Charles de Lint is one of the finest contemporary fantasists writing today. His deeply emotional and intimate tales almost always revolve around our collective human nature, our fascination with and desire for an afterlife, and they contain an immense respect for the undiscovered magic and mystery that inevitably surround us. Filled with life lessons but never moralistic, his core concern seems to be that each of his characters must find their own worth, what they are worth to themselves and to others.
PROMISES TO KEEP is a Jilly Coppercorn and Newford novel, and tells the story of how Jilly was able to turn herself from a heroin-addicted prostitute into an aspiring fine artist, and how she was helped along the way by innumerable people who are now her friends.
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I dig Sandman Slim.
James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, is the tough-as-titanium antihero of Richard Kadrey’s urban/noir/horror series that began in SANDMAN SLIM, continued in KILL THE DEAD, and is now on its third installment, ALOHA FROM HELL.
Stark is the scarred half-angel, self-proclaimed “monster who kills monsters.” In other words, he’s the boogeyman to the things that go bump in the night. He’s feared and hated by the denizens of Hell, and considered an abomination by the forces of Heaven.
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There is something remarkably beautiful, intimate and humane (not human, since one of the characters is a gigantic tusked female, and the other bleeds spiders) about the opening of Daniel Abraham’s THE DRAGON’S PATH. It features a young man escaping from some form of religious sanctuary into a land he has only heard of but never seen with his own eyes. He makes contact, begs to do chores for food, water and shelter, and engages in brief conversation with a formidable farmer’s wife.
This vignette, which begins and ends on a chilling note, lets the reader know they are in for an epic, thoughtful, believable, chewy fantasy tale — the beginning of the kind of fantasy series we all grew up on, those trilogies or tetralogies that convince you the author is someone special.
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Jo Walton is justly famous for her “Small Change” series (FARTHING, HA’PENNY, HALF A CROWN) set in an alternate universe where England took the appeasement route in the 1940s and Nazi Germany is the dominant country in the world. It’s a chilling and all too believable series, because she writes about human beings, their virtues and foibles, very well indeed. In short, as the main character in AMONG OTHERS might say, Walton is absolutely brill.
AMONG OTHERS is the perfect coming-of-age story for those readers who, like us, were brought up on a steady diet of fantasy and science fiction. It’s an homage (and could be used as a reading list) to some of the best sci-fi of the past century. But it’s much more than that, too.
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Jesse James Dawson, the character introduced in K.A. Stewart’s A DEVIL IN THE DETAILS last year, returns in A SHOT IN THE DARK. Outside of a slight bit of moral conflict, it’s basically more of the same. But that’s not altogether bad news, especially for those who enjoyed meeting Dawson the first time around.
Dawson is a member of the select and very secret group of champions who fight for the lives of those unfortunate enough to have sold their souls to demons. He has no magical powers of his own, but instead uses his martial arts skills and his expert katana sword technique to battle various supernatural monsters when they come to collect the human souls that were foolishly bargained away for mostly material possessions.
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