Review initially published on my blog, Writing by Numbers, here.It’s uncomfortable and a little odd to admit that this collection of short stories mostly made me think I wouldn’t de Lint very much. Though the stories are fiction, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was a smarmy liberal white guy persuading me of his sensitivity, his hipness. That he considers himself an appealing blend of Peter-Pannish proponent of imagination, and storyteller with his finger on the pulse of gritty urbanity. P...

Dreams Underfoot introduces readers to DeLint's imaginary Canadian city of Newford: a mecca for urban fantasy. Magic is on the streets of Newford, if you just know where to look for it, often in unusual places, or more accurately perhaps, if you believe in it. Newford is home to many imaginary creatures, some sinister and some benign. The novel is a collection of 19 stories, many of which tie into others, with a small group of central characters, such as the free-spirited artist Jilly Coppercorn...

Note, Nov. 26, 2015: I edited this review just now to correct a misspelled word.All but one of the 19 stories in this collection take place in de Lint's favorite setting, his imaginary city of Newford, Canada and its environs, and they furnish a great introduction to his characteristic urban fantasy. (Strictly speaking, two of the stories here don't actually have a supernatural element; but they fit right in with the rest.) Newford is home to such creatures as mermaids and fairies, skookins and

This is an enjoyable collection of 19 linked short stories, of the sort of urban fantasy that mixes the ethereal and mundane. Just right for nighttime reading.De Lint is a prolific Canadian author who has written many books set in the fictional city of Newford, of which this is the first; most of the stories were originally published in magazines in the late 80s and early 90s. They tend to feature bohemian types – artists, writers, musicians – and street people, encountering magic beneath the su...

Good reviews are always harder for me to write than bad ones. This book just sings to me--I love the sparse, clean prose; the engaging, three-dimensional characters; the twisted but familiar storylines and the city of Newford. I love that de Lint sets his urban fantasies in a Canadian city, which is a welcome change from the UScentric urban fantasy I usually read. I was sad to close the book after reading the next page, and I want more.

Charles de Lint seems to do what many New York Times Bestselling authors fail to do; he is able to tell simple (Note: I do not mean simplistic) stories, and keep the “meat and potatoes” in place. What do I mean? There is nothing more irritating to me than a story which is more a sketch than a story, where characters are given the thinnest of descriptive lines, where the plot is as thinly unveiled as the characters, are given to long dialogs that meander in order to get that extra pages in so th

I was just a wee freshman in high school when I discovered Charles de Lint, and my addiction to his characters and fictional world of urban mythology all started with this book. It has been 14 years now and I'm still a huge fan.The first edition paperback of this book actually has an oil painting by Terri Windling on the cover of a celtic looking woman with deer horns, a flute, and an oak leaf tattoo over her eye. I want to say John Jude Palencar has been doing the reprint cover art as these ant...

This collection of short stories was the first of Charles de Lint's Newford books that I read 20 years ago. I might not rate it quite as high now (perhaps a 4), but at the time - it was immersive and amazing and I could almost (not quite!) see hints of the magical from the corner of my eye after I finished reading. I was happy to discover that de Lint's Newford tales have retained their own immersive magic all these years later.

Copied from the author's website, I thought this would be a handy guide for myself (since I lost track of which ones I've read and who knows in what order). * for the ones I have/read.Q. Where do I start reading the Newford stories?A. The books have all been written in such a way that you should be able to pick up any one and get a full and complete story. However, characters do reoccur, off center stage as it were, and their stories do follow a sequence. The best place to start is the collectio...

3.5 stars. I liked this collection and certainly would recommend it to fans of de Lint but in all honesty I was expecting to like this collection more than I actually did. I had previously read Moonheart (which I loved) and Memory and Dream (which I thought was excellent, though not quite as good as Moonheart). First, this is not really a short story collection as much as a group of individual tales all set in Newford and involving many of the same characters (and often building on events that o...

Short stories, I have decided, are simply not my favorite medium. They don't offer up enough satisfaction or closure, and there's that obscurely frustrating first couple pages of a story when you don't know what is going on, and that happens over and over again. Thankfully all the stories in this case take place in one area, the city of Newford, with a cast of characters that show up repeatedly. Jilly is a great character and I can't wait to see her again, as well as Geordie the fiddle player.De...

Charles de Lint was writing urban fantasy well before the genre's current wave of popularity. In fact, his work sits outside what people mean by urban fantasy these days - it eludes classification, falling somewhere between magic realism and folkloric fantasy. Terri Windling's introduction to this edition discusses the difficulty of trying to pin such a book down to a single genre.I'm currently attempting to read through all Charles de Lint's Newford books in order of publication. Dreams Underfo...

Thoroughly unimpressed.Maybe this wasn't a Lint book I should've started with. Or something. I guess it just didn't work out for me. Anthologies, unless really compelling, don't roll with me in the first place, and this just...didn't. At all. The stories were really discombobulated and disorganized and I mean you could've arranged them throughout the book in whatever order you wanted but why did you choose this order?!...ugh. I dunno, guys.

I've been familiar with the name of author Charles de Lint for a number of years, but I've never really got around to reading his books. I read Moonheart many years ago and remember being very impressed with it (to the point I bought the audiobook from Audible last year and hope to get to listen to it this year), but I never read anything else. de Lint writes urban fantasy. Somehow, in the years between the late 80s/early 90s when people like de Lint and Emma Bull and were writing it and now, th...

"There are no endings, happy or otherwise."I came to this book and really, really wanted to enjoy it. Sadly, I didn't at all. Even though each individual story is short, I found it a slog to get through and definitely didn't feel in a rush to pick it back up. I kept starting each new story hoping that maybe this would be one I'd really like, or find beautiful or profound, but never quite managed it. If I had to put the book down midway through a story, I often forgot what happened before, or whe...

This is another one of those books where I just have to say 'How does one review something this special, this odd and this wonderful?' I can't. I can, though, try and tell you why I love this anthology so much.It's the second of de Lint's works that I have read. The first was The Blue Girl, which, when I started it, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. This anthology really connected some dots about Newford for me, though. The characters in here are just magical in that they are totally...

Absolutely stunning. I'm still somewhat mesmerised by this book, under its spell, having a hard time not picking it straight back up and reading it again (and only stopped from doing so because I lent it to someone else with the insistence that they read it immediately).This book doesn't really fit neatly into "genre". It's not quite a novel, but then not quite short stories either. Short stories, I suppose, in the sense that each "chapter" can be read independently of any other, and in fact wer...

This felt like the literary equivalent of putting on a flannel shirt, lying on old carpet, and listening to Nirvana with your eyes closed. It is so evocative of 90s grunge that it's hard to enjoy in 2020 (though I admittedly suspect I am just too young to have this grunge nostalgia).The stories themselves are just interesting enough to keep you going, but not interesting enough to make you care or even think about them much after you've finished one. It was all very bland and ethereal. The first...

A collection of short stories that actually works very well as a 'novel.' They all share a setting and theme - that of troubled, often creative young people encountering myth and magic in the imaginary city of Newford. Having never been to either city, for some reason Newford conjures up a sort of cross between the Seattle and Vancouver of my mind.Some of these stories are very, very good. I'd say some of them are some of de Lint's best work. However, around the second half of the book, it began...

On a scale of 1 to 1 trillion, words cannot describe how highly I would score the pretentiousness of this book. It's so pretentious I have no idea where to start with my criticism of its' over serious pomposity.So... where to start? Well, I'd start with the damn introduction, an introduction that has the... (I don't want to say gall, so I'll say...) confidence to claim that de Lint is an author of the quality of Isabel Allende (at least in terms related to magical realism), and that the only rea...