was firmly established as a significant fantasy writer.
Several of his stories were linked and followed the
career of Cerin Songweaver, and music was a com-
mon theme, not surprising given the author’s strong
musical background.
His first novel, The Riddle of the Wren(1984),
is a pleasant but unexceptional story about the
opening of a gateway between our world and an-
other. The suggestion that magic still exists hidden
around us pervades De Lint’s work, and most of his
major novels have had contemporary settings.
Moonheart (1984) introduced Tamson House, a
structure that effectively exists both in our reality
and an alternate one where magic is common-
place. The novella Ascian in Rose(1987) uses the
same setting, as does Westlin Wind(1989). De Lint
wrote several short stories involving Tamson
House or characters connected to it, and several of
these were collected as Ghostwood(1990), later ex-
panded as Spiritwalk(1992). The Tamson House
stories draw from a variety of different folklores
and portray a world recognizably our own but dif-
ferent in very subtle ways.
The Harp of the Grey Rose(1985) is a more
traditional fantasy, although it avoids the pervasive
large-scale violence common to that form. A wan-
dering minstrel rescues the woman he loves from a
nefarious sorcerer. De Lint invokes gypsy magic in
Mulengro(1985), a tense and fascinating thriller in
which an angry man conjures up a homicidal crea-
ture to murder his enemies. Jack the Giant Killer
(1987) and its sequel, Drink Down the Moon
(1990), return to a contemporary setting, pitting
resourceful Jacky Rowan against a variety of magi-
cal creatures when they invade a contemporary
city. Yarrow(1986) is one of several stories by De
Lint that involve the dream world, in this case pos-
ing for the protagonist the problem of discovering
who has been literally stealing her dreams. A simi-
lar device is used less effectively in the quasi–sci-
ence fiction novel Svaha(1989). The migration of
characters from the world of fairies into our own
recurs in Greenmantle(1988), and there is a some-
what similar theme in Wolf Moon(1988), whose
protagonist is an involuntary werewolf who travels
about searching for some place that will accept
him despite his affliction. His life is ultimately
transformed by the power of love.
De Lint opened the 1990s with the more
melodramatic The Dreaming Place(1990), which
pits its two main characters against a Manitou, a
powerful Indian spirit who can transfer their con-
sciousness into the bodies of lower animals. The
author’s interest in darker themes eventually re-
sulted in three horror novels, all originally pub-
lished under the name Samuel Key, and two of
which—Angel of Darkness (1990) and From a
Whisper to a Scream(1992)—involve the supernat-
ural. Our Lady of the Harbour(1991) is a touching
novella about a man’s encounter with a mermaid,
and The Little Country(1991) is a complex and sat-
isfying story in which a young girl literally enters
another world by reading a book written about it.
The last was De Lint’s most ambitious book to
date, and there was no longer any doubt that he
was a major figure in the fantasy genre despite his
avoidance of the dominant form, disguised histori-
cal romances.
The stories collected in Dreams Underfoot
(1993) and the novel Memory and Dream(1994)
establish the imaginary city of Newford, which
would be the setting of a large portion of De Lint’s
work during the 1990s. The plots are often quiet
and understated, as is the case in the novel, whose
artist protagonist has forsworn her ability to bring
her paintings to magical life. The Ivory and the
Horn(1995), Moonlight and Vines(1999), winner of
the World Fantasy Award for best collection, and
Tapping the Dream Tree(2002) are further group-
ings of Newford stories, and The Onion Girl(2001)
and Spirits in the Wires(2003) are both associated
novels, the latter of which is particularly well done.
De Lint’s more recent novels have varied from
very good to excellent. Trader(1997) poses an in-
teresting problem for a musician who wakens one
day to discover that he has magically swapped bod-
ies with a villainous magician. His efforts to reclaim
himself run into somewhat predictable but cleverly
rendered difficulties. An investigator in Someplace
to Be Flying(1998) discovers that there are magical
creatures living hidden within human society, but
that revelation is potentially dangerous because of
human fear of the unknown. Forests of the Heart
(2000) is one of his most interesting efforts. Various
Irish spirits have migrated to the New World, but
they are unable to displace the native Manitou, so84 De Lint, Charles