Charles de Lint,
338 pages,
TOR Books Fantasy
Oddly as it is at this time and age that we think ‘What would it be like to have magic back in the world’. A second after we express that thought, the left side of our brain would react and state ‘That is impossible to happen’ and we’d often dismiss the former for the latter. Of course in this day and century we had already plotted the world and know every distinct area once thought impossible to see. Have map the areas of the human anatomy and explained how it works, from the heart that pumps the blood to every region of the human body down to a single neuron and its function in the transmission of nerve signals from the brain to its receptacle organ. And seen the universe and what’s it like through the aid of satellites sent into deep space and powerful telescopes. So we know already what is there to know about us, the universe, and the environment. Or so we’d like to think.
But what if the world isn’t that define as we think it is. What if there is another world mirroring our own? No this isn’t the Twilight Zone if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m talking of a world that may had existed before or running its course along ours, but hidden within every angled shadow at a certain time of the day. A world where fairies, dryads, and mermaids do exist but not as we pictured them in storybooks and scary movies. A chance encounter at the local drugstore with an overly perky individual, which turns out to be a sprite that got into the wrong store. Or a very beautiful girl you’d been admiring while on the train home. Then as she passes you by as she gets off at the next destination, you’d suddenly smell salt water as if you were at the beach. And in a dream you are surprise to find out that Jason, Freddie Kruegger, and Dracula or what looks like them, had been long time pals of yours in your dream travels.
This is the sort of world you’d see, once you read “The Ivory and The Horn” by Charles de Lint, a Tor Book Fantasy. A fantasy book roughly housing eight short stories, two novelettes, three chapbooks, and two novellas. “The Ivory and The Horn” presents a surreal fantasy world of ghost, satyrs, and spirits existing in between the spaces of the real world.
Set in the landscape of Newford City, a pseudo-American city that seems to be a chop-chop version of New York, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn. Skyscraper buildings, residential suburbs, and cosmopolitan architecture clashing with an urban jungle of rundown apartments, littered streets, and abandoned warehouses (or factories). A mini-America in between the wetness of the sea and the harshness of the Nevada desert.
The stories in this collection are a variety of hope, lost, renewal, sorrow, and mysticism. Each story having its own tale to tell. A caseworker for social services who’s about to give up, when a stranger appears in his life to renew his faith. The ghost of an old street lady comes back to help a young woman in need. One night a man meets a mysterious woman while throwing out the trash who teaches him to dream.
Each story can range from the simply bizarre; a fat nimble woman goes out collecting bones, to make dog-like figures in “The Bone Woman”. To the terrifying, a lady reporter is haunted by voices from a wishing well in an abandon motel in “The Wishing Well”. And the childish, a female artist bumps into a young girl at the market who accuses her of evicting a business establishment in a supposed imaginary world in “Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery”.
But the stories themselves are not simple tales of fantasy (or urban fairy tales), as we’d like to think of them. Hidden behind the deceptive mask of a fantasy book are stories and tales of ordinary individuals who are down on their luck. Or of men and women those past had left behind scars so visible they carry them with them. A lesbian who has lost her lover to leukemia, a former kid from the streets who’s struggling hard to maintain a job and keep to her studies, a reporter who even with her good looks and chic style of dressing, is inside carrying the psychological scars of a broken family.
The characters in the stories range from artist and poets moonlighting as waitress at a café, struggling musicians, American Indians in the city, street people, social workers, and their non-human counterparts; a very irritating yet charming coyote spirit, a mysterious dark woman hanging out at a local jazz club, the ghost of an artist who seems to be in need of therapy and other phantasmal beings.
Most of the supernatural elements in “The Ivory and the Horn” seem to be a combination of Native American folklore, fairy tales, urban myths & legends, superstitions, and other myths & legends. Ghost in stories come out and talk in riddles (a thing rarely presented in movies and mainstream books) and animal spirits are depicted as women with features of the animal they’re suppose to represent, portions of which stick out at odd ends here and there. Some murderers take away a bit of paraphernalia from the people they kill, least they be hunted by their spirit. And a group of downtrodden native Americans living in the city rediscover the songs of their race. Incorporated in a manner that seems to dispel our now often trivialized conception of the faerie world (or spirit realm if you prefer) and to remind us that the world of the spirits is something we can’t confine to our own terms.
Going on a more technical note, each tale seems to favor an epigraph for an intro, which kind of acts as a contrivance to the underlying theme, essence, or situation in the story. In most of the short stories and other tales in the collection, narration is told by the narrator and the main character or by the character himself (or herself). While some are told by an anonymous character or in conjunct with the narrator.
A number of characters reoccur in most of short stories and the much longer pieces. While some of short stories have characters inherent to their own, e.g. “Saxophone Joe and the Woman in Black”, “The Forever Trees”, “Coyote Stories”.
The language is straightforward, honest, and intimate as we listen to the characters relate the day they’ve been through, their life, their emotions and feelings. Description is kept to a bare minimal, no large quantity of heavy description, as focus is primary on the story itself. Simple yet stark realism told by the narrator or the main character as the bitter yet often unseen truths of a city are presented to us free of any superflurousness, arousing both sympathy and compassion in the reader.
Heart pounding, at the same time heart wrenching, the stories in this collection reminds us of how it is to be lost, cynical, and often disbelieving in the strength of the spirit and the faith it requires to believe. Because all too often we have become too jaded and complex ourselves (and even a bit too grown up I might add) to believe in anything at all. A mixture of rapture, pain, sorrow, and lost, and oddly a feeling of relief after reading the tales in this collection. To know you are alone but at the same time not alone in the world.
338 pages,
TOR Books Fantasy
Oddly as it is at this time and age that we think ‘What would it be like to have magic back in the world’. A second after we express that thought, the left side of our brain would react and state ‘That is impossible to happen’ and we’d often dismiss the former for the latter. Of course in this day and century we had already plotted the world and know every distinct area once thought impossible to see. Have map the areas of the human anatomy and explained how it works, from the heart that pumps the blood to every region of the human body down to a single neuron and its function in the transmission of nerve signals from the brain to its receptacle organ. And seen the universe and what’s it like through the aid of satellites sent into deep space and powerful telescopes. So we know already what is there to know about us, the universe, and the environment. Or so we’d like to think.
But what if the world isn’t that define as we think it is. What if there is another world mirroring our own? No this isn’t the Twilight Zone if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m talking of a world that may had existed before or running its course along ours, but hidden within every angled shadow at a certain time of the day. A world where fairies, dryads, and mermaids do exist but not as we pictured them in storybooks and scary movies. A chance encounter at the local drugstore with an overly perky individual, which turns out to be a sprite that got into the wrong store. Or a very beautiful girl you’d been admiring while on the train home. Then as she passes you by as she gets off at the next destination, you’d suddenly smell salt water as if you were at the beach. And in a dream you are surprise to find out that Jason, Freddie Kruegger, and Dracula or what looks like them, had been long time pals of yours in your dream travels.
This is the sort of world you’d see, once you read “The Ivory and The Horn” by Charles de Lint, a Tor Book Fantasy. A fantasy book roughly housing eight short stories, two novelettes, three chapbooks, and two novellas. “The Ivory and The Horn” presents a surreal fantasy world of ghost, satyrs, and spirits existing in between the spaces of the real world.
Set in the landscape of Newford City, a pseudo-American city that seems to be a chop-chop version of New York, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn. Skyscraper buildings, residential suburbs, and cosmopolitan architecture clashing with an urban jungle of rundown apartments, littered streets, and abandoned warehouses (or factories). A mini-America in between the wetness of the sea and the harshness of the Nevada desert.
The stories in this collection are a variety of hope, lost, renewal, sorrow, and mysticism. Each story having its own tale to tell. A caseworker for social services who’s about to give up, when a stranger appears in his life to renew his faith. The ghost of an old street lady comes back to help a young woman in need. One night a man meets a mysterious woman while throwing out the trash who teaches him to dream.
Each story can range from the simply bizarre; a fat nimble woman goes out collecting bones, to make dog-like figures in “The Bone Woman”. To the terrifying, a lady reporter is haunted by voices from a wishing well in an abandon motel in “The Wishing Well”. And the childish, a female artist bumps into a young girl at the market who accuses her of evicting a business establishment in a supposed imaginary world in “Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery”.
But the stories themselves are not simple tales of fantasy (or urban fairy tales), as we’d like to think of them. Hidden behind the deceptive mask of a fantasy book are stories and tales of ordinary individuals who are down on their luck. Or of men and women those past had left behind scars so visible they carry them with them. A lesbian who has lost her lover to leukemia, a former kid from the streets who’s struggling hard to maintain a job and keep to her studies, a reporter who even with her good looks and chic style of dressing, is inside carrying the psychological scars of a broken family.
The characters in the stories range from artist and poets moonlighting as waitress at a café, struggling musicians, American Indians in the city, street people, social workers, and their non-human counterparts; a very irritating yet charming coyote spirit, a mysterious dark woman hanging out at a local jazz club, the ghost of an artist who seems to be in need of therapy and other phantasmal beings.
Most of the supernatural elements in “The Ivory and the Horn” seem to be a combination of Native American folklore, fairy tales, urban myths & legends, superstitions, and other myths & legends. Ghost in stories come out and talk in riddles (a thing rarely presented in movies and mainstream books) and animal spirits are depicted as women with features of the animal they’re suppose to represent, portions of which stick out at odd ends here and there. Some murderers take away a bit of paraphernalia from the people they kill, least they be hunted by their spirit. And a group of downtrodden native Americans living in the city rediscover the songs of their race. Incorporated in a manner that seems to dispel our now often trivialized conception of the faerie world (or spirit realm if you prefer) and to remind us that the world of the spirits is something we can’t confine to our own terms.
Going on a more technical note, each tale seems to favor an epigraph for an intro, which kind of acts as a contrivance to the underlying theme, essence, or situation in the story. In most of the short stories and other tales in the collection, narration is told by the narrator and the main character or by the character himself (or herself). While some are told by an anonymous character or in conjunct with the narrator.
A number of characters reoccur in most of short stories and the much longer pieces. While some of short stories have characters inherent to their own, e.g. “Saxophone Joe and the Woman in Black”, “The Forever Trees”, “Coyote Stories”.
The language is straightforward, honest, and intimate as we listen to the characters relate the day they’ve been through, their life, their emotions and feelings. Description is kept to a bare minimal, no large quantity of heavy description, as focus is primary on the story itself. Simple yet stark realism told by the narrator or the main character as the bitter yet often unseen truths of a city are presented to us free of any superflurousness, arousing both sympathy and compassion in the reader.
Heart pounding, at the same time heart wrenching, the stories in this collection reminds us of how it is to be lost, cynical, and often disbelieving in the strength of the spirit and the faith it requires to believe. Because all too often we have become too jaded and complex ourselves (and even a bit too grown up I might add) to believe in anything at all. A mixture of rapture, pain, sorrow, and lost, and oddly a feeling of relief after reading the tales in this collection. To know you are alone but at the same time not alone in the world.
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Charles de Lint is a musician, writer, and folklore scholar who has written over twenty novels, seven novellas, chapbooks, novelettes, and countless short stories. H e resides in Ontario, Canada with his wife, Mary Ann.
For more info you could check him out at his website: http://www.sfsite.com/charlesdelint/
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