she was such a minority.) The number of characters who were molested or beaten as children is too high to keep track of without an abacus. And a great many stories are written in the first person, which can intensify the grimness.Also, I hesitate to say it in this age of rampant Political Correctness, but I’m not entirely happy that a very great many of characters in this collection specifically, and in his writing in general, are lesbian. (*insert Seinfeld quote here*) I feel like I have to defend the fact that I’m a little tired of it, but I refuse to, except to say that it’s kind of the same thing as if he had a great many characters who were … oh, any given demographic. If the same number of characters were bartenders or Tibetan monks I might start getting annoyed. In this case, to be honest, my feeling after the umpteenth story featuring a lesbian stripper or a lesbian dominatrix (about which world I had NO interest, and I would have skipped the story had I known – I hated that one for several reasons, and that aspect was a big one. And it was just a weak story) or a woman who “doesn’t think she waltzes, but would rather like to try” … was that if I wanted to read about sapphic relationships I’d go to the gay and lesbian section of Barnes and Noble and shop. (Or, you know, go wander through slash fanfic online. No, wait, that would just make me open a vein.) Where was I before that sea of parentheses? (“To take arms against a sea of parentheses, and by closing end them…” Hee!) Oh. Right. Either grim or gay, or, often, both.Not to belabor it, but the population of women who start off in their stories straight and end up in bed with another woman was still growing when I put the book down. Seriously? Sir? Fantasize on your own time, if that’s what this is all about. It’s getting old.Also, while the stories are never less than beautifully written, this lot just doesn’t satisfy for some reason. The end of the ghost story “In the Pines” was … silly, which was a true shame as that would otherwise be my favorite story among what I’ve read (“strollops”!). “Saskia” … I don’t know. Find a flesh and blood girl, man. “The Big Sky” also failed a bit in the end, to me, and I just didn’t enjoy the tenor of it; “Birds” had some really nice moments but the premise seemed too … something, or not enough something, and, yet again, I was a little annoyed by the ending; “Moonlight and Vines” had a bit of a pat ending (and did the boy in the story, who could have been a great character, really have to fondle himself quite so often?); “Shining Nowhere but in the Dark” had some great moments, but … well. “If I Close My Eyes Forever” was the S&M story (consider yourself warned); “Passing” was another “hey! I like the girls!” (to paraphrase Tara Maclay) story.I think one thing that threads all through De Lint’s writing is what bugged the heck out of me about Edward Eager’s Magic or Not? – pick one! I much prefer something like the stories of the Crow Girls, or Bones, etc., where the magic is undeniable, even if some characters choose to continue to deny it. That was yet another reason I was put off by “Shining Nowhere”, and “Passing” too for that matter – the characters’ decisions in the end to accept the magic made them somehow weaker, in my eyes, not stronger. In a review out in the ‘verse (I really need to start making a note of where I find these things) someone pointed out that a sort of theme of these stories is “first encounters with magic”; it’s a theme of a lot of his work. It’s another groove that became a little well-worn here: “Either I’m losing my mind or something weird is going on.”Taken individually, encountered in the original anthologies most of them were first published in, they might have been the gems I talked about last time I wrote a De Lint-centered post. But I don’t know. Taken en masse, these exemplify the reasons my first reaction to short stories is reluctance. It’s like a box of chocolates from a store that caters to a thoroughly foreign culture: you really, really never know what you’re going to get. The next thing you bite into might be a peanut butter cup or an English toffee (I wonder if I can still quote the X-Files version of “life is like a box of chocolates”?), or a chocolate-covered palm weevil grub or chili pepper. Someone, somewhere might like it, but I, emphatically, do not.This isn’t going to be one of the books I don’t finish; it’ll hang out by my bed and I’ll probably read another story here and there. But I’m taking a break.
This is a tough one to describe. I grappled with what to score it, and settled on four stars in the end. I'm not keen on de Lint's prose style, and find his dialogue artificial. I suppose my main problem is he reminds me so much of my own juvenile attempts, in my teens, at short fiction. In the early days, I made some of the same mistakes he does. For one thing, his settings and characters come across as things he thinks are cool, as opposed to things that make a good story. It sounds like a whole lot of wishful thinking. His riot grrl females aren't interesting, fleshed out people: they're his idea of a cool and appealing woman, and his moody, aloof men are more of the same. It often feels as though de Lint tells different stories using the same archetypal warm, mystical women, and the same cold, downtrodden hero-men.But in spite of all this, I did give this collection four stars, and for a good reason. It's the magic. De Lint has a policy about magic, and he comes right out and says it in several of the stories here: that it can be found anywhere, however mundane, and even if it comes right out and smacks you in the face, you still have to look for it. The real crux of his storytelling is the magic his characters find when they need it the most. It's satisfying, and when it happens, it makes a kind of narrative sense. If you can get past the sometimes pretentious prose and his autobiographical quasi-depressive lone wolf identity bleeding through every story, you can access a world saturated with marvels right down to the most everyday things. It's everywhere, and it's beautiful, mirroring your own world and filling it with wonder that you can carry with you.As I said, it's a hard one to describe.
What do You think about Moonlight And Vines (2005)?
This collection of short stories set in the mystical, magical, occasionally mundane world of Newford give us little glimpses into the lives of the inhabitants, some familiar, some new to us. We are given a sense of the interwoven quality of this world (as is true of all realities) and of the interconnections of the large and small characters’ lives. Indeed, there are no small characters in de Lint’s world, but there are some that recur and even become the principals in some of his novels. These stories are a bridge between the novels and previous short stories, giving the world more continuity and perhaps more reality than it would have without them. At least, I believe, these characters continue to live and have adventures and encounters (large and small) in de Lint’s imagination. I am grateful that he shares these episodes with us via these short-story collections. Highly recommended.
—Cupcakencorset
The denizens of Newford inhabit an off-kilter world, one where magic is not only possible but actually occurs. But magic is a slippery entity, not entirely there when you want it or in any recognizable form. The people of Newford are special and wonderful, too, in their own unique ways. They contain a kind of magic that makes them stick like a burr in your memory. The irrepressible Jilly, e.g., firmly believes in magic—in seers, crow girls, pennymen, wish-granting dwarves, what have you—but she’s just one of a panoply of interesting people who dot these pages. Magic, according to Mr. de Lint, isn’t what it does for you, but what it does to you and each of these individuals, once touched by it, are never quite the same afterwards. When Mr. de Lint writes, you not only believe that magic exists but wish that it might happen, no matter what form it takes.
—Marsha
Charles De Lint, and his cat Claire, Rock my socks off. In the town of Newford (an urban community somewhere in Canada) logic never has to follow, fantasy is the rule. Meet Jilly Coppercorn, the most awesome artist ever born in literary fantasy, and all of her friends in their shared and intertwined adventures in this anthology. You can almost hear them busking on the street corner with that old fiddle, or see them running through the alleyways.Ghosts in the grave yard have stories to tell, twa corbies do as the folksong tells, and much more. Don't buy Thai! Find yourself held safe in the moonlight and vines.
—Cindi
